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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 $20 billion, since the iPhone's release."
HP? really?
A large portion of the reasons for Dell's collapse was because they were caught lying about their accounting.
Boot... Micro$oft
Remember when Carli Fiorina was in charge at HP? She seemed to have a good vision, but was pushed out in boardroom drama. Then the whole board spying thing, then mark hurd and the lady friend.
I would fire the whole board and start fresh there. Get some good leadership at the top! start in WebOS. Even if it's not perfect, HP needs two sticks to rub together.
And when HP wanted to purge itself o the 'PC Maker' part of their business to do a reboot the shareholders revolted.
Feed all the MBAs to the paper shredder.
The PC is dying. The most recent quarterly results confirm it, as Apple alone announced 12 M iPad tablet sales, overwhelming Dell's mere 9 M PC sales. The consumer market is especially bad as laptop prices continue to fall to record lows without stimulating sales. Intel's Ultrabook initiative has already been declared a failure. If not for third-world markets, the PC would be in complete freefall.
Meanwhile, the retail segment continues to collapse. Best Buy reports record losses while laying off hundreds of Geek Squad technicians, the lifeline of consumer PC support. Soon it may be impossible to purchase a PC from a major name brand retailer. Consumers wanting a PC will need to enter shady inner-city shops selling off-brand merchandise.
Worse, the outlook for the PC looks especially foreboding with Microsoft's poorly-received Windows 8 OS on the horizon. Leading PC game developer Gabe Newell is convinced that Windows 8 will devastate what remains of the PC industry and force major OEMs to close shop. Massive discontent about Windows 8 fomenting on the Internet will only further push consumers into the tablet market.
The situation in Enterprise is even more grim. Most large businesses have standardized on Windows XP, Internet Explorer, and applications built on obsolete frameworks such as VisualBASIC. As far as business is concerned, the PC is as mortified as a Selectric Typewriter. No major PC upgrades will likely occur ever again. Meanwhile, nearly all major corporations are experimenting with tablets and developing modern mobile applications.
Hewlett-Packard has already publicly expressed serious doubts about the future of the PC market. IBM wisely abandoned it years ago. Margins are already below zero as PCs are loss-leaders for IT outsourcing and other services. Second-tier CPU builder AMD is reportedly close to bankruptcy. In a few years, Chinese conglomerates will control all manufacture and distribution.
While the Amazing Kreskin may predict the future, most computer nerds are too myopic to grok the obvious conclusion. They blindly cling to beige turbo-buttoned clones while debating the latest window manager advancements. Soon, they too will be seen as relics, just like the seldom-used PCs pushed into dusty cubical corners, much like the dumbterms which preceded them. Ding dong, indeed the PC is already dead. The new era has begun.
That was before they sold off much of the good stuff, and spun the last of it off as Agilent. Today's HP is HP only in name.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Do you want your PC manufacturer to be expensive and a high stock price, or reasonably priced but worth "only" 20 billion?
There's no problem here. Move along.
You can't rest on your laurels and think you can keep making the same profits you used to in the "beige box" era of PCs. The only PC maker I can think of that's actually interesting is the one I bought my last system from: iBUYPOWER. But they're specialized, making gaming systems for a specific type of user.
"since the iphone release"
Um... that is just stupid.
"PC Makers"? Ha. They're middle men. Integetrators of other people's products. They "make" nothing. It was inevitable that they would get squeezed out until the last man that can survive on the smallest margin is left standing. All the ultrabooks and "surface"s in the world won't change the fact that Windows computers are a commodity and always will be until MS tells the OEMs to take a hike and put them all out of business.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Start with NOT including bloatware.
I interviewed with them in 1999. Back then they seemed like an excellent company, with a campus that reminded me of college (lots of small buildings interconnected by pathways).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Two more examples: Go to bed with MS, wake up with crotch rot.
How about resurrecting the VBI project?
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
But those of us who actually buy a lot of computer love Dell. Easy to work with, good quality/price balance. Wouldn't touch HP with a 10 foot pole. Of course, I keep a 100 ft pole around for both Sun and IBM. (no penis jokes please. Okay, maybe a few.)
will only get their reboot, when microsoft windows gets out of the way.
and since microsoft has a huge war chest, and protection from the government, they can ensure that it never really goes away, for a long long time.
so personal computers will stagnate for the next 10 years.
personal computing devices is the new area for growth, and has gone around PCs.
Face it, folks, the gig's up:
Coming: 1. Then end of general purpose computing. 2. "Secure" computing (Palladium-style) 3. Only approved programs via "app stores"
Apple has been too successful. They've got $100bil in the bank, and growing. All the other computer makers are in the doldrums, and are could come to the verge of bankruptcy just by making some more bad decisions.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
"Normal" people have been completely brainwashed, and it's doubtful we could explain anything in a way that would make them desire tech freedom. When there was just a chance that Saint Apple's holy iDevices might have to pay for the use of some Google patents, US Senators actually held hearings for poor old Apple.
Buy a couple extra laptops. You'll look on them like you do your C64 now.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
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?
Most consumers want little portable devices and media consumption displays, not general purpose computers.
Sure there are some , but this isn't the 90's where *everyone* wanted a desktop ( or 2 ). And those that do still want them, mostly now realize that last years model is good enough to not to fork out for a new one just because its shiny and the marketing people say they want to..
Sorry folks, its 2012, time to adapt, or stick to the business markets.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hp just has to make the rest of its PC's like its z series workstation.s we use the z series workstations at work and they rock. All hp has to do is make their home pc's like ther do their business pc's Also they need to advertise their switches more.
The market has been saturated already, and people can't see the need to upgrade every 2 years.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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?
Both Dell and HP are making billions. They mostly cater to the business sector. I mean sure Apple has a 25% profit margin, which is insanely high for a hardware company. Most of that is from iPhone and iPad, and those items come and go based on the whims of consumer taste. 10 years, 20 years is a long time in the computer industry; companies rise and fall during those times. Anything can happen. 15 years ago, Apple was nearly bankrupt, and now they're the most valuable company by market cap. IBM was taking massive losses nearly 20 years ago, now they're the 3rd largest tech company. In the meantime, Compaq is gone, DEC is gone, Wang is gone, etc. HP and Dell have been reinventing themselves, and they're closer to what IBM looks like rather than Apple.
Let's face it, 90% of the consumer market does not feel the burning need to upgrade.
A cpu/mb/ram combo from 4-5 years ago, can still run Windows 7 comparably well. For browsing, e-mail, doing your taxes, and playing media, most machines are there will be okay for a while.
So people are doing to buy a new computer just like they would buy a new TV, microwave, or fridge. Only when they have to.
On the Enterprise market, as companies shift to 5 year cycles for the OS, they may choose to keep the HW stable as well. I see a trend in the large orgs that I work with to lease the computer, and purchase the monitor (which lasts usually longer and less prone to failure). 3 year leases are turning into 4 year lease plans, and even I have one 10,000+ purchasing HW on five year cycles.
And now for the cool market of gamers, media creators, Linux OS users and coders. Yes, they may upgrade every year or so, yet they're in the minority.
I'm personally shocked how many of my friends/acquaintences are dumping $2-3k to get one of those fancy Apple 27" computers because of how cool it looks on their bloody granite kitchen counter. And HP won't have a chance there.
Small footprint computers, media center systems, and tablets would be my guess on the consumer computer devices that will be the ones selling more.
Why didn't they just make a decent vanilla Android tablet & phone?
All they have to is contract out the hardware and add free software to it. Keep it updated too.
Loads of people just want no bullshit vanilla Android stuff.
Dell has three different web sites (home, small business, enterprise) which show different products at different configurations, and it's nearly impossible to find the basic chipset specifications for a system. Lenovo's web site was full of 404 misdirects and products they didn't really sell until recently. HP is a dumptruck of different glossy cases with a variety of shiz crammed into them.
The bar for competency is incredibly low in their industry. I hope all three of them implode when newegg decides they can assemble components into whitebox pcs. Open and shut.
Yawn, yet another "teh PC is DED!!!!1111" article, the kind we've seen every few months for the last two+ decades.
The most glaring assumption (spurred on by Apple Cultists, of course) is that stock price is some kind of indicator of market success. Apple is STILL a niche player, and never stopped being so. For a brief time they did a great job of expanding the smartphone market (kudos for that, despite the fact it would have eventually happened anyway), but now they're once again a bit player.
The number of PCs greatly exceeds the number of people with smart phones, and the number of people with smart phones greatly exceeds the number of people with tablets. Apple is no longer the biggest smart phone producer (that's Samsung), iOS is no longer has the largest market share of the device market (that's Android). Apple's last refuge is the tiny niche market of tablets... which they'll probably lose this year as the tablet market expands to a somewhat significant number of users.
Getting back to the issue of PCs, Apple's OSX has a single-digit market share. In fact, more PCs are using Windows Vista than OSX. If Vista is a failure, as MS haters claim, than what is OSX?
Anyway, this is just more fact-free blabber, the kind that's been spewed by non-serious techie-wannbes for more than 20 years. The PC will outlive their careers in the tech industry.
My personal experience is that HP and Dell are the preferred suppliers for this sort of thing. Who else are you going to buy? IBM/Lenovo, Acer, or Asus? None of them have the value that Dell or HP have these days for general purpose desktop computing.
Hell, Dell/HP are my preferred server vendors, as well. When it comes to servers, they tend to have less gongshow anachronism than IBM. UEFI actually boots quickly on their platform(s). While they use less Intel Ethernet, it's something I can work with, versus the craptastic RAID controllers shipping on IBMs (at least on Windows; with Linux, we have other options on IBMs, eg. LSI firmware and mdraid).
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Tablets and smartphones aren't the problem. The problem (for the vendors) is that few things these days warrant a pricey new PC. /w 1024MB).
It's not that tablet/smartphone users don't have PC's. Most do. Most still use their PC's
But the PC they had 3-4 years ago is still good enough (ok, add some RAM if it's Vista
They may get a virus and require hiring somebody to clean it up, but that's still generally cheaper than a new PC.
However, what most people DON'T need is a quad-core i-7 with 8GB of RAM, 3TB HDD, and a dual-sli video card.
At most, they might need under 1TB of space, onboard video, a dual-core CPU, and a few gigs of RAM.
Yes, CAD users, graphic designers, and some others may differ, but the public at large doesn't do that much that requires a new upgrade.
In terms of smartdevices, the evolution is still pushing new product. Newer phone = updated OS, faster processor, better UI, more games, etc. Same for tablet.
They'll hit a ceiling as well, but at the moment the problem isn't that people don't need PC's because of portables, but rather that they don't need upgrades because what they have is good enough.
I think HP should bring back Carly. Her strong conservative leadership is exactly what HP needs to get thrahahahahahahaha no that would be an even worse travesty
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...
That innovative part of HP was spun off into Agilent years ago. The part of HP that was left behind from the spin-off was just an ordinary PC and printer company.
PCs are a mature market, and they may not change as much any more, but they aren't going away any time soon. That's because people don't create content on a phone.
Nevertheless, somebody has to make PCs, glamorous or not. It might as well be these companies, just like Proctor & Gamble makes toothpaste and soap. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with that?
1 design the system with a smallish second harddrive that can be removed (move the recovery thing to this device) ,1 t, 2 t, 3t (with and without the recovery partion)
A sell a number of drives that can fit that slot 500 gig
B setup this drive to be used as a backup
2 move the value add programs to some sort of "ap store"
3 have the parts manual on the backup drive
4 MAKE SURE YOUR STORE WEBSITE CAN RECOGNIZE A LOGIN FROM YOUR COMPUTER : if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product and give me options that are compatible with that system.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Sorry, not even close. most trobled "computer" company perhaps.
I'm pretty sure Nokia beats both Dell and HP so far as loss of market share and market value over a short period of time by a long shot.
Desktop and laptop PCs are a commodity. Deal with it. If you don't want to be in that market, get out; there are others who will remain as long as the demand is there. You can't expect Apple-sized profit margins when you're selling a commodity product. You can eke out a bit on each unit and hope to make it up in volume, or focus on selling good service contracts to businesses. But you're not going to "reinvent" the market.
. In fact, there are plenty of people who detest Apple and everything they represent. HP used to make quality equipment, then went on a serious crash. HP doesn't need this so-called 'innovation', it needs to make quality equipment with good support. Since this is in such short supply, they should eventually reap the rewards. They need to become the type of company that Warren Buffet would invest in.
I've wondered why not have some technologies filter down to the humble PC that would get people buying again:
1: First, the case and PSU. It would be nice to add the battery for the UPS on the bottom, so the machine will keep going even if unplugged, and would start shutting down if power is off or low after a couple minutes.
2: A way to have removable 2.5" HDDs for a RAID array. RAID 1 is a must have these days. It would be nice to have a standard case/cartridge/tray for that size so hot replacement would be easy.
3: An optional TPM module daughtercard. This way, if someone likes me wants a TPM, it can be obtained, but DRM makers can't assume a TPM is on every computer.
4: Perhaps "smarten" up the HDD controller with some SAN like functionality. Have the ability to have backend configurations like RAID 5 or 6, but then hand the rest of the machine virtual disks that can be snapshotted and backed up without the OS knowing or caring. The controller could even have filesystem independent block level deduplication so if the PC has a hypervisor, it would save plenty of space if running multiple VMs of the same OS.
It would be nice to plug in an external HDD, take a snapshot of the running OS, then copy it via a vhd/vmdk file to the external drive as a quick and dirty way to do a backup.
5: Built in hypervisor. It would be nice to be able to separate the VM used for gaming and browsing from the VM used for getting work done, just for security reasons. Plus, with snapshots and the ability to roll back, restores end up being fairly easy.
6: If Tandy could do this in the early 80s, modern PC makers can. If a machine ships with Windows, put a bootable copy of the OS media on a read-only flash partition. This way, even if the HDD is replaced, the box will always have some type of OS available.
7: One of the old HP boxes I had used a nVidia chipset which did hardware level firewalling at the NIC level. Combine this with an updatable blacklist, and this would be useful for separating machines that are botnet clients from their C&C upstreams.
8: An "erase all" function that would not just do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whatever, but do like HDDErase and do an ATA "secure erase", which zeros not just the drive sectors, but the protected areas and the relocated sector table ensuring that data is gone, or it can't be read in the first place. This would be very useful for handing a machine to someone else, but not having to pull the HDDs out.
Honestly how much have computers changed since the early 90s? Faster and more powerful. The average person doesn't know the difference between one graphics card and another. Even chips speeds got blurry when they all abandoned the cold war of speed. You used to have a good idea about chip speed just based on the name. Now I have to compare benchmarks to have any clue about speed. They are the same over sized shoe boxes they have always been. Complain all you want about Apple but at least they broke the mold with iMacs. Desktops still have their place in the home and office but what they are finding is the family needs one desktop and lots of handhelds where as a couple of years ago each kid potentially needed one for homework and surfing. It's ironic that tablets passed desktops as media machines. It's still a hassle playing media files on a desktop and seamless on a tablet. On my desktop I always wonder if it'll handle the videos codec and I have to deal with the system's twitchy player or the various players fighting over who gets the file to playback. All these problems go away on a tablet. The joke is I watch movies on my tablet while I work on my desktop. They need to reinvent the desktop but they dropped the ball. The desktop could have been the entertainment hub for the whole house but no one has made the plunge. Apple is the closest but even they seem to be dipping their toes in the water. They had a chance with the Apple TV and iPad/iPhone combo but they choked and didn't fully intergrate them. Everyone whispers about an actual AppleTV, basically an oversized iPad, but no word in months if it's more than a rumor. It's as if the PC world is afraid of the water so they are riding the sinking ship down instead of trying to swim and risk drowning with a failed product.
Doesn't anyone remember what Apple had in 2007 (Steve Jobs and his working "reality distortion field") and what HP had in 2007 (Carly Fiorina and her distorted view of reality)?
You can pry my gaming PC from my cold, carpal tunnel stricken dead hands. There are more than enough of us who have no desire to 'abandon' a traditional PC to comprise our own demographic.
It bears repeating.
The problem is that companies (HP,DELL, etc) hasn't innovate and doing the basic R&D in the last 10 - 12 years. Everyone has been
using another Microsoft OS, nothing new has come out that revolutionize what the consumer wants.
Companies need to have basic research lab, to try out new ideas
It wont be long before Apple sues you out of existence for ripping all their ideas up. Just close up shop now.
In the 90's & early 2000's HP (Carli specifically) was busy throwing 10's of thousands of professional jobs overseas, killing off American jobs in the process. The Corporate bean counters thought, ya, cheaper over there, we save dollars and make more profit... WIN! What the bean-o's miss is that every single job sent is one less customer, and more importantly, one less person who understands the process and can bring innovation into the company. We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed. Ultimately, unless the US realizes the value of on premise intellectualism, this country will continue to devolve to 3rd world status - full of monkeys just smart enough to run the machines, but to dumb to complain or revolt.
Be bold, tell MS to piss off as the exclusive OS maker, and make new gear for a new OS.
Yes it came be done, BeOS for example, made by a handful of people, did things that no OS could for years.
Had any large PC maker had the balls to stand up to MS and supported it, think where it could have been by now.
This is what we need, new thinking, new vision, MS is dragging (or holding) that down.
So go on HP, try it Dell, take the plunge Acer, be innovative Samsung, let go of the MS teat and see what you can accomplish.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
...again and again.
That post was nonsense.
I bought my first $300 PC in 1988 and it was an Atari. It used pretty much nothing in common with an IBM clone. It used a much more expensive CPU than what typically came with IBM clones. Yet it was cheaper and better than any clone I could get at the time.
We already have dirt cheap general purpose ARM devices.
The idea that we need kludge clones for cheap computing is just a Lemming fantasy concocted to pretend that the rest of us are beholden to Microsoft even if we aren't Microsoft users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I read that as PC makers in desperate need of a robot and I thought to myself, yeah that's a pretty good idea. If HP made a decent robot I'd buy one and they'd have high profit margins again.
Android and IOS are the killers. In the case of Android it runs on a ton of different platforms and I must say I'm rather impressed by the Asus pads.
Overall, though, outsourcing was a success story. By the time a company starts outsourcing, the original owners are gone or don't care about their company anymore. Outsourcing, along with all of the methods of turning brand recognition into cash (cutting quality, QC, etc), are about sacrificing the company's future for immediate profit. I don't think any of the executives who benefitted from outsourcing thought that the company could survive after it. It was about cashing out. The ones who followed, though, and inherited the company may have had some delusions about the company still being healthy.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It just won a billion dollar settlement which is the beginning of their campaign to obliterate choice in tech.
That is nonsense. Apple provides PC desktops/laptops too, which allow you to do anything you like. They will continue to do so.
In fact even on mobile platforms Apple does not eliminate choice, they could shut down jailbreaking if they really wanted (or make it way harder than it is) - they choose not to.
What Apple IS giving users a choice over is, do they want a totally open-ended experience? They can get a "real" computer.
Does the user want a computer they don't have to administer pretty much at all? iOS device.
Apple then added a middle choice, which was "how about the power of the desktop but we'll give you a secure source for applications which you can use as much of or as little as you like" - the Mac app store.
Before Apple introduced the "App Stores" to the world at large (and I know there were plenty around before, just not as widely known) the users only had a choice of what was basically a wide-open system where apps just came from anywhere. Lots of freedom, but too much freedom for a non-technical user to handle easily - hence a world of viruses and malware that arose as a result.
The world needs choice. That means it needs the newer more secure platforms, like iOS. But it will continue to need much more open systems too; and those will continue to be available (although with hardened defaults again to help non-technical users not hurt themselves too badly).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Take a look at this thread where the message is PCs are dead because what people have is good enough. Now think about Windows 8 and more importantly Windows 9. Think about those laptops: capacitive touchscreen, a hinge to flip the laptop from touch to keyboard mode, a good trackpad, ultra thin, retina, high end battery, SSD.
People don't have Windows 8/9 machines. When you wonder why. People are voting with the dollars that they don't want desktops.
Most of what Dell does is desktop and laptop sales. I get that. Its only just starting to get into the server business. So, to say that it needs a reboot is probably valid considering that most of its business will likely shrivel up and die as the next new thing comes in...
However, HP is different. I haven't seen an HP laptop or desktop in years. Most of its sales from what I see are in the server hardware and software business. (OK probably printers/scanners are big too). To say that it too needs a reboot because users are going to move on to the next big thing is just wrong in HP's case. How is HP a PC vendor? It hasn't been one in years.
HP makes some awesome servers. They sell some pretty good software. In my opinion, HP needs a better sales team...
1) They are losing money to Dell in the server hw space. They need to outprice and outsell Dell here.
2) Their enterprise software (Openview suite) needs a better sales team. They should really be in more enterprise companies than they are, and they should have a lower price point per server to make it more attractive to smaller companies.
A PC running Windows using a smartphone/tablet form factor with a 128 MB flash hard drive. Onboard screen and peripherals like mouse and keyboard are all bluetooth. NO wires, except for power. They'd have some flexibility on size. It might be a little larger or thicker than a phone or tablet, and with both 7 inch or 10 inch screen sizes if screens are included (Built in screen and keyboard optional on the more expensive models). Bonus points for autoswitching seamlessly between phone company internet and local Wi-Fi hotspots, with the emphasis on "seamless." Extra bonus points for working HDMI ports, or better still, wireless HDMI (plug-in receiver included).
In other words, make it worth my time to buy one.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
... seeing as how they led the race to the bottom.
The story of HP is just sad. A truly great company, ground down by a series of clueless leaders.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
They haven't done anything with the Mac Pro line for so long, there's nothing for the generic manufacturers to imitate.
/ Just trolling
// Or Am I?
Carly Fiorina put the nail in the coffin. Good thing she didn't get elected to congress.
games actually drove the PC hardware market. The latest, greatest game would only run the top end settings by
utilizing hardware that didn't even EXIST when the game was released.
These days we have consoles and very, very few games are built with PC only in mind. Too much money to be lost
by ignoring the console market. Thus, any games made for the PC have to be " dumbed down " for lack of a better
word to ensure it will run on current generation consoles. Even though top end PC hardware can absolutely crush
any console on the market today.
In fact, it seems these days the games are made for consoles FIRST, then ported to the PC platform.
Other than 3D / CAD software and the like, there really isn't anything to push the hardware makers to innovate anything.
Especially at the consumer level.
I mean, seriously, how much horsepower do you need for Facebook or Twitter ?
PCs are a commodity. Even those with high end needs no longer have to buy a new box every year and they don't have to buy it from a high end maker.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
Most do care about email though. While facebook is working at supplanting it, this seems to still do better on something with an actual keyboard.
Luddites obviously don't want a PC anymore, and I don't disagree with them. When a tablet or smartphone gives them all the functionality they required, such as the ability to tweet, change their Facebook status, and play Angry Birds, then there is no reason for the average consumer to require a PC today. So all those claiming the PC is dead, long live the phone/tablet, your voices have been heard a million-fold.
PC (or Mac) is still a very much required product for content CREATORS, you know, those people that make Facebook, Twitter and Angry Birds. You can't make apps on the iPad or iPhone, you can't make apps on an Android phone or tablet, and can't create app on a Windows Phone.
I think the PC market IS being rebooted, in the form factor of a hybrid tablet. While Luddites will need nothing more then a Windows RT tablet, the rest of us that develop and create content could easily see the old PC shoebox form factor being replaced by a Windows Pro tablet. Honestly the spec's of the Surface Pro exceed what I use for work to develop on and I am sure that there will emerge a new generation of Pro tablets with i7's and all kinds of fast multi-core CPU's and gobs or RAM that will essentially replace shoebox and laptop computers. As much as Apple has laughed at a tablet/PC hybrid, I think Apple is very scared of a market of competitive devices where content can both be consumed AND generated. A device that allows "enterprise" to easily gravitate towards a new tablet form factor running Windows is Apple's biggest nightmare, and its about to come true in a few months.
So, I won't rule Dell and HP out of the game yet, but if those companies are not ready to release a Windows 8 Tablet (both Luddite loving and Geek loving variants). then you should rule them out for being willfully stupid to recognize and adapt to market trends.
For me, a PC is anything that can be used to develop content on. While the average consumer needs nothing more then a device that beeps when it receives a tweet and some sadistic joke of an on-screen keyboard, there is still a large and strong market of people needing a product that can MAKE content.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Imagine the world today had hp claimed ownership of Wozniac's first PC?
You may say I'm a dreamer...
But I'm not the only one...
Take my hand and join us...
And the world will live, will live as one
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The topic is PC makers right? Why are you talking about HP and Dell when you should be talking about the people that make chips, motherboards, video cards, hard drives, and power supplies? You know, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Asus, MSi, Kingston, Rosewill, and that lot.
. . . OOOHHHH you're concerned about the PACKAGERS. The people that take computer parts and put them in a box. Oh, well fuck'em. Seriously, what do they bring to the table?
Michael Dell should shut the company down and return the money to investors. After all that's what he said he would do.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html
I just bought an HP laptop, not to mention I also have an Android smatphone. Those who think the PC is just gonna dissappear are way off the mark. People still use PCs but since the trend was to buy an overpriced smartphone they postponed the purchase of a brand new PC, but the smartphone is not going to replace them. Who wants to be typing a spreadsheet or even a large email on a smartphone?
People with have laptops and desktops for many more years, to create "content" (whatever that is supposed to mean). People will not have PCs; their desktops and laptops will not be their own personal computers, they will be controlled, monitored, and remotely deactivated by whatever company sells them. It is a matter of freedom. PCs are about freedom, and freedom is being attacked -- which by extension means PCs are being attacked.
Palm trees and 8
I went through a couple of used Dell OptiPlexes, they seemed fine.
I now have a nice used Compaq that cost me about $200 3 years
ago and should be good for another 3.
This is a direct result of being told what innovation is by a monopolist rather than actually having innovation in the software marketplace.
Does anyone really think the way that office 2010 handles macro management is better than 2k3? Did visual foxpro really have to die because access is good enough? What about lock down in using private key in the uefi? What's going on with silverlight? Has anyone produced a "killer app" in the .net runtime?
The lack of pc sales is because we let microsoft make all our development decisions for us. Now software usability and productivity is getting worse with every upgrade(?).
No need for those crappy Windows servers, clients and productivity software. Its a post-PC world people! Time to bring back the hippie lifestyle.
I worked at Merck. This could just as easily be an article about the pharma industry. Somewhere in the glorious mid-80's it became more about marketing and managing than it was about product. Then, in the early 2000s there was no more product. Happened in all sorts of companies.
Whether or not you agree with what apple make or what they run on their machines or not, one thing is clear: they have the logistics sorted out.
The PC makers are firing wildly in all directions in an attempt to capture parts of every market, and in doing so are throwing away economies of scale - which lessens their ability to compete.
Newsflash: if i go to your website for a laptop, and there are more models than I can count on one hand or so, there is a problem. There's no need for it, and all this does is increase the R&D costs, manufacturing costs, etc. Apple can drive costs down because they sell large numbers of a small model count. They can build them with sturdy, quality chassis at this price point because of this, and the PC OEMs simply can't compete without killing their margins (and going broke). Or, they sell 40 different models of crap that no one would want.
HP: cut your model line down. Machines with/without GPU in 12" (ultrabook) and 15" form factors. A single workstation spec portable in 17" form factor with engineer spec GPU. 2 specs of desktop: generic end user class, and custom workstation spec. Shit-can everything else. The reduced model count will allow you to build that smaller model count at a higher quality with better margins.
Leave the massive diversification to specialty PC makers or build-your-own tweakers. There is no profit in it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
PC makers are basically packaging other people's hardware and software to make a low-margin system that users can use to manage their data. Just about everyone has figured out by now that the hardware and the software don't matter anymore because they are a commodity. What does matter is the D-A-T-A that that hardware and software is managing. Consider...if someone steals your computer, they get maybe $200 worth of resellable hardware and software and that's only if your computer is fairly new. But all of those documents, photos, collected data, records, etc....are priceless to you if you lose them. If you've got them backed up somewhere on something, you go buy another computer and you're rolling again with the backup. If it isn't backed up, it's a life-changing loss. So no one cares anymore if their computer is the fastest or has the latest version of Windows. All they care about are things that help them to keep their data safe like ease of backup, access to cloud storage, and familiarity and comfort with their software and hardware.
In DSO there was a saying we had "We're not leaders, we're fast followers." Innovation was always killed internally and only when our compeition did it would we implement it. Corp wasn't afraid of law suits because of our size. If someone used HP they either counter sue or buy the company.
I left after being disgusted with not allowed to do anything but bug fixes and ripping off our competition. Even with that I was flooded with red tape and paper working asking why I did what in what way.
they were the preferred supplier for pcs (i.e. you'd better had a damn good reason not to buy from them). for that they gave us special pricing. Over time though, prices went up... and up... till even with our special discount you could get stuff cheaper from dell. so by bye hp hello dell.
now all we need is for dell to hire some f*cking sales people so that when we ask for a quote it doesnt take 2 weeks for them to get back to us. oh and make sure they know what they are doing, not quoting for a different part (like a non touch sensititve monitor when we gave them the model number and description of the touch sensititiive part)
To grow long term you have to innovate. Cutting cost might work for a quarter or 10, but not long term. HP and other hardware companies have done very little innovation lately. I thought HP changed its ways when it bought WebOS. Sadly when they did buy them, the clock was ticking, and apparently HP was not lean and mean enough to do something with it before it lost mind share. What innovation are they working on today?
But I thought some of Dell's current financial situation hinged on a few issues:
1) ASUS, the group that used to make Dell's notebooks now makes a completing line of notebooks which is not beneficial to Dell's competitive advantage.
2) Dell was in a position where they were able to repackage EMC equipment through a deal that EMC pulled out of a bit under a year ago which has reduced the number of product lines available to Enterprise customers.
Those seemed to be the bigger things weighing against Dell. The rest of this seems to be a be of FUD regarding the future of desktop computing.... which, from where I'm sitting, is looking pretty safe.
There are 3 classes of x86 computers for 2 classes of machines.
Laptop
* Cheap netbooks - $99 target price (overseas travel)
* Good enough laptops - $400 target price (office)
* High end laptops - $800 target price (crazy people)
Desktop
* Low end - $50 - $200 (media center players)
* Good enough - $350 (home server, kid's PC)
* High end workstation/Gaming - $800
Most consumers are extremely price sensitive.
Apple doesn't count. They've found a way to charge 2x what the competition charges and convince their customers this is a good deal. Perhaps it is.
People like me want open platforms, where DRM is possible, but not required. I'd like silence for all platforms and any screen less than 1080p is a joke. I miss the 1440p screens from 2005 on a cheap laptop.
PCs are not dying. They are just finally (nearly) completely commodity items.
Unfortunately for the likes of HP the thing that the market doesn't need in that situation is either large behemoth producers or an innovator. At this point all that happens (except for the high end which I cover in a second) is that the small players bring the price down to near cost while adding small improvements. There simply isn't anywhere massively different for PC form (box on/under desk, big screen) to go for now - people generally don't need more power or more features (hardware wise) than we already have there - hence all the R&D and consumer interest is going into phones and tablets. Of course there are the niche markets but the only one in the desktop arena is hard-core gamers and that isn't a very large market with the current state of gaming - the other power niches (high-end CAD users, other number crunchers, people with large databases to process, and so forth) are all moving (if they have not already moved) towards online processing or at very least their own little server farm (the likes of HP can still make a business there I'm sure, though that is not relevant to discussion about the "PC" market)
From a personal computing point of view we already have a reboot: it is the phones and tablets (and TVs & related set-top boxes, but in terms of both OS, other software, and hardware, these overlap the tablet market so much you can't really consider them much separate - the R&D for each feeds into all). If the likes of HP can't jump on that bandwagon they'll have to wait for (or have the luck to find or create) the next big thing or and/just hope their other markets (the server and large-scale "solution" markets) can make up for the drop-off in their personal computer market share.
There isn't going to be a revolution in the PC market. There will be many small improvements, maybe something large enough over time to be called evolution. There is no need for any such revolution: they do many jobs well, and to do the other jobs people want other forms are more suitable. They are not dying out though - they are just dropping into the relatively stagnant area of solved problems so you can't sell a new one to the user every year or two. The revolution is the developments in over areas (phones and tablets, for the time being), and even they are getting to the "we have all the features, the just need refining" stage already so in the next year or few we'll be saying the same things about tablets/phones/settops/TVs/etc needing a reboot.
I have an HP laptop. It has a number of profoundly dumb design choices, like for instance putting the disk activity LED on the side where you can't see it. I managed to correct that, with some bit of personal effort.)
Perhaps those little mistakes reflect the bigger corporate ones... or the other way around? What's the sayings... what goes around comes around, or you reap what you sow?
I work where I need to have a serial port to connect to instrumentation.
Nowhere can I buy a laptop that has even one serial port so that I can take it to clients sites to do diagnostics.
Give me a laptop with a serial port and I'll buy them by the dozen, for myself and for the other field engineers
if i hit the HP store website it should automatically know that i am using an HP product
Say a visitor is using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome software to view a home PC maker's web site. How, technically, should the web site be able to know what brand of computer the visitor is using?
It's still a hassle playing media files on a desktop and seamless on a tablet. On my desktop I always wonder if it'll handle the videos codec
VLC media player for Windows is just as seamless as the media player applications that came with my cousin's Archos 43 Internet Tablet and my ASUS Nexus 7 tablet. The only reason it isn't bundled with desktop PCs is patents.
I foresee an period of consolidation in the PC market. There are too many players for all to be profitable. Lets hope victory does to somebody other than Me-Too companies like HP and Dell. If you want to be seen as a vibrant player you have to bring customers something they can't ax easily try from spur competitors. That's why Apple is winning. They're not afraid to make big investments and take big risks to open new markets.
I foresee an period of consolidation in the PC market. There are too many players for all to be profitable. Lets hope victory does to somebody other than Me-Too companies like HP and Dell. If you want to be seen as a vibrant player you have to bring customers something they can't as easily get from your competitors.
That's why Apple is winning. They're not afraid to make big investments and take big risks to open new markets. I'm not saying they've brought a lot of real innovation to the market; they haven't. But they've brought products that worked pretty well to the market as soon as the technology allowed them to make something slick and appealing.
HP, in contrast, has focused on making computers that work just like everybody else's computers and let Microsoft Windows limit their innovation. I trace HP's decline to beginning when they split the company and spun off Agilent. All the creative minds seem to have gone to Agilent and HP has focused on the commoditized markets -- computers and printers.
You buy a tablet, you probably already have a laptop. Tablets aren't replacing them.
Unless you're a child living in a household where the PC belongs to a parent and the parent hogs it. How is a child with ready access only to a tablet supposed to, say, learn to program a computer? AIDE will count only once Android tablets start outselling iPad tablets.
It's a bit like how one or two years ago, everyone was predicting that mobile gaming was going to replace console and PC gaming
If more phones and tablets included physical gamepads, this might have happened. But it didn't, and genres that depend on a physical gamepad stayed on the consoles.
When was this, exactly? They were dinosaurs in the 1980s, best known for products such as keyboards that you could readily kill someone with (if you could lift one), which would last forever... although you needed to use a hammer to type on one. And the infamous RPN calculators, because they were too cheap to put in a few more chips to handle algebraic order-of-precedence. (You will probably still find HP apologists arguing for the "more natural" design of this inverted math format to this day.)
"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"
Was I in some parallel universe when this was happening?
"Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches."
The only trend Dell, like HP were following was the directive from MS to not enter other markets, as MS perceived such as stealing their own market share. As far as MS is concerned the OEMs are just the delivery people. That's why companies with no contractual relationship with MS were able to expand into the mobile market.
AccountKiller
Time to send out an SOS:
Stupid stupid stupid dumb dumb dumb stupid stupid stupid
Stupid stupid stupid dumb dumb dumb stupid stupid stupid
Repeat until something happens.
Get rid of the philosophy to send stuff offshore, bring back the engineers, and take a page from General Motors' own efforts to bring things back.
Wouldn't hurt to avoid contractors like the plague either, since it shows a sense of trust not found in many companies today.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Feed the staffing companies to the same shredder, and anyone left in that company that uses them or advocates indirect labor.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As an owner of both. The HP calculator division in Corvallis Oregon needs to make a comeback. The other growth market is the Microservers they offer. Most people have phones, PCs and or tablets. Fewer own a personal server of their own, and The Cloud takes some of the steam away from that idea. Most stand-alone NAS are overpriced, and underpowered for what they do, but people need need a viable place for their, ahem...sea-faring content, and a Microserver NAS is a viable proposition.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
When Dell secretly started taking rebates from Intel that accounted for basically 100% of their profit they screwed the entire industry. How can anyone can anyone compete fairly in a market like that?
finally people have awoken to the fact that they don't need a desktop PC to get a TV guide or view movies or sort pictures, that's why the PC industry is on the decline. It won't disappear because businesses still need them, but most other people don't. If WoW came to the iPad, thousands more would crawl out of their dark rooms and give away their PCs.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Mojokid said " If there's one small dig ThinkPads have taken with regularity over the years, it's that though there's a ton of quality and substance built into these machines".
Which is why when it was my turn to upgrade got a top of the line w530. Yes it is super fast. But the Thinkpad substance is on a decline.
First of all the new chicklet keyboard design make me hit the wrong keys all the time. Especially the delete key! And this after two months of trying to get used to it. The old keyboard I could use without looking. But now they have removed all the physical clues. No more gaps between F-key-groups so I have no idea if I hit F5 or F4.
Then they have removed the status lights for such things as caps lock and battery vs charging.
And the screen is 1 cm lower than my old T61 - which was 1 or 2 cm lower than my older 4:3 laptop. Each new machine give me fever lines of code to work with. I am not a happy customer any more. My productivity has taken a hit and my boss won't like that.
But what can a girl do? Make my own?
Dell, HP, Acer, Gateway, et. al. have been in a race to the bottom ever since the Mhz wars ended. They used to compete on specs that 10% of the market actually understood as well as price, but when everyone started using the same parts they built this market of razor-thin margins that they now fight for, where the single company that didn't play that game (Apple) is now growing faster than anyone, with products that have differences other than the plastics that contain the functional bits.
Last week Dell held a presentation here about VDI solutions where they were rattling off all the companies they have bought, with the sales pitch being that your whole VDI stack can be from one vendor including SAN, network, servers, thin clients; so there's only one "throat to choke" so to speak.
My counter-argument is that sometimes it's better to go with best-of-breed in each of the components for maximized performance, maximized uptime, etc.; and then there's also the problems that arise should your single-source provider go titsup, but whatever.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Most did the MBA because they could manage people rather than learn what they did and get paid more money for knowing less.
Programmers who became programmers and did CS degrees because they wanted to get paid pots of cash for being a "web designer" were similalrly near-universally incompetent. The dot-com crash killed most of them off. Unfortunately, being tagged with "management" means that the mismanagement crisis that caused the financial crash cannot be blamed on the MBAs like it was with the web-designer CD student, therefore it hasn't killed them off.
And I didn't have to do all that (it wasn't required except back in the days of the GeForce 2).
What you may allude to is a driver for some specific unsupported hardware on Linux. But then again, look for a 3D driver on Windows or Mac for some hardware that doesn't have a driver.
Writing a letter to your relative you can use your pen, hand and some paper. They don't mind the lack of letterhead, untyped cursive font nor the lack of proper spellchecked content.
And home finances aren't really requiring a lot of work, even where such finances are being done.
Saying the iPhone harmed HP and Dell is idiotic. It's a phone, not a computer. You can still do maybe 10% of common tasks on it compared to a computer and that includes typing at a reasonable speed. I think everyone here knows what really went wrong with HP and Dell so here's my suggestion on how to fix it:
1. use parts that are actually good
2. make money
and if they did the plugin right then it should also hook into FireFox/ Chrome/ Opera/Opra/Whatever.
That's exactly what I was asking: how could a plugin be "done right" in order to hook into copies of Firefox, Chrome, and Opera installed later? Are you recommending that PC makers deploy some sort of background process that searches for installed web browsers and automatically installs an extension into those browsers? I can only imagine the sort of backlash that would get on, say, Slashdot; just look at what happened when Microsoft tried the same thing.
At one time Dell had more VPs than system engineers.
Dell has never been the same since I left. I don't know if that was cause or effect.
Personally, I think I get more precision on my input on a tablet than on a traditional PC, except for when typing is involved.
Clickable targets can be fairly small on a PC with a mouse or a stylus tablet: roughly 20px on a side. But on a finger tablet, targets have to be bigger because the finger is so big. There's a reason the first versions of iOS didn't include copy and paste, and that's because text selection with a finger is awkward. And good luck getting the precision needed to edit pixel art on a finger tablet without having to zoom in by a factor of 40.
Software blessings depend on what you buy
Or what a big company allows you to buy. Until October 2011, there wasn't an Android-based counterpart to Apple's iPod touch pocket-size tablet, and Apple has lately been using state-sponsored monopolies against makers of competitors to its iPad tablet.
that's because my current portable device has a 7-inch screen and won't listen to my Bluetooth keyboard
The fact that some tablets end up not listening to some keyboards is part of the problem with tablets. With a random tablet bought on Amazon and a random Bluetooth keyboard bought on Amazon, how can the end user know whether they'll cooperate?
Or maybe the first time you hit the HP support website using something Not MSIE it asks you permission to install the detector plugin??
A web site begging the user to install a plug-in is often the last thing a user sees before his computer gets infected with fake antivirus. See also a recent Ask Slashdot about scammers.
and the blue rays, with the Jell-O pudding. I don't even.
Every time I see a story about the death of the PC, I wonder what everybody's smoking and when they're going to pass it my direction. Is everyone just pretending to freak out so that they'll roll out quantum PCs faster? Because this has no basis in reality, from anything I've seen. It's like everybody picked a favorite April fools joke and just has been running with it all year.
I seriously just don't even get what you people are talking about.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
They can robot anything.
Fix them too.
Ask yourself why I looked at you product took my cash, went to Fry's electronics and built my own.
Why did they go to Apple.
You answer those two questions with product and your off.
The degree has been one of the largest private entitlement programs in a hospital. Get tired of dealing with patients? Run off and get an MBA, provided of course you have the schmooze and game-playing skills needed to get a corner office. For anyone outside the hospital industry you simply have no idea how much bloat these clowns have on the healthcare system in the U.S. Books are cooked, layoffs take place (without calling them such). Plus in most places they don't have to deal with these expensive "early-retirement" incentives. You're gone. Period. Just because someone has an RN or PA behind their name doesn't make them any less power-hungry or territorial.
I did pay a few hundred dollars in 1987 for a 20 MB hard drive. And I remember paying over $100 for 4 MB of RAM, so you'll have to tell me when that was. All from an IBM-compatible PC from a company called "Clone" (on Inwood Rd. in Dallas/Addison now, I don't remember it being there 30 years ago when I bought from them).
And I just bought an i7 quad core laptop with 16 GB of RAM for under $1000. My mouse likely has more computing power than my first PC (my first PC, a Commodore in 1981, predated the one mentioned above).
Learn to love Alaska
I had copy-and-paste on mobile devices before there even WAS an iPad.
I had copy and paste on my Newton, but that had a stylus. On what touch-only device without a stylus were you copying and pasting? The market has chosen, and stylus fans like us have been outvoted.
As for pixel editing, I can't even do that on a DESKTOP without blowing the screen up 800% or so
In GIMP on my 10" laptop, I can generally manage 600% with the pencil tool, or 300% when I'm using rectangle tools to move things around. But it's still nowhere near the 3200% or more that I need to consistently hit the right pixel in the Pixel Art app for Android on my Nexus 7 tablet.
Although a stylus beats "finger painting" for me.
Which is exactly my point: In my experience, even a mouse beats finger painting. Almost none of the current mobile touch screen devices include a stylus except for the Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo's developer qualifications are far more selective than even Apple's.