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HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times:
"China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers."
An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.
HP still has a R&D division? Has hell frozen over? Is a CEO being intelligent for once??
Why not just cut 300,000 right away and get ahead of the game for once?
Because when you offshor^H^H cut a bunch of jobs, you need more salespeople to sit by the phones to answer calls about products you offshor^H^H have sold-off in order to mak^H^H save money.
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I have a friend who works at HP, and he's constantly tell me how they're overworked due to constantly lowering employee count. /sarcasm
I'm sure cutting out 10% of the workforce, shoving even more extra work on everyone else, will just be a huge moral boost.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The modern CEO doesn't grow his company in the long-term. He doesn't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. He doesn't pay shareholders modest dividends and tell them about his long-term strategy for slowly growing and maintaining a profitable company. That shit is old school!
The 21st century CEO boosts short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. He shows the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and they call him a visionary. He hides debt with a shell game, cuts workers to hide sales declines, and outsources everything he can to some sweatshop that produces crap product to lower prices. The 21st century CEO looks AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEO has long since bailed out with his golden parachute. Let Uncle Sam bail them out.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
"...CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force."
I bought a HP netbook, believing that I would have something of quality. Big mistake. I think is not going to help increase the number of sellers, if you only have crappy products for sale.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Anyone who watch Meg Whitman run for governor should realize by now that she is an abject retard.
I wouldn't put her in charge of a car wash, much less a multinational company.
I guess after that other Republican candidate, Carley Fiorina started driving HP into the ground they needed another mentally handicapped Republican to finish the job.
Did it bug anyone else that they kept using H.P. instead of HP?
Maybe it's just me...
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person. One must choose either "he" or "she" or the much more awkward "he/she." I supposed one could also go with "it" but most humans take offense to being called an "it" for some reason. Being as most CEO's are men, I chose "he" in this instance. I think that's a reasonable choice.
And as for Meg Whitman, well I'm sorry if I may have offended the woman who just threw 30,000 families into dire crisis. I suppose she'll just have to live with it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Life is always a two way steak.
AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
On a side note, the rest of your post is now invalid.
Carly Fiorina gutted the company and put it into a tailspin. Hurd took over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. Now Whitman has taken over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. I hate to see HP go, at one time it was a great company, but they lost their way under Fiorina and never recovered.
There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the plane in free-fall and on fire behind you, as you float to your new private island on a parachute stitched from gold thread and destroyed lives.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Facebook is a media company, more like Time/Warner than IBM, except they produce even less. Facebook delivers eyeballs to advertisers, nothing more.
HP should send everyone a hp touchpad as a farewell gift, that they always remember why their jobs are now gone. Hope they don't forget the "Thanks Leo" sticker on the backside.
think of what she would have done to California if she had been elected. They dodged a bullet with that one.
So Africa with it's lack of factories should have a very good standard of living then?
A local manufacturing base helps with social divides by giving the lower classes a way to become the middle class.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Moreover, I'd assume stuff made by Indian companies (as in, the products are designed and created there) to be infinitely better quality than stuff made by American companies who outsource.
I've experienced outsourcing, and had to work with people who are on the end of a telephone in a different country, timezone, and living in a different culture. The issue wasn't that the guys on the other end were especially incompetent (many were, but I've worked in IT long enough to know that 75% of the people who work with you are usually barely able to string a subroutine together), but that the wall between us made development close to impossible. The only project management worth a damn under the circumstances was waterfall, and the downsides to being reliant on formal, comprehensive, specs were all too apparent.
There's no substitute for people who work together on a project working together. Which is why, ultimately, companies like HP who think that the way to solve temporary financial issues is to get rid of their US operations and become marketing shells for goods "designed" and "manufactured" by themselves only nominally, will eventually go the way of the do-do. With no imagination, and with native operators being more efficient, HP cannot beat companies like Asus and Acer.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Or you could just re-write the sentence without the need for a he/she/it reference, which is usually the first choice.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm sure that with the EDS acquisition, as well as all the other companies HP went out and bought, there are tons of people hiding out waiting to see which group of employees survives the merger. With the PC and printer divisions merging, that looks to me like a lot of sales guys, account managers and customer liaison people are going to be looking for work as well. HP has 300,000 people or something like that. It's kind of like IBM -- once a company gets too big, people can build themselves a very safe spot without doing too much work simply because it's too hard to keep track of everything.
I've had some limited experience with EDS, and from what I saw, there's LOTS of room to cut there. Outsourcing contracts can only support so many project managers, support staff and liaisons-to-liaisons without affecting the number of actual workers who do work.
The problem is that mass-firings like this, especially ones led by management consultants, tend to gut product engineering and design teams, and leave the overhead in place. Even though Whitman may be sparing HP Labs, which was cut to the bone under Fiorina and Hurd, that doesn't account for the everyday hardware engineers who have to design HP's next products. If HP wants to stay successful long-term, they need to ignore the typical McKinsey speak and keep the people who can build stuff that HP can sell.
I'm working in one of the very few dinosaur-era fields that actually needs to buy good-quality PCs and servers for customer projects. Think stick-in-the-mud customers, low or no network bandwidth and old applications. HP and Lenovo are basically the only choices if you want a decent, well-made business grade PC with a warranty and stable configuration. All the hardware manufacturers need to lay off the cloud kool-aid and realize that there will be a balance between local, private and hosted for quite a while. Not every business is ready for the cloud, the cloud doesn't make sense for some businesses, and even the cloudy people need decent machines to run VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. on. In HP's case, I'm sure the McKinsey people read the Gartner people's Magic Quadrant stuff, concluded that every business will be in the cloud by 2017, and recommended that HP get out of the traditional PC and services business, and become strictly a cloud provider. Problem is, when the social media/Web 2.0/cloud bubble pops, things are going to swing back to a sane mix of hosted and local, and HP might not have anything good to offer anymore.
They need more H-1b workers from India. That's the solution.
Seastead this.
If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.
If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!
0 1 - just my two bits
"While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers."
How ironic and sad that this is HP's claim to fame now days. There was a time when this was simply so not true. There was a time when you bought HP stuff (and you paid top dollars for you), you knew you could throw it against a wall or drive a car over it and it just kept working. Quality was #1, bar no competition. That was back when the engineers still had a bit of say in what went down there.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Any large company that thinks giving 10% of their workforce to their competition is going to make them a better competitor in their market has got to be dreaming.
But, obviously, clearly, cutting 10% of your overhead must immediately increase your profitability by 10%. This is truth.
For truly it is said: 'any idiot can cut costs, only a true leader can grow sales'
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Their documentation is in such a disarray your have to navigate a shit labyrinth of documents on their website to find the one you need, only to realize its just flat out wrong.
God ford bid you actually need to speak to any one, India is the only place you can call, if you try your sales rep, or "regional manager" they give you the same shitty number where the ass clown in India tells you to restart your entire server cluster, in the middle of the day, to fix a failing HD issue.
I welcome this as an opportunity to jump ship on a sinking empire that has lost its way.
This makes me wonder if Meg Whitman hasn't received some "economic advantages" from China. This is really very sad. HP is a United States-based company. The layoffs should hit China first. This makes me think Meg Whitman isn't very patriotic. She is loyal to her own bottom line. I understand things were better at eBay before she came on the scene. Let's watch her further decimate HP.
I believe Futurama established that the correct pronoun is "shklee".
Actually, the use of "singular they" is a gender-neutral option in English. I've seen it used more lately, although my middle school English teacher would probably cringe at the idea; it still sounds wrong, somehow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
My favorite answer to this problem: Clearly, saying "he, she, or it" every time is a bit cumbersome, but at the same time we want to be inclusive. This eventually leads to the contraction "h'or'sh'it"
I am officially gone from
Nice idea except the HP CEO *appears to be* a woman.
There, FTFY.
Women are people, and people have souls, therefore Meg Whitman is not a woman.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh come on... This is HP we are talking about. They likely have 30,000 people in the packaging division responsible for the absurd amount of trash every time you buy an HP product.
The trash is actually on the hard disk. The packaging is actually much more easily got rid of.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Eh? The old HP which everyone knew and loved (well, mostly) had a claim to fame to PCs, workstations, calculators, printers, scientific instruments, and a host of other fringe but cutting edge stuff. That's what gave them a competitive advantage, respect for their brand name. Y'know, back when they were a leader in the tech industry. Their problems right now are due to "retooling" to become a generic PC repackaging brand. They got exactly what they wanted - they're now leader in a market with probably the thinnest margins in the tech industry, indistinguishable from the likes of Gateway.
If you find yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing, you are by definition an also-ran. You should be creating the hottest new thing. Like back in the day when businesses would pay a premium for HP workstations, printers and scientific equipment; and geeks would pay a premium for their calculators - because they were considered the best and most advanced. They didn't dominate the inkjet printer business because their sales department did a good job marketing them. They dominated the inkjet printer business because they paid a few geeks to play around with using electrostatic forces to spray ink - they nearly single-handedly invented the inkjet printer market.
Unfortunately they gutted their R&D which was producing their high-profit distinguishing products, in favor of sales to promote their high-revenue generic products. I'm sure the high revenue looks impressive on their sales staff's resume, but if it's on razor-thin profit margins it's not really helping the company. I don't see how shifting their sales from one thing to another is going to help. They need to revive their R&D departments if they want to become an industry leader again and enjoy cushy profit margins.
Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC
"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.
Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have learned this lesson, with Chinese hardware. They're cutting out the middle-men and going right to the source for routing equipment. It's a bee in Cisco's bonnet. Of course they do much of the engineering bit themselves because the Chinese have an ongoing, systemic problem with actual innovation... but they really can manufacture like nobody else.
The big difference here though, is that there's no value in going to India over the US other than cost, and that gap is always closing. Meanwhile, there's considerable downside in having to deal with India when you need sales, customer or technical support. Why HP's made that their business plan, I don't understand. Let India do all the work, collect the markup, and "to hell with what customers want."
Who's surprised that that isn't working?
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person.
This isn't true. There is a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun for a person. In the nominative case, that pronoun is "he". In the objective case, it's "him".
Yes, it's ambiguous that the gender-neutral pronouns are spelled and pronounced the same as the masculine ones, but it's far from the only case in English where we've got two words spelled and pronounced the same that mean different things. I always figured if people wanted to communicate in an unambiguous fashion, they'd choose a language other than English..
...because if HP instead had a liberal democrat for a CEO, they would suddenly once again become a vibrant, thriving company due to having no shame to tap into an endless supply of government money just like GM.
Works for Apple. Yes, Steve Jobs was a staunch Liberal. So is Steve Wozniak. Besides Eisenhower [who taxed corporations and the wealthy in high numbers] not a single Republican President has ever balanced the budget once. But in reality, HP cannot find Hewlett or Packard with their technical prowess and ability to find skill to rebuild HP in its current form. HP is better of breaking up into several corporations and selling off some of the units, fire all the MBA hats making decisions and take 18 months to rebuild and retool their direction with technical talent.
When they talk about themselves, do they call themselves the "N.Y. Times""?
why is it theirs? What made it theirs? Almost all of this wealth they claim is inheritance being used claim more of society's output. They didn't 'earn' it in the way you think of earning; e.g. by producing something of value. These people are making most of their money buy rapidly buying and selling investments and skimming off the top, and by gutting productive companies. These are people that spend all day making money, not useful products, services or inventions.
We as a society have chosen to give Meg Whitman an enormous amount of money. She'll pass that on to her children who will leverage it to maintain that. But That money isn't any thing useful; it's a representation of what we think Meg Whitman's contribution to our civilization is worth. Can you tell me what she does for society at large that justifies this? Can you tell me why we can't have a society that makes intelligent decisions about where to allocate it's resources?
One way to spend out capital as a civilization is giving it all t 1000 families and then the rest to a military and political apparatus who's job is to protect those 1000 families from the other 6 billion left without food, shelter and health care. That's pretty much what we're doing now. Your standing on principle, saying it's theirs. But it's more complicated than that. They didn't make or even discover the lands they claim to own. They didn't build the houses that stand on it or invent the technology that made it possible to build it. They just claimed it as theirs, and we all just sorta agreed with them. That was fine when the economy was growing and we all had good jobs and enough of what we want. When I wasn't worried about money I didn't care that Meg had a private jet or that some Sheik built his own private ski resort in the middle of a desert. Well, my wages have been falling for 30 years and my productivity has doubled or quadrupled. Those productivity gains created unemployement that's being used to further depress my wages. I'm asking tough questions... difficult questions. Sorry sir, but you're going to have to come up with a better answer than 'Because it's not yours'. I did the work, I put up the houses. I fixed the computers that ran the accounting firm. I wrote the software they use. I did all the work. Why the hell isn't it mine?
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