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HP Is Now Two Companies. How Did It Get Here? (cio.com)
New submitter joshroberts3388 writes: If Hollywood wanted a script about the inexorable decline of a corporate icon, it might look to Hewlett-Packard for inspiration. Once one of Silicon Valley's most respected companies, HP officially split itself in two on Sunday, betting that the smaller parts will be nimbler and more able to reverse four years of declining sales. HP fell victim to huge shifts in the computer industry that also forced Dell to go private and have knocked IBM on its heels. Pressure from investors compelled it to act. But there are dramatic twists in HP's story, including scandals, a revolving door for CEOs and one of the most ill-fated mergers in tech history, that make HP more than a victim of changing times.
That's not the important question. The interesting question is, "Where is it going . . . ?" I don't think HP's senior management can answer that question.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
By all accounts things only started to go south when Bill and Dave left and were replaced by a series of bean counters with no sense for what gives a tech company positive buzz and positive sales growth. Carly being example 1. Meg being example 2.
HP sold off the original HP as Agilent.
The good parts of HP have been gone for a long time.
The Corvalis Group was pretty much just dismantled.
The Instruments group became Agilent.
The part that is left is a bunch of ink grifters in the printing division and a bunch of shitty clone sellers in the computer division.
It's not at all the same company that it was. And it has nothing to do with Carly, she only became CEO years after the decline. The Cold War killed HP. They couldn't continue to sell instruments and equipment to the Military at sky-high prices, the business they were doing in the 60's became comodified. The back labs at HP filled up with boomers who though they could ride the gravy train to retirement but it wasn't going to happen.
She also helped destroy the high quality instruments division before spinning it off as Agilent. That was the group whose technology quality helped keep HP's quality high, because the robust designs and high quality for HP instruments were a touchstone for quality in the the company's other departments. Since her advent, I've repeatedly shown partners and clients that they can buy more hardware, of better overall quality, for less money, than by insisting on HP. It does require some research, but when you're buying 100 servers you _do not care_ how many firewire ports it has, the graphical chipset, or how robust the decorative faceplate is. You care about CPU's, amount and quality of memory, and being able to afford dual power supplies _and_ dual UPS's and switches to plug them into.
HP hasn't had interesting product in living memory. The closest they came was buying WebOS and making a tablet, but they couldn't even follow through on that one. I'm not sure there was a future in that anyway, but at least if they'd followed through it would be something to move forward with.
True on the consumer side, but on the enterprise/datacenter side they were producing some pretty interesting products in the last few years that were horribly marketed and/or sold. My personal favourite was the HP Moonshot which was a hyper-converged blade architecture and potentially one of the most interesting things in large-scale computing in years. However, it was hobbled by terrible marketing, and requiring you to have the solution architected (at your cost, mind) by HP's techs rather than allowing you to just buy the chassis and blades. I went through that process and it was such a pain in the ass that we ended up buying Cisco UCS (which was its own set of pains in the ass I won't get into).
I think they did ease up that requirement for architecture, but I know myself and a lot of other people were really put off by the sales technique; like they were saying we were too dumb to know our own workload requirements and therefore they wanted to charge us for their service folks times to come architect it for us. They were acting like they had no competitor... and in that sort of density they sort of didn't when it was first unveiled. But tech moves quickly, and at the time it was felt that the kind of density Moonshot was offering was a nice to have and not a necessity, so most savvy IT managers and admins went with UCS or Dell's M1000e, and later started looking at platforms like Nutanix and Simplivity for the same workloads.