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PC Makers In Desperate Need of a Reboot
nmpost writes in with a story about how hard it is to be a successful PC company in today's world. "Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times. Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback. Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP's market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far. HP might have been unchallenged for the ignominious title as technology's most troubled company if not for one its biggest rivals, Dell Inc. Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches. As a result, Dell's market value has also plummeted by 60 percent, to about $20 billion, since the iPhone's release."
Feed all the MBAs to the paper shredder.
Fewer MBAs, more engineers.
You're supposed to be a tech company. Where are the tech advances? Where's the engineering? Why are your products almost indistinguishable from Dell's?
Commodity PCs might be boring, but they are still needed and there is still a big market for them. The real problem is here:
HP, like too many other companies, has reduced its R&D to almost nothing and tried to get new products and ideas by just going out and buying other companies.
Remember when Carli Fiorina was in charge at HP? She seemed to have a good vision
I'm sorry, what? I had to re-read that a few times... Really? Carli Fiorina had a good vision for HP? Wow. Simply wow...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Of course they did this, they outsourced their soul when they thought their companies were nothing but machines with parts that could be replaced with parts from the cheapest provider. Once they did that they lost their soul and they lost their innovation. Nobody had a desire to take pride in their company anymore knowing that they could well be the next to replaced with someone in India next.
It was the rank and file of the old HP, Dell, Compaq etc that were so damn innovative that built the industry. Upper management came along and thought they could outsource them and still get the same results, failing to see how people would no longer /care/. People who are focused on surviving simply don't give a damn and the next thing you know companies like Acer and Samsung rise from being providers to the giants to the next giants themselves.
Here's the thing, if they do the same thing the American companies did, they too will fall and someone else will take their place. Seriously, can anyone ever give me a single example of where outsourcing actually worked out in the long term for someone other than the vendor?
It's only dying as a consumer appliance. Professionals and power users will always need a powerful general-purpose computer with a real input device (a.k.a. keyboard) and a screen bigger than 10 inches.
The PC market is in decline, but it is not dying and will not die in the near future. The main reason for sluggish PC sales is that the technology has reached a peak at the moment (or you might say it has finally matured) and consumers no longer need to buy a new system every couple of years just to keep up. Since the dawn of the PC era users have had to constantly upgrade their hardware to run that new OS, that new game, or that new multimedia application. That time has ended. A decent system bought 5 years ago will still run everything it needs to.
True, the rise of tablets and smartphones also gnaw at the PC market, because some people only want to check their email and log onto Facebook, but the power, flexibility and usability of the PC will remain indispensable for a large amount of users and professionals.
I was at Lucent when Carly was there - I thought she was a waste of space then, and I was shocked when HP hired her. HP was "Bill and Dave's company" - by and for engineers making great products. It was obvious to this outsider Carly was the wrong choice - I had no idea how right I was. A friend in HP Sales confirmed there was dancing in the hallways the day the HP board finally canned Carly. The only good part of HP that is left isn't HP at all - Agilent Technologies is as close as we have to what Bill and Dave started.
Stop that. Please, I beg of you. Stop saying PC dying. I have yet to see a tablet that can handle the Autocad/Mastercam/Catia drawings that we work with. I don't want to be stuck having to build this shit from scratch, or purchase a server just so people can use the software they have to use every day.
Before you all go off on 'virtual server/blahblah' I'm telling you, we have tried, and nothing beats having each user have a PC at their desk using the software to do their work. Just because we can make the PC last 5 years before having to replace it, doesn't mean that the PC is dying.
Keep your stupid investor hands off the PC market. Seriously. - Love, Aerospace Manufacturing
PCs are no longer shiny and new. PCs aren't so immature that they need a major OS upgrade or a major hardware upgrade every year or every 3 years. They're a mature product.
You can use a 5 year old Compaq as an HTPC. You can use a $300 low profile bargain PC for everything but heavy gaming.
The market is saturated.
Fully amortized and discarded office PCs are more than adequate for the needs of most home users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No one is under the impression they can't be docked. The issue is performance. They can't even match low-end machines from 5 years ago, let alone any modern desktop machine from this century.
"Normal" people have been completely brainwashed
I don't think that normal people have been brainwashed, I think that they never needed a general purpose computer in the first place. They kept on having problems with their general purpose computers, and Apple has been able to make most of those problems go away for most people. The market rewards that kind of behavior.
Also, are you under the impression that tablets/phones wont be able to dock up to a real 'workstation' with a screen that is > 10 inches???
Sure they will. And what you'll get is an expensive, absurdly underpowered, restrictive computer that specialises in running the kind of software you get if you spend $2 in an app store.
The current generation of mobile devices is doing very well because they serve a vast and previously bizarrely undersupported market: people who want a portable device for easy information consumption. If you're not doing any sort of content creation, significant computation, or catering to more than one user at once, you can get by with the kind of processing power you find in an iPad or a Galaxy S3. If you're not expecting much in the way of interaction, you can get by with a touchscreen and very simple user interface concepts. For the market where they are wildly successful, the current crop of smartphones and tablets are excellent devices, balancing low power consumption, ease of use, portability, and "wow factor" against a bunch of downsides that their users simply don't care about.
On the other hand, as soon as you do need to do anything creative, or do any real computation, or scale up to multiple users, or support non-trivial interactions, the current crop of mobile devices suck. All those downsides that didn't matter before are now dominant, and the high price, low power and almost zero flexibility are fatal liabilities. And no matter how much window dressing you lay out, they always will be, because it's not the job these devices were designed for.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Nope. Apple is still Lincoln. Same parts as Dell.
If you want to pretend to be like a BMW owner you will actually have to pay for an BMW and stop being a clueless poser.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually it was because they were using Intel kickbacks to win the price wars.
The problem they found once the price wars were over was that both Intel and AMD in their race to outdo each other went right past "good enough" and straight into "insanely overpowered" for everyone except the top 6% or so of heavy PC power users and there just aren't enough of them to sustain a market.
The OEMs and MSFT got spoiled by the crazy turnover rate of the MHz wars, simple as that. Until the rise of multicores it was practically pointless to even try to upgrade your PC as changes were coming so fast and speeds were jumping so quickly that a 2 year old PC would be struggling badly to run the latest software, much less play games or do any other heavy lifting. In one 5 year period I went from a 300MHz to a 2200MHz and my RAM went from 64Mb to 2Gb...those are pretty damned big jumps folks. There wouldn't have even been a point in trying to stretch the life of those machines a little longer because they were so quickly outclassed.
Now compare that to the PCs I was selling 5 years ago, which were Phenom I X3s and X4s along with Intel Core Duos...is there anything your average office worker or home user does that wouldn't run just fine on a Phenom X3? Hell I have an engineer friend running Solidworks on a Phenom X3 and is quite happy with it. The machines I built 4 and 5 years ago can be easily and simply upgraded with just a RAM stick and the multicores will happily do any job they have with cycles left over. Hell if you wanted to game you were looking at a full PC changeout every 2 years, now I'm happily playing on a Phenom II X6 and the only reason i bothered upgrading from the quad was it was on sale and let me give the quad to my youngest who is happily gaming on it this very minute according to Steam.
The bullshit the press is spewing of "Tablets are gonna replace the desktop ZOMFG! Look at the numbers ZOMFG!" is a classic example of "correlation doesn't equal causation" because as someone in the trenches I can tell you PCs aren't going away, in fact most folks have never owned so many PCs...and that is the problem the OEMs have. There hasn't been a "killer app" to require a major upgrade, hell even gaming works great on a 4 year old C2D or Phenom II X3, so people are simply keeping what they got because they are so overpowered. Hell my EEE netbook cost like $350 over a year ago and the thing plays L4D and many other mainstream games just fine...on a $350 netbook!
So the OEMs are either gonna have to accept its a mature market, where like dishwashers people don't replace until they fail, or they are gonna have to make new markets to sell to. I personally have been making good money selling Mini-HTPCs. People like being able to have a box that has all their music and movies, can stream it to anywhere they are in the house, or they can watch them hassle free on their widescreen TV with one of those Lenovo keyboard mini remotes.
But as long as they think they can just slap the latest chip in a box or laptop and it'll magically sell of the shelves they are gonna be hurting, because the average user is not gonna see the websites load any faster on the latest monster than they are that first gen Core Duo, nor are their office programs, their video games, or anything else they use gonna run with enough of a difference in speed to justify spending all that money and going through all the hassle of transferring their stuff. The tablet? They use that as an eBook reader and to look up on IMDB what the name of the actor is in the show they are watching, different use case.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.