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HP Plans To Cut Up To 4,000 Jobs Over Next 3 Years Amid PC Slump (bloomberg.com)

Yesterday, it was reported that the PC industry is on a two-year downslide as PC shipments have declined for eight consecution quarters. Today, HP announced it will cut between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs over the next three years due to the PC slump. Bloomberg reports: The company will eliminate positions across the board, Chief Executive Officer Dion Weisler said on Thursday. The comments came as HP held its analyst meeting in New York. The reductions could include 1,000 jobs being outsourced if the number of positions edges close to 4,000, Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said. Weisler is searching for additional ways to drive profitability after his PC company gained independence last year from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which sells corporate tech gear. Earlier this year, Weisler said HP would need to accelerate a plan announced in 2015 to eliminate about 3,000 positions over three years. Instead, those reductions are to be completed this fiscal year. HP has about 50,000 employees now. HP said the newest job cuts will generate cost savings of about $200 million to $300 million annually starting in fiscal 2020. The Palo Alto, California-based computer maker expects to take $350 million to $500 million in charges in connection with the plan, and of that tool about $200 million will be labor costs, according to a regulatory filing.

8 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Moores Law by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Moore's law is not what is dying. What is dying is people's desire for "faster", at least on the personal front. I am typing this on a 4 year old MacBook air. Every single application I run on this thing launches in under a second. I can play HD video without lag. It runs anything I want to do fine because most of the heavy lifting nowadays is up in the cloud - so, why would I buy a new PC? This is the reality most people live in now.

    Until some big new wave of high-demand workloads on-premise arises (VR perhaps? Holography?), demand for PCs and Tabets will continue to fall off a cliff, because people simply don't need them. This has nothing at all to do with Moore's law at all - you could build a PC 2X as fast for 1/2 the cost, people still won't buy it if they don't have a use for it.

  2. Re:Moores Law by rossdee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nah, its a consequence of Windows 10
    Nobody wants to buy a new desktop or laptop if it comes with a shitty OS

  3. Cutting positions across the board by alw53 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Note that "across the board" does not refer to the board of directors.

  4. Re: Moores Law by brunes69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your overly pedantic definition doesn't change at all why your original comment, that HPs sales decline is a "consequence of Moore's law" is inaccurate. HPs sales are dropping because the need for personal computing power has reached a plateau. Simple as that. It's the exact same reason Smartphone sales are slowing. You need killer apps to drive hardware sales, people only care about "faster" to a point.

  5. Re: Moores Law by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Moore's Law has feck-all to do with the decline in PC sales. You're the one with the emotional attachment to it, to the extent that you ignore the highly relevant fact that most people don't care about "faster" any longer, and their needs can already be met by 10-years-old hardware.

    You're quite possibly wrong in any event. We might be approaching the limits of what can be done with silicon, but who says we have to use silicon?

    --
    Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  6. Re: Moores Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    People get angry because you are an arrogant moron, stating falsehood as if it were fact. You are speaking authoritively about Moore's law and can't be arsed to read the fucking Wikipedia page where it directly contradicts what you are saying.

    Skimming over your post history I see a lot of equivalently uneducated tripe. You use arrogance to compensate for your lack of knowledge, which makes you come off as an insufferable twat.

    THAT is why people are angry.

  7. Re:Please Remind Me . . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As far as I can tell the history went something like this:

    HP renamed themselves Agilent and spun off the printer and PC business (Which never fit well with high end test gear) to an entity they called HP, this slight of hand was a good way to dump the deadwood on the board without them realising.

    Agilent then spun off the electronics test gear to a company called Keysight, leaving themselves the high end medical/chemical analysis business (This actually makes sense because the two are very different kinds of business).

    Meanwhile the company now called HP jumped the shark (Boardroom leaks, bugs, private eyes, the revolving door of short term that is the CEO....).

    If you are looking for the old HP, look either to Keysight (Electronics test gear) or Agilent (HPLC and the like).

  8. Re:Moores Law by RabidReindeer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What is dying is HP's ingenuity.

    Technology isn't a commodity that you can keep grinding the same old product year after year. A company that intends to be a company as an ongoing proposition looks beyond the next quarterly figures, looks towards new markets and works on how to leverage their assets to exploit those markets. And 4000 people is a pretty large asset.

    The problem is that bean-counters think of "Our People are our Greatest Asset" as some sort of cutesy slogan and that in reality their people are only assets to be liquidated if they are "non-performing". Meaning considered only as what they cost and not what they can do for profits beyond the next 3 months.

    It takes a lot of work and money to hire and acclimatize new people as opposed to re-purposing existing staff. It would seem more efficient to leverage those assets instead of turning over staff as product lines go obsolete and are replaced.

    But then again, I'm assuming a company that intends to remain a major player and not just downsize their way to greatness, scraping cash from its dying carcass.