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HP Plans To Cut Product Lines; Company Turnaround In 2016
dcblogs writes "Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman told financial analysts today that it will take until 2016 to turn the company around. Surprisingly, Whitman put some of the blame for the company's woes on its IT systems, which she said have hurt its internal operations. To fix its IT problems, Whitman said the company is adopting Salesforce and HR system Workday. The company also plans to cut product lines. It said it makes 2,100 different laser printers alone; it wants to reduce that by half. 'In every business we're going to benefit from focusing on a smaller number of offerings that we can invest in and really make matter,' said Whitman."
0_o 2100 laser printers? WHY?
For Apple Mac's. Instead of lookalike computers, they'll actually be using Apple products. This alone should make them twice as productive.
...than the entire state of California.
They need a short term one, specifically one that doesn't involve switching CEOs every year.
If you don't have stability at the top, you have zero ability to execute a long term goal.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
God, I'm glad I got India'd out of a job in '04.
HP printer firmware seems to get flakier every year. 2100 model variants? Do you really need more than 20?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
1,050 printers is still way too many.
They should just have 3, A laser, a color laser and an inkjet.
they make their dough on toner and ink anyhoo!
Yeah, it will be much better with Jerry Brown presiding over it instead...
Wasn't their bold plan for not sucking supposed to be offering 'enterprise' IT consulting? And now they admit that their own organization couldn't change its own asses toner cartridge with both hands and a map?
for her at least. HP has better prospects than California.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Pretty much everybody who needs a PC already has one, and will go as long as 10 years between replacements. Servers are still big business, but nowadays data centers want to buy cheap white boxes, since any reliability issues are handled by cloud software. So name brand computers are dead.
When I worked for Sun's hardware division, I believed that the company could turn itself around by firing all the sales idiots who thought x86 systems were a passing fad. (Which earned my emity because I worked on some fancy x86 systems that were easily the best on the market.) Now that I've been out working on cloud systems for 3 years, it's become obvious that the brand of computer an app is running on matters as little as the specific processor. Commodification of everything is the new normal.
Honestly, most people are just confused by all the stuff that's out there anyways.
Over 2000 printers? For consumer stuff, offer
* inkjet
* laser
* color laser
Maybe an MFC offering for some of the above
For extra stuff, just have addons that can easily be plugged into the printer. You don't need to manufacture two printers to allow ethernet, just make one include a module
Add something similar for corporate printers, along with the ability to add trays/duplexers/etc as normal...
Yes, there might still be quite a few different models, but I fail to see why they'd have 2100
Now that's some clever job security!
When a company starts thinking that Salesforce (or any CRM, or any single piece of software) is going to save them, that means they are DOOMED.
The fact that HP doesn't know this says a lot about how clueless they really are about IT, software, *and* business needs in general.
640 printers is enough for anybody.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
"California CEO Meg Whitman told financial analysts today that it will take until 2016 to turn the state around. Surprisingly, Whitman put some of the blame for the state's woes on its IT systems, which she said have hurt its internal operations. To fix its IT problems, Whitman said the state offices are adopting Salesforce and HR system Workday. The state also plans to cut benefits and entitlements. It said it has 2,100 different forms alone; it wants to reduce that by half. 'In every state we're going to benefit from focusing on a smaller number of entitlements that we can invest in and really make matter,' said Whitman."
I donno if its going to be all that different.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A few years back, I remember reading glowing stories on HP's former CIO in InformationWeek. Mott was leading a multi-year project to slash the number of in-house applications, the number of data centers, and IT employees, and to migrate to the corporate data warehouses to use HP's new technology NeoView.
Mott didn't survive the rapid turnover in HP CEO's office. He is now the CIO at GM.
Do they really still make printers?
It must be 8 years ago since we abandoned HP printers, and we never have been happier...
What a shitload of flaky mechanisms, flaky drivers, bulky software and trouble did we avoid.
that's an eon in 'internet time', by then the tartars will have flowed again across the steppes!
But the ones that learned this are retired. Those who now fill their shoes have to learn it all over again.
Knowledge is funny, that way.
The company I work for loves HP and we buy tons of stuff from them. They're our official vendor for servers, storage systems, etc. Dealing with them is a huge headache. They take forever to return quotes, then ordering takes forever. I recently tried to buy some fiber cables for our SAN and it took three days to get us a quote, even though we gave them the HP part numbers and the quantity. Their excuse? "It took us a while to look up and apply your corporate discount." You'd think they'd have that programmed in their computer and it'd be calculated by the time the screen refreshed. They are a computer company after all. I told a colleague that if we had ordered the cables from NewEgg (or any other tech web store) we'd already have the cables before HP even gave us the quote. It was two weeks before we finally got our fiber cables.
You'd think a huge computer and software company would be more efficient at this, but HP is borderline incompetent. I think the only reason they are still in business is due to sheer inertia.
Apple makes 12 HW products by my count. I think Meg may be onto something here.
Organization? You must be joking..
If you are looking for a job, HP is a company without an interesting mobile strategy and a cloud strategy focused predominantly on IT services - not very attractive for entrepreneurial types, who have many other excellent opportunities.
Finally, the 100K HP departees are not likely to purchase HP products or to recommend them in their new settings. That's a very large pool of people who are going to advocate for competing products.
So the turnaround projected for 2016 is unlikely to happen, but it's a pretty fair bet than Meg Whitman won't be around HP when that day arrives.
So, are you going to just make compact desktop models, just high-end high-volume model, or just pick one-point in between? Are you just just going to make directly-connected models, or wired network models, or wifi models?
Or, along with color vs. black and white, are there multiple axes of variation you need to cover that are going to require more than one model of printer in each the "black and white" and "color" categories?
Its been said, but I'll reiterate.
Salesforce is not an IT tool, it is a Customer Management tool. The whole point of using Salesforce is to make your sales and customer service people more efficient so you can do more with what you have or do the same with fewer people.
Workday is the same thing, only it replaces any internal HR databases with its own SaaS solution in order to allow your HR people to manage more people, or in order to manage the same number of people with fewer HR people.
At the end of the day, both of these projects are about outsourcing internal functions, possibly to save money, possibly because Dave Duffield and Marc Benioff the CEOs of Workday and Salesforce respectively were big contributors to Meg's failed gubernatorial campaign.
I'm cynical, especially when it comes to the continued flushing of HP down the toilet.
...all I can say is sell your HP stock! They're doomed.
I wonder what the similarity ...
..fire your own workers, just like Xerox will be doing with their remaining engineers next year when the HCL "partnership" hits the iceberg and they have no A3 multifunction devices to sell of their own and no money left.
It'll be much cheaper. No R,D&E costs at all, just Sales, Marketing and Accounts.
Why would HP need to buy Apple products? HP already makes their own MacBook Pro (which is appropriately named "Envy") as well as their own iMac. They don't need to visit the Apple Store when they can make their own.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
As another poster has pointed out, those probably include localized models. Different display languages and power cords can make for a lot of different "models." Really, she should have called them "SKUs", not "models" to differentiate between actual different designs and minor changes to what gets tossed in the box.
Yep.
HP will soon no longer be neither designing, nor manufacturing any of their own products. Already the lion's share of their manufacturing is farmed out to Foxconn and other outfits in China. Pretty soon "Hewlett Packard Development Company" will become just Hewlett Packard, Inc." as product development also will be farmed out to China and the name will be used as a product "brand" only... just like Magnavox, Westinghouse, Zenith, Emerson, Polaroid, Philips, RCA, Sylvania, Bell & Howell, and a host of others.
And not too far behind HP's footsteps is the once great name of Motorola too.
As long as she doesn't go anywhere near public office ever in her entire life, or any company that I or a friend are working for, or any institution that will have a significant impact on my life, I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
For the home consumer, HP once meant high quality laser printers and top notch calculators. Then Carly Firiona came, merged HP with Compaq, and proceeded shit on everything and everyone. Its been downhill ever since. And btw, the real HP calculator division died over a decade ago, all that remains are crappy ass Taiwanese junk. TI & Casio are far better values today. Palm/Handspring floundered with Treo & Web OS, acquired & killed by HP. Now always-internet-connected smartphones , mainly Apple iPhone & Android, are drowning/killing all other competing smart devices. Innovation-wise this sucks big time.
And bring back carly, just to fire that stupid bitch all over again.
Apple thinks only 1 should be needed.
AND you will like it.
Their firmware and driver teams need adequate room in which to explore the wide variety of vexing bugs that you can get away with shipping...
Or drivers they're not shipping; I am the unhappy owner an orphaned HP color laser printer (CLJ 1500). While Brother figured out how to support 64 bit Vista & Win 7, HP decided to "focus on things that matter." It is going to be a while before I look at buying HP hardware again. (Yeah, yeah, I'm sure HP is all bummed out about that.) But who knows, maybe they'll impress me with their visionary innovation some day.
HP should outsource all their IT to HP India. It worked so well for the rest of us.
It'd be interesting to see how long it'd take them to go out of business.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Believe me, after Arnold ran the state even further into the ground, we need someone with experience at the reins. Wanna-be politicians like Whitman and Arnold just don't cut it when there's extremely difficult times ahead.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Add another variable for them localizing their printers around the world, due to varying environmental conditions. Like printers in humid, tropical countries would be very different from the ones in the US, which is why you don't see the same models in both places. It's not the same as touchpads.
However, I think they should spin off their non-PC computer business into a pure maintenance company, that would deal w/ customers w/ their legacy products, like ones from Compaq, Tandem, DEC and HP's own PA-RISC and Itanic lines. Let this company develop successors to all these lines of products - the PA-RISC, the Alpha, continue on Itanium III, MIPS and make successors to the old product lines like Himalayas, Alphaservers, HP-9000s, Integrity servers & so on. Delight their customers (who are still w/ them) and live off maintenance contracts. And maybe even build a business around FBSD and OBSD.
As for HP itself, be just a PC & peripheral company like Dell. Since they are going w/ Windows Phones & Tablets, base them on Clover Trail or Hondo (same advice goes for Microsoft's own rumored phone) - don't go w/ Android: that market is already lost to Samsung, Sony, Google/Mot and HTC.
I saw Red Sonja, and expected as much. One should watch Conan, Terminator, and Red Sonja before voting for a candidate. He may have a heart of gold, but he was a fierce warrior who seemed to have a somewhat tenuous hold on the concept of governance.
Ronald Regan, on the other hand, was a handsome and well-dressed non-barbarian. So clearly he was a better choice as governor. Clearly.
I'm sure it will since he's had plenty of practice in presiding over the downfall of California. I'm not even in the USA and I've heard of his fuckups last time.
Then you still have the worry but there's fuck all you can do about it apart from wait. An organisation near me with 20k users hosted by MS were just small fry that had to wait more than a week to get their email. The problem was a DNS typo at the MS Exchange server farm fixed in seconds, but it took a bit over a week for the ticket to make it through the queue. Over that time the IT people in the organisation did little other than answer phones and tell angry people that they just had to wait.
There are sentences in Moby Dick longer than the paragraph above.
Wait, I thought Randy Mott was getting high praise for what an amazing job he did for HP's IT.
I guess not then.....
It's a good thing Meg has a lot of experience working with extremely large companies in the services and hardware business. She doesn't? How did she get the job then?
- (anonymous former hp employee coward)
Me too. Unless you play games, CS people have been fine for 6 years. Typical office related computers probably for 10 years if you don't get forced into the software upgrade cycle.
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I agree, I think she's got a better shot at turning HP around. California is a well known lost cause.
It is refreshing to see a HP CEO actually address the issues HP has instead of hiding them. The CEOs of the last 10 years or so have just been covering things up and pretending all is good. It has been SOP since Carly that if a quarter is going to come in below expectations; you lay off all the contractors for up to a month and freeze spending for a while to make the numbers come out better. Of course this means competent contractors leave for more stable work and all of the project’s schedules slip and then go over budget trying to catch up again. We had a good quarter though!
I don’t know if she can do it, but publicly facing the problems instead of hiding them seems like a good first step.