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HP To Shut Down Its OpenStack Based Public Cloud (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality. "HP’s decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company’s public cloud ambitions. It has become increasingly clear that there are three, maybe four companies that can support (at scale) the massive shared computing, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary for a public cloud. ... HP will continue pushing its private and hybrid cloud."
Well, "which HP?" is a good question.
Splitting up and selling off are not exactly indicators everything is going swimmingly.
As I said, companies grow, companies buy, companies fuck up what they buy, and then realize they no longer have much of an idea what they are anymore.
I think the M+A craze in tech for the last 20 years has been a lot of short term profit seeking, but is overall really bad in the long run. It maximizes executive compensation, but it doesn't actually achieve the outcomes they claim it does.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation."
This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades. Having worked in big corporations almost exclusively, I've seen a lot of this:
- Management by spreadsheet, exclusively. (If you can't measure it you can't manage it.)
- MBAs being put in charge of divisions they know nothing about. (A good manager can manage anything.)
- CxOs listening to McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Gartner, etc. exclusively. (They're the most expensive so they give the best advice.)
The last one is particularly funny -- I've experienced a lot of white-shoe consulting firm employees coming in and telling veteran execs 20 years their senior what to do. All of these firms' business models are to take newly minted MBAs, fly them to client sites and dazzle executives with sales PowerPoints. As you can imagine, the problem continues until the consulting firm can't extract any more fees for those former students.
Well, they're in a feedback loop now .. the MBAs are the ones saying you need to bring in MBAs.
Much like how CEO pay climbed to stupid levels because CEOs and their cronies sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs, when the sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs.
The people making the bad decisions are hiring people just like them to help make the decisions, because thay mostly want like-minded people. Their compensation is separated from their performance, and they only look at the next quarter so they can take their bonuses and run like hell.
Corporations are almost incapable of long-term planning, because they really only give a damn about the next 3-4 months, and ensuring they maximize their own compensation.
My personal opinion, like you having seem it for the last bunch of years, is that C-level management and MBAs are pretty much uniformly fucking up corporations by doing the same stupid stuff over and over again. But by the time anybody realizes these clowns have been promoted, or received their golden parachute.
Other than CEOs, who really believes CEOs are worth anywhere near what they get paid? Oh, of course, the people who aspire to be CEOs so they too can get overpaid.
It's the emperor's new clothes. It's lies and stupidity piled on top of one another.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.