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HP Is Planning To Split Into Two Separate Businesses, Sources Say
mrspoonsi writes Hewlett-Packard is planning to split itself into two separate businesses, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. Sources tell the WSJ that HP will split its personal-computer and printer segments from its corporate hardware and services business. The announcement could come as early as Monday, the sources said. The company reorganized itself in 2012 under CEO Meg Whitman. That move combined its computer and printer businesses. The PC and computer segment is massive for HP. For the first six months this year, it reported $27.8 billion in revenue. That's about three times the size of HP's next biggest unit, the Enterprise Group, which makes servers, storage, and network hardware. Under the new split, Whitman would be chairman of the computer and printer business, and CEO of a separate Enterprise Group, according to one of the sources. Patricia Russo, who sits on HP's board, would be chairman of the enterprise company. The printer and PC operation would be led by Dion Weisler, a current exec in that division.
The brand-new USD$100 HP 3D printer*.
* requires spools (embedded with a security chip) of "standard" PLA (with a non-standard diameter and melting point) which will be available for only USD$99 each.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
They'll call the spinoff Compaq!
The part that makes shitty consumer hardware is splitting up from the part that makes rock solid server hardware. This is an absolute dream come true!
The Server Hardware company could be called Digital.
And the consumer company could be called Compaq.
If there were to have a third company for printers - that should be called HP!
(I'm still bitter about Alpha being killed!)
From Carly Fiorina, on, hp has been lacking in leadership, and vision. Hewlett and Packard built a great company, only to have it destroyed by poseurs. Meg Whitman is the latest one - using smoke and mirrors to drive bumps in the stock price. We all know how this is going to end - eventual parting out to companies like Lenovo, Samsung - you name it. Whitman and other insiders will walk away with millions. hp's last 10 years is perfect representation of executive and Board incompetence.
If you can't figure out how to make one company successful, why double your workload?
So they're dropping their company's boat anchor (the lowest quality PCs, laptops, and printers in existence) and expecting it to float? Good luck with that.
Question is - which one does 'HP' have more faith in? The PC/printer division, or the services - isn't it the EDS/MPhasis part of the company?
Would the Integrity line a.k.a. Itanic be a part of the latter?
Chinese buying PC division within 3 years
When I heard it I first thought they want to split into one company selling printers (and living on subsidies) and one selling printer ink...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Good. It's only a matter of time now until the PC unit fails and the HP name can be bought back by its proper owner Keysight.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Question is - which one does 'HP' have more faith in? The PC/printer division, or the services - isn't it the EDS/MPhasis part of the company?
Worth remembering that both the "halves" of the current HP are just the remainder of the original company after its previous split/spin-off of Agilent anyway. Agilent was arguably closer to HP's original business (i.e. test equipment and the like) than what remained of "HP" (nominally the former parent) after that.
In short, the current HP is already the result of a split, and the "new" HP will be whatever bit keeps the name, but will it have any meaning beyond a badge?
It's a similar case to Motorola, which had already split or spun-off parts of its business more than once into On Semiconductor, and a few years later into Freescale before the remaining "Motorola" split into two distinct companies with that name (one of which was later bought by Google).
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Didn't the last CEO of HP pitch this? The stock fell 40%, the CEO was fired, and the board said "No, No, No, we're not going to do that."
HP consumer PC segment must be hurting bad for Whitman to revise that decision.
Going private will probably help out Dell as business decisions will no longer be made by Wall Street. The situation of chasing stock price has become so dysfunctional that the best way to ruin a company is to go public with it and let the suits in. See Turner broadcasting and Google as cases of this effect.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
... each other. The printers are well known, they have an impact in small business and medium business. When those businesses get larger they feel more comfortable contacting with HP because it is a company they know.
Take that away and they will will see other options as equally attractive.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...Merge, downsize, split the stock and/or split the business, rinse, lather, repeat. Corporations are in constant motion and adjustment of their books in order to manage the market, the labor costs, the tax laws, SEC, and the international equities market. All is a hedge on a future that is profitable to a select few, but it impacts all of us. It seems that the interests of these large corporations cause a great deal of uncertainty for their employees and the market in order to be competitive. It was a lot simpler when HP made money by having a superior, high value, affordable product . Now that is no longer the focus because of the complexity of our laws and the incentives offered to a select few who benefit more from a dose of chaos and uncertainty and losses. Especially loss of labor costs whenever it suits them.
I got an email ad from HP saying it was my 'last chance'' to get a Win 7 PC
Question is - which one does 'HP' have more faith in?
Just watch and see which side they transfer all their debt to. It's a classic play called "leave your shareholders holding the bag for your mismanagement of the original company".
In short, the current HP is already the result of a split, and the "new" HP will be whatever bit keeps the name, but will it have any meaning beyond a badge?
Like Pillips and Kodak and many other "greats", HP is now only a marketing company for cheap Chinese crap designed by someone else.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
When I heard it I first thought they want to split into one company selling printers (and living on subsidies) and one selling printer ink...
When my $49 HP printer runs out of ink, the replacement ink cartridge costs $29. So instead of buying the ink, I disassemble the printer into a pile of gears, cogs, timing belts, stepper motors, etc. and sell them on eBay as "robot parts". The I use the proceeds to buy a new printer, including ink, for $49.
As soon as I saw this story, I heard the "Dude! You're gonna get a Dell!" Dude in my head.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Except that new printer only has 1/3 the ink of a $30 cartridge.
I hope they take the founder's names off of the computer company. The last four CEOs have been an insult to Hewlett and Packard, its employees and its customers. Hewlett-Packard (now called "HP" out of shame) used to be the epitome of creativity, innovation, treating employees with respect and an "Extra Measure of Quality". Now it's nothing but a continuing estate sale of what once was a great company. The Board of Directors is to blame. The manifestation of its incompetence have been a succession of terrible CEOs (Fiorina, Hurd, Apotheker and now Whitman) who individually and collectively are incapable of understanding what is required to innovate products. The inkwell is also going dry (HP's primary source of profit was selling ink and it financed the remainder of the company). So what's left? HP Lab's funds have been cut for decades. Ink is drying up. Their PCs are designed and build by the cheapest Chinese bidder and the enterprise hardware business R&D capability has mostly walked out away out of frustration. Such a sad decay of a very, very good technology company.
Their NonStop division is still coming up with innovative hardware.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Correct. Wistron makes some of their cheap crap. Other ODM spinoffs of Chinese companies make the rest of the laptop/desktop stuff. HP doesn't design or produce any of their PC products but the same is true with Dell. HP also manufactures no computers except a small portion of their enterprise servers in the U.S. Most of the stuff is migrating to Singapore and Mexico. Most of the content for their large servers is manufactured in Malaysia. (I refrained about making a comment about quality here).
The Gen9s have some of the memory tech starting in a couple of months.
I really hope they take the labs, both the ProLiants and the Integrity gear and keep them running as they have been. The Mark Hurd years were hard on them, and things fell behind. From a customer standpoint, it seems like Meg's been letting them be engineers again.
I hope those teams survive. My blades and my Integrity boxes are the only things that haven't died in my datacenter. My storage vendors haven't been remotely as solid.
My mom says I'm cool.
They are smarter than you. The amount of ink in the included cartridges is small enough that even if you never buy ink and make 1/2 the money back from selling the printer, you're still not going to be printing more pages.
Sure, you could recoup the cost of the printer from selling parts on ebay, but is that time and effort really worth a few dozen pages of printed material? I just use commercial printing services or (when I have access to one) a laser printer.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Will people be buying an H Printer, or a P Printer?
Make sense - I've seen printers sold for less than the cost of the ink-cartridges.
I've lost count of how many times HP split off/spun off parts of the company in the last 20 years ...
HP's consumer and enterprise laptops are entirely different and seem to be designed by different companies.
The Envy, Pavilion, "Essentials" lines may appear like chinese-designed OEM machines in an HP-styles package.
The Pro*, Elite* series are very different. They have
- custom BIOS with tons of options (unlike the consumer versions with almost no options and a text-based interface like you see in cheap OEM motherboards)
- much better touchpads with really nice buttons. The consumer versions often have weird stuff like virtual buttons, buttons with a loud "click" and non-existing travel. While enterprise laptops have buttons with some travel distance and a smooth click. I can't describe it but they do have a very nice feel, somewhat closer to keyboards.
- better components. Almost every corporate laptop has Intel networking chips (or at least Broadcom). The cases don't flex as much as consumer versions.
- the Windows 8 era machines include Windows 7 AND 8 installation disks - choose whatever you like. And proper, not "single-language reduced crap with tons of Symantec/McAfee/BonziBuddy bullshit" Windows editions.
- 3-year warranty. Not even Apple offers that kind of support.
No, Bean counters and MBAs have wrecked HP. Pointy Haired Bosses know no gender.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I prefer them to the Dell style rails where you have to drop the servers in to the extended rails vertically (the server remains horizontal).
Got it? Got it? Oops, CRASH!!
It hasn't been a problem yet, but every time we set one up, it's really nerve wracking.
They will probably keep the consumer side as HP and name the business side something else. Now what could this new company be called. Oh hey! Let's call it Compaq!
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Actually Apple does offer a 3 year warranty (called AppleCare) for an additional fee. However, HP actually offers a 5 year warranty on their enterprise desktops, laptops, tablets, and servers as an option.
This works really well for the college that I work for because we can replace our hardware on a 5 year replacement cycle and yet still ensure almost everything is covered under warranty.
HP's enterprise service divisions are also very good about just shipping out replacement parts on request rather than requiring the entire system to be shipped back for service.
Agilent doesn't exist anymore.
They call themselves something really stupid nowadays - Keysignt Technologies. Which sounds more like a marketing company than one making test equipment.
Of course, any company old enough will have a pile of equipment that's marked with both "HP" and "Agilent" on it because each time the name changed, they just rebadged the silkscreen.
Anyhow, when they split, the reason was the HP name was familiar to the public so they kept that for their PC division, while engineers familiar with HP would easily adapt to the new name of Agilent. (Except they may have forgotten what a terrible name Keysignt is...).
You know what? I won't be sad to see them go. After the garbage that they loaded on to the consumer market, and they way that they have mismanaged their company why should they deserve to slog on with reputation alone?
It makes me happy to see that even a behemoth like HP is mortal, and producing lousy products can result in the brow beating of a company no matter how long it takes and how much money they make. .
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
The reasons for doing this are probably far more though through than that. A business doesn't look at splitting itself unless it can benefit from further tax relief or additional government grants of some sort.
The reality is that the company is probably already managing those 2 categories separately so I imagine the benefits are beyond it's operational management structure.
I just got an HP elitebook 840 and it compares very well with the Apple laptop I had at my last job.
Cheap storage VM.
Out of the slppery depths of Hell the Leviathan rises once more. DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION has returned. Say it with me Brothers and sisters: all hail the PDP- 16894. Hoozaah. Hoozaaah. Is that a tear of joy or despair. We will never know.
Beware the wood elf!!!
If you custom-build a machine from their ZBook "Mobile Workstation" line, you can even configure a machine to not have Windows installed at all. Saves you about $100.00. Still rather pricey, though...
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Agilent doesn't exist anymore.
According to the Wikipedia article, the "Agilent" name is still being retained for the "life sciences, diagnostics and applied markets(?!) [remainder of the post-spinoff company]". Which ties in with what this person said.
But, yeah. What a crap name.
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I think they will sell-off one of them
Casteism
Nah, they'll just do it the American way: Drive it into the ground, then ask for bailouts.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.