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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?
...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."
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
They should just have 3, A laser, a color laser and an inkjet.
they make their dough on toner and ink anyhoo!
They've got 2100 laser printers. Imagine how many models including the ink jets!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Three is way too few. They need Corporate high volume, corporate medium volume, and corporate low volume. (High and medium being multi-function copy machines, low being a beefy printer). These should all be laser. Then they have various graphic-design oriented printers, from high volume to low volume, with variations in paper sizes. Lets say high, medium, and low volume, with "low volume" overlapping with high end consumer. Drafting/plotting printers for blueprints and such. Then maybe 7 consumer printers. That's 13 right there, disregarding color/monochrome, and injet, bubblejet, and whatever the hell else exists (I rarely print at home, so I only know what we have at work). (My math doesn't add up because of the overlap I noted). So far fewer, but definitely more than 3.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
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."
But it's got these sexy rounded corners and the casing is aluminum billet.
Granted you can't ever replace the toner when it runs out, but this makes it a whole inch smaller and a couple pounds lighter!
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Gives her something to do until the next California Governor election comes up. By then she will have tired of the 'HP' experiment and leave it to someone else to pick up the pieces.
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.
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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Yes. Because I want a refridgerator sized printer that easily churns out 50000 pages a month in my home office. And the university down the street wants a laptop sized printer that can only take 20 peices of paper in the feeder at a time.