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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."
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.
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!
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
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.
Amen!!!
Brother, Samsung, Canon, Epson, etc. drivers usually install in a quarter (sometimes a tenth!) of the time. And usually take up a quarter to a tenth of the drive space.
Especially on the all-in-one models.
And functionality just isn't that different or better with the HP models. Just immensely more annoying to install.
HP's printer software is a disaster.
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."
One of the first things Steve Jobs did upon his return to Apple in the 90s was kill off all the random, overlapping, redundant, confusing product lines... Which each cost money to develop, produce, support and market. He drew a cross on the whiteboard and wrote "pro laptop" in one corner, "consumer laptop" in another, pro desktop and consumer desktop in the others. And that was their strategy. The point was to FOCUS a company that had lost its way, and HP certainly looks like a company that has lost its way.
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.
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.
There are sentences in Moby Dick longer than the paragraph above.