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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."
HP has been in decline for years.
Quality is down. Innovation is down. A series of seemingly incompetent CEOs. A couple of bad purchases. Some stupid decisions. Some utterly failed products.
Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.
Welcome to the modern world of tech, where you buy everything in sight, fuck it up, have a bunch of bad management, and then eventually implode as you realize nobody in your organization measures up to the people who got you there.
One wonders how many good companies have been swallowed up and ruined in trying to make huge companies more profitable, only to find out the huge companies have no idea what they're doing.
Over and over again, we see big corporations who really just keep changing CEOs, and utterly failing to understand just how badly they're all screwing up the company.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
As a brand, HP means nothing more to people anymore than "some company that makes printers."
Speaking of HP as a brand, I'm sure many here remember when HP meant "the best test equipment money could buy" (except for oscilloscopes, of course.) That sort of reputation for a brand is rare indeed. However, after going into computers, making printers, merging with Compaq, etc., they spun off that business and renamed it "Agilent." Later, Agilent became "Keysight" after they split that into a test equipment business and a medical equipment business, the latter of which retained the Keysight name. But whatever they're calling their test equipment business now, I think they've lost significant brand value, regardless of the value of the products that Keysight actually makes.
Evidently, they thought the "HP" brand in computers - or more likely printers - was so strong that they would retain that for those products at the cost of losing the top brand in the test equipment business - which, of course, is the business that Messrs. Hewlett and Packard originally created.
Today, the PC business is a commodity business that nobody wants to be in anymore for that very reason. I suspect the printer business eventually will be a commodity business, if it isn't already. Of course, brands don't much matter in commodity businesses.
Sayonara, "HP," my old pal - you were a good brand while you lasted...
HP will be the poster child for what happens when MBAs and H1Bs take over a company.
Ultimately, tech companies need to be run by tech visionaries. Car companies need to be run by car guys/gals. Financial companies need to be run by sharks.
You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation. Creativity and passion can not be taught.
I miss the old HP, run by passionate engineers, that built the worlds best calculators, printers, and oscilloscopes.
At this late stage, trying to catch up to AWS or Azure would be a death march. They should try something with better odds, say, invading Russia during the winter.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..