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."

Comments

Computers are Dead

[fm6]

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.

Re:Computers are Dead

[slew]

Nonsense, the variant of processor can matter, but software must be written to take advantage of it...

The amount of software that is written to take specific advantage of a processor architecture is going down in this era of the cloud. Unless the thing you are doing is so trivial that it doesn't matter, or vast that you can fill your own datacenter with it 24-7, odds are today your software will (eventually) want to run on a cloud platform (e.g, like Amazon AWS/EC2). In a cloud environment, you don't own the computer, you rent a virtual computer. The cheapest rentals will likely be the most commoditized platforms. Specialized software which need specific variants of processors is not only is less cost effective to develop, but also to execute.

FWIW, As for the other arguments, x86 is mostly dead in the cloud world. Everyone is x86-64-AVX That means in addition to the 16 standard integer registers there are 16 256-bit SIMD registers in the IAS which are quite competitive with Sparc (0+7g+8i+8o register window). Besides, today processors have many more physical registers and do top-of-stack caching so ISA registers don'tt mean as much as it used to mean (e.g, the sandy bridge i7 architecture has 160 integer registers available for renaming).

Also, all those arguments about magic instructions are mostly not relavent anymore. Everyone pretty much has the similar stuff. For example, the latest rabbit out of the Sparc bag have been a dedicated security co-processor (given that many of their servers are web-host front-ends, maybe a co-processor that does AES/DES/RSA is a reasonable thing), although not clear that it's net any better than say an i7 with x86-AES-NI acceleration instructions + a highly optmized AVX RSA implementation unless all that's all your server is doing is RSA (usually there's some other code running).

Re:Computers are Dead

[fm6]

Maybe I got voted up because people can see for themselves that all this is happening. Maybe the people you know buy new computers every few years and maintain their own in-office networks — but that's not the trend, not by a long shot. There's resistance to moving away from these things, but the fact remains that they cost a shitload to maintain. And what do businesses worry about these days? Cost. Then they worry some more about cost. And then if they have some spare time they worry about cost.

When you say that the cloud is nothing new, you're assuming that "cloud" is just marketspeak for "servers". Wrong. It's about SaaS and other technologies that make access to applications a kind of commodity. Saying "this is nothing new" is like somebody in 1981 saying "PCs are nothing new, we've had computers for more than 30 years." What's new here is not the basic technology, but the economics and infrastructure that makes that technology more available.

Which is why HP (as mentioned in the article) is trying to save money by shifting to cloud-based CRM and HR instead of continuing to run their own servers. Ironic, really.

BTW, you mention the need to run an Exchange server? Every office I ever worked in that had its own Exchange server had major problems because the damn thing is hard to administer. If I had been there as an IT guy, I would have insisted that they go to an Exchange provider and let them worry about that shit. Cloud, cloud, cloud.

Re:zuh?

[vlm]

10 middlemen retailers all with a policy "we will pricematch any competitors price for the identical model". Well, if walmart is the only retailer on the planet who sells model 13513.2362 then I guess they'll never have to pricematch, will they?

Also add some B+W only models, some multifunction models...

Re:zuh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yes they are.

I went shopping for a flat-panel TV a few years ago. I had my eye on the Samsung 7 series, 52-inch. They have a "fancy" power indicator light that Samsung was proud of for some idiotic reason. It "looks classy" to marketing shills, apparently. I really gave a fuck. (Your sarcasm detector should have just exploded.)

So I shopped around online and at local retailers. MSRP on an LN52A7000 (close enough) was $3400. All the local shops wanted $3100, but Best Buy carried the LN52A7100, with the red power light, Circuit City (during their final days) carried the LN52A7120 with the blue power light, and everyone else seemed to have their own variant with different colored power lights.

I bought the base model with the white power light from Newegg for $1800. That's what they get for trying to screw over an internet-connected buyer. I figure it was a small, silent middle finger to all of those dipshits. The reason Circuit City is gone and Best Buy is soon to follow is because of that shit, and I, the customer will not tolerate it. FOADIAF, B & M.

Re:zuh?

[jimicus]

WTF were they thinking?

This sort of mess doesn't happen as a result of careful planning. It happens as a result of shortsighted knee-jerk management decisions. Those management decisions probably work out OK in a strong economy, particularly if you are able to predict how many of each model you'll sell.

The problem arises when you face a downturn. You've got an entire chain from building through to distribution devised around this idea of shipping 2,000 different printers (with, let's say 50 basic printers and 40 variants on each one). Which means your driver team is put together based on that assumption, your factories are tooled up based on that assumption, your warehouse processes are based around that assumption and your management team is built around that assumption.

It'd make far more sense to have maybe 10 or 15 basic printers and a whole lot of optional extras - which is precisely what everyone else in the industry does. But in order to get your processes down to that level, you need to drastically cut staff, warehouse space, re-engineer your factories (or pay your contract manufacturers to do so) - and in so doing, an awful lot of middle managers who have been merrily building up their own little empire will push back. They won't do so obviously - well, some might but they can be dealt with very easily - they'll do so insidiously. Terrified for their own job, they'll do everything in their power to avoid making any change that might ultimately mean their team (and hence their empire) is no longer needed.

You really need someone at the top who has the strength to push through this sort of mess and sort it all out - you can't trust the entire business to work with you to achieve it because in so many people's case, it goes against their best interests. Even then it's famously difficult to get right - there is a damn good reason why people who've succeeded in turning around massive companies are greatly respected, and it's nothing to do with their enormous salary.