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.

Comments

Moores Law

[110010001000]

This is the consequence of the death of Moores Law. A lot of people won't be happy to hear this, but Moores Law is dead and won't be coming back. Digital computers are reaching an endpoint and there are no more leaps to be made technologically here. Essentially digitial computing is hitting a dead end. The computer you have today will look a lot like the one you will have 10 years from know. I know people will go on about 3D microchips, atomic transistors, exotic materials, but that isn't going to bring back Moores Law. We have been spoiled for decades, but the party is over.

Re:Moores Law

[brunes69]

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.

Re:Moores Law

[rossdee]

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

Re:Moores Law

[h33t l4x0r]

I'm trying to imagine OSX apps that do heavy lifting in the cloud. Siri maybe? What else?

Re:Moores Law

[h33t l4x0r]

For your sake I hope it's not dying. Because then you'll have to find a new definition you can feel superior about knowing,

Re: Moores Law

[brunes69]

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.

Re:Moores Law

[DanDD]

Your assertion that Moore's Law is dead is akin to a similar assertion over 100 years ago that "everything that can be invented has been invented", and that the patent offices should be closed.

Go download Google's open source Tensorflow (an AI Machine Learning library), and try some real machine learning on real-time sensors and data streams. You'll quickly realize the highest end workstations can't keep up.

Now delve into a bit of devices physics. The easy gains in speed for silicon transistors have been made. There are still advances to be made, but different device physics that allow switching into the terahertz might just reset the clock on Moore's Law, which is just what's needed in all sorts of fields, such as AI.

Re: Moores Law

[Bing Tsher E]

Pedantic definition? There is a specific definition. It isn't anything to be pedantic about, it's just something you can cite.

Re:Moores Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Patently false. source.

Exerpts:

"Despite a popular misconception, Moore is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months." Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months."

"At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, Moore revised the forecast rate.[6][30] Semiconductor complexity would continue to double annually until about 1980 after which it would decrease to a rate of doubling approximately every two years"

YOUR facts are wrong, you pretentious idiot.

Re: Moores Law

[Zontar The Mindless]

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?

Re:Moores Law

[swb]

That's crazy.

It seems to me there's still lots of room for improvement, if anything the CPU improvements have just moved bottlenecks elsewhere. CPU improvements pre-SSD were even hard to get more use out of without spending vast dollars on disk systems that matches what a couple of $300 SSDs can do today.

My desktop workstation has 32 GB of memory and it's nothing to write home about, but 10 years ago that would have been some crazy expensive Xeon motherboard.

Realistically, we've had it easy with simple hardware improvements being such low hanging fruit. We've been able to get away with making our dumb software fatter AND get the end product to run faster ever couple years just because the CPUs got faster.

The twilight of trivial CPU improvements will hopefully result in more resources being put into software development so that while scaling CPU performance vertically may taper off, the use of multi-core systems will allow it to scale horizontally, resulting in continued improvement.

Re:Moores Law

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep saying that, but I don't really buy it. People didn't really need a faster PC in the 00's either. But software capabilities were increased, and so were the requirements. Some computers had hardware MPEG2 decoders back then, but along came DivX and everyone used that, with software decoding, because people had or could buy fast enough PCs. Now we can decode 4k x265 in hardware, but what if a new format comes along? If PCs continued to improve, it wouldn't be a problem to do it in software. I'm sure people would want 2x faster PCs, even though they don't have an immediate use for them.

Re: Moores Law

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Moores Law

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hilarious that people think shrinking things down is the only meaningful way computers advance. There's more interesting stuff going on today with hardware design than ever, and all the best devices are moving more of what used to be done in software into dedicated hardware.

Re:Moores Law

[breeze95]

This is the consequence of the death of Moores Law. A lot of people won't be happy to hear this, but Moores Law is dead and won't be coming back. Digital computers are reaching an endpoint and there are no more leaps to be made technologically here. Essentially digitial computing is hitting a dead end. The computer you have today will look a lot like the one you will have 10 years from know. I know people will go on about 3D microchips, atomic transistors, exotic materials, but that isn't going to bring back Moores Law. We have been spoiled for decades, but the party is over.

I'm not 100% on board with that belief. The hardware aspects of computing may seem to be heading for a dead end because software demands on hardware have plateaued. Hardware innovation was in response to software demands. Absent software pushing the need for cutting edge hardware, hardware innovation will slow down. I have a computer that I built in 2010 or 2011 that is powered by an Intel i5 3.0 GHz processor. So, far my computer has and can handle any consumer software products on the market. This fact reduces my need to upgrade my computer every 2 years. This is one of the reasons (along with the growth of mobile computing) why the demand for desktop computers has declined. Computer manufacturers are looking at consumers such as my self and don't really see a need to push the envelope. Maybe the growth of artificial intelligence and smart homes will change this. Besides, Moore's Law seems to be alive and well on the mobile computing platform.

Re:Moores Law

[Hadlock]

My buddy bought a second hand, Xeon 16 physical, 32 logical core workstation with 96GB ram for under $1000. It's sandybridge era, but hot damn there's plenty of cores to spread the work around. We estimate that even though his workflow involves six different VMs, he won't need to upgrade his personal machine again for probably five years. I was considering buying one too, but I think I'll settle for a brand new i7 quad core XPS 15 with a 1050 GPU for ~$1800, which ought to last me four years or so. Maybe more. My 2012 era i5 thinkpad laptop (ivy bridge) is still faster than anything I need it for, but the screen needs updating, and to be larger as my eyesight starts to deteriorate as an adult and replaces my old "fire breathing" desktop from 2010. I'm a power user and barely find reason to upgrade my hardware, I can only imagine how long the average user can go between upgrades these days.

Re:Moores Law

[Dutch Gun]

It's not that either. Or at least, that's not the whole answer. I think a large factor is that many people no longer need a PC at all to do basic personal computing, or take part in the information age. A smartphone or tablet will do just fine for many basic computing and communication tasks, and those are an order of magnitude easier for normal people to use.

PCs are edging their way back to being gaming, specialist, and business machines. They're not dying, just finding a more specialized niche. People who are predicting the "death" of the PC are off the mark. They'll decline to a point, then stabilize as a much smaller industry than in its heyday, with many PC manufacturers consolidating, diversifying, or going out of business. There are still many tasks that will continue to require a full screen display and comfortable keyboard, and PCs still have an advantage as one of the few remaining open platforms.

Of course, we're already seeing the market plateau with tablets, and I think soon smartphones will be in the same boat as technology matures, the market is saturated, and so people have less reason to buy a new phone each year or two, eventually holding onto them for three to six years or so (probably no longer than that due to simple wear and tear).

Re:Moores Law

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

You can start measuring them in cubic inches now. :-)

Re:Moores Law

[Anonymous Coward]

"Moore's law is not what is dying. What is dying is people's desire for "faster""

Which has everything to do with the fact that CPU speed stopped doubling ever 2-3 years around 2006. We are into the 10-15% speed bump per processor generation if that and have been for the last 3-4 generations of CPU since the Core 2 duo.

Re:Moores Law

[RabidReindeer]

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.

Re:Moores Law

[nukenerd]

PCs are edging their way back to being gaming, specialist, and business machines. They're not dying, just finding a more specialized niche. People who are predicting the "death" of the PC are off the mark. They'll decline to a point, then stabilize as a much smaller industry than in its heyday

Agreeing, a parallel is in music players. Back in the 70s/80s everyone wanted a "Hi-Fi" system with separate record player, cassete recorder/player, radio, amplifier and speaker boxes, including huge woofers if they had the cash and space. People had 10 % of their living room occupied by shelving and wiring for their Hi-Fi. Some enthusiasts still have such kit (often dedicating a whole room to it), and always will, but the general population has moved onto iPods and earphones.

Re: Moores Law

[Applehu Akbar]

The slump in sales is because, as others have pointed out, it has been a while since a killer app came along to require a major increase in computing power from that class of device. Processor power in smartphones, on the other hand, is still increasing because that's where the demand is.

Meanwhile, Internet of Things is building as another center of demand for computing power. As soon as bridge beams can continuously report their own status, you're out of a job.

Re: Moores Law

[ilsaloving]

A better question would be if Windows 10 has accelerated the slump. It means nothing if Windows 10 had zero impact one way or the other. But if PC purchases slowed down at an even faster rate after Windows 10's release, then that would be very damning.

Re:Moores Law

[unixisc]

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.

Actually, what the GP wrote was not wrong in itself: semiconductors have long passed the point of diminishing returns where process shrinks would guarantee cost, and thereby price, reductions every generation. But as you point out, that's tangential to the underlying issue here: most people's computers are insanely overpowered ever since the core architecture replaced the MHz races, so that the only reason to buy a new PC or laptop is if one's current computer actually breaks down or stops working: it's never gonna become too slow to handle your typical home workload.

Also, since all that HP and Dell do - in fact, have been doing throughout this millennium - have been rebranding computers made by guys like Compal, Quanta, Arima, et al, they might as well follow IBM's lead and exit this business altogether, and just let those companies put their own names on the computers. Particularly since it's they who do all the work

Re:Moores Law

[unixisc]

Actually, no. In the past, when you had just single core PCs, whose main improvement was in MHz and internal caches, the OS and applications would grow a lot, making existing computers too slow. As an example, when Windows 95 came out, it would run on 486s fine, but you'd need a Pentium for it to run well. When it went to Windows 98, it would crawl on Pentiums: you'd need Pentium 2s. Also, Microsoft would also make noticeable improvements to Office - something that stopped @ Office 93.

What changed was when Microsoft switched from a Windows 95 based OS (98, ME) to an NT based OS, merging them in XP. Until then, you couldn't run Windows on SMP systems, but w/ this move, since XP was NT, you could. Intel, which was looking for new ways to catch up to RISC, having fallen behind in the MHz wars, then discovered that they could toss multiple CPUs into a single microprocessor for prices still far less than that of competing RISC CPUs, such as Alphas, SPARCs and so on. Once this started, the OS would initially put different running applications on different CPUs, and once applications themselves became multiple threads or processes, splitting them b/w the cores became even easier. As a lot of Comp Sci exercises have shown, it's hard to hit complete utilization when one has multiple CPUs, unless you have many independently running processes in tandem, which is a rarity in actual use cases. Result being that w/ our multi cores, even when we have multiple tabs on a browser running as well as Word, Excel and the like, it hardly causes any headaches.

The only other thing that might have challenged CPUs is games, but there too, most games these days focus on utilizing the GPU, and hardly affect the CPU much.

Re:Moores Law

[Grishnakh]

WTF? That's a terrible analogy. No one has ever replaced a stereo system (the kind with separate speakers) with a portable music player and headphones. That's like replacing a car with a bicycle. They're both useful, but in different ways and for different purposes. Proof: get out your phone, plug in your headphones, put them in your ears, then play some song you really like for your friend who's in the same room with you. Whoops, they can't hear it! Then take out the headphones and play it on the single tiny speaker. It sounds like crap (actually, it's pretty impressive how good such small devices sound these days, but it's still nothing like real stereo speakers).

For publicly playing music in a way multiple people in a room can hear it, or for playing music so that you don't need to continually wear uncomfortable head/ear phones, nothing will replace speakers, which need some kind of amplifier to drive them.

Now what *has* changed is what kind of equipment you need for great sound. Instead of a giant rack-mount or component setup, all you really need is a single "receiver" which generally has everything integrated except the speakers. They can even play music files off a USB stick or your PC, and this has been around for at least 10 years now.

Re:Moores Law

[vandamme]

I'd buy a decent laptop if it came with Linux.

But "decent" excludes HP.

Re:Moores Law

[PJ6]

Moore's law is not what is dying. What is dying is people's desire for "faster", at least on the personal front.

[citation needed]

You give your own anecdote, I'll give you mine - I don't buy new hardware as often because the new stuff is nearly the same speed as it was 5 years ago.

If they go back to giving us the huge speed increases we used to see, I'll start buying hardware every 2 years again.

I am typing this on a 4 year old MacBook air. [...] It runs anything I want to do fine because most of the heavy lifting nowadays is up in the cloud

What heavy lifting? What are you talking about? Guess you don't care about privacy.

Also - you're using a Mac. Guess you do a lot of "coding" on that Mac of yours, huh.

Cutting positions across the board

[alw53]

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

Re:Cutting positions across the board

[JoeyRox]

Someone has to turn off the lights when the whole thing closes down :)

Re:Cutting positions across the board

[Anomalyst]

Paging J. Michael Straczynski

Re:Cutting positions across the board

[AHuxley]

Or the teams that are on call to help the NSA after upgrades.
Helping big gov expand more must be a growth sector needing private sector staff?
Don't read up online about the polygraph tests or buy any books online about the polygraph tests on any network with any "hops" of conection.
Step 1. Get a gov/mil security clearance to secure a job in the private sector for decades.
Step 2. Install as much proprietary hardware and software as the gov/mil contract will allow. Ensure a lot of call backs are needed over the decades of the project. Fix any "expected" proprietary issues with more proprietary products.
Step 3. When 2 people with accents knock on the door to offer a $100000 always say no, they are always 2 gov workers to witness testing staff.
Call company security, follow security policy.
Don't take work home with you, all workers home networks and calls will be shared with the gov.
Enjoy gov/mil work with that still in the private sector feeling for decades.
The only trick is to fool the gov/mil to keep buying big brand proprietary products. Thats the real work.

Re:Cutting positions across the board

[unixisc]

Meg Whitman has herself secure by having endorsed, and campaigning for Crooked Hilary. Expect Hilary to have a public position of condemning HP, and a private position of taking donations from Meg to her campaign as well as the Foundation.

4000 firings is like a week for HPE

[BenJeremy]

I can't call them "layoffs" because that term is reserved for employees who are welcomed back at some point. Meg and her cronies also drastically reduced HPE's contribution toward benefits, particularly for the NewCorp spinoff people - meanwhile, the plans offered have become more expensive as well, with prescription copays as much as $50 for 30 day supplies. It's effectively a huge pay cut. They are daring the remaining employees to quit, by bringing morale to an all-time low with employee-hostile policies.

Meg actually had the nerve to cheerfully tell the people watching/attending an all-employee town hall how great it was that they were moving so many jobs from high cost countries (i.e. US, Canada and Europe) to low cost countries. Sociopath much?

Re:4000 firings is like a week for HPE

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. (I want to comment on this article elsewhere)

Meg actually did that all-employee town hall. I heard the figure of 60% bandied around in reference to how much of the total workforce they want to "best-shore" (politically correct code-word for "offshore").

HP doesn't stand for Hewlett-Packard anymore
HP now stands for Hindus-Phillipinos

Re:4000 firings is like a week for HPE

[roman_mir]

If HP could do whatever HP does without hiring a single employee it would have been even better. Don't have to be 'sociopath' to understand that.

Re:4000 firings is like a week for HPE

[unixisc]

Hindus are a religious group, not a religious nationality, such as the Jews. Besides, most of these jobs have gone to places like China/Taiwan, since we are talking PC manufacturing here, not IT offshoring (where your snide remark about India might make sense). Last I looked, Taiwan is split b/w Taoist, Buddhist and a whole host of myriad religions (not including Hinduism), while China is (unofficially) mainly Taoist/local religions followed by Buddhist.

Re:4000 firings is like a week for HPE

[unixisc]

The sociopath part comes in management calling in employees to tell them how much better the company will do once they've been expended. If HP had never hired these people in the first place, there would be nothing wrong w/ it, since nobody would stand to get hurt by such a move. But by calling in people to tell them how their jobs are going offshore just to get done cheaper, they are being sadistic. In the main story though, the deal is not that PCs are not cheap enough: it is that new PCs have trouble displacing existing PCs, which are so good that they are lasting and thereby leaving little for the newer ones.

Honestly, the problem Intel - and Microsoft - have is that they have run out of steam to compete w/ themselves. In Intel's case, the last few generations of CPUs that they've built have been so good that there is no reason for people to replace PCs which have been running for at least 10 years. In Microsoft's case too, Windows 7 has been so adequate that nobody wanted to upgrade - leave aside the horrible decisions Microsoft made while coming up w/ Windows 8 and 10. The reason a lot of people are losing their jobs is that they've successfully achieved the goal, w/ the result that there is nothing new to achieve, thereby eliminating their cash flow

fire h1b's first!

[Joe_Dragon]

fire h1b's first!

I'm not really buying it

[rsilvergun]

How many employees do you actually need to sell PCs? If this was their servers I might agree.

Re:I'm not really buying it

[hambone142]

HP doesn't "design/build/support" PCs and hasn't for decades.

It's all outsourced. HP's PCs are built and designed by ODM (Original Design/Manufacture) companies.

Wistron is one of their primary suppliers of laptop products. There are others (my HP desktop has an Asus motherboard).

Their directed cost cuts in the ODM products have resulted in substandard quality and I won't buy a consumer grade PC from HP anymore, knowing what I know (I won't get in to detail).

You get the behavior you measure and HP measures cost cuts, not quality improvements.

Maybe if HP didn't make crap...

[Neo-Rio-101]

It's pretty much a "day in the life" for HP to make people redundant. I'm convinced they only do it to boost their stock price.
If you look at the HP Origins movie which they show to all new hires, HP brags of a company that cares about it's employees.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Excuse me while I feel violently ill. Maybe that used to be the case when Bill and Dave were alive..... but now....?
How the mighty have fallen. It's very sad watching that video.

The real problem for HP is that they now make "Made in China" crap and ride on their brand name and it's past glories. I can't think of a worse brand for computers now. Quality seems to be an afterthought in the drive to produce stuff that only barely just scrapes past the warranty period. Every HP I have come across has had some lingering issue with it. Dead and dying keyboards, broken hinges off the bottom of laptops, laptops that fall apart, random blue-screens on their business docks, glitchy displays, Windows 10 upgrades that cause serious display issues, their custom HP BIOS that blocks third party hardware from being used (forcing the consumer to endure phone support to buy HP parts at greatly inflated prices), their printers from barring 3rd party ink through firmware updates, etc. etc. etc. and that's just what I've seen.
Sure all brands have the occasional bad egg, but HP seem to create more than others.

And yet, HP equipment floods the market where I live, and given the choice... it's just cheap and nasty. ... and heaven help you if you have to deal with their support.

So these days they're almost irrelevant in the consumer space. Microsoft pushed people away from Windows with Windows 8 and has been scrambling to bring them back. Then of course most computers these days are good enough for most people and don't need to be upgraded constantly.
Then, you have iPads for most people who just want email and to surf the internet
Then you have Macs for most people who want to do stuff rather than wrestle with a computer ...and then you have Windows PCs for most everyone else who hasn't got the memo yet - but yet relies on office and the like.
That said, Windows computer issues keeps most home IT techs in business.... as they'd otherwise be working for HP.... if HP didn't send their jobs overseas.

Re:Maybe if HP didn't make crap...

[unixisc]

For consumer stuff, iPads are more than adequate, and the role that HP used to play back in the day of even Lewis Platt is now played by Apple (or at least was, during Stevie). If one is buying a PC, doesn't make sense to go HP or Dell, when you can buy from the original makers like Acer or Lenovo or Asus. In fact, why not open things up to the likes of Compal, Quanta and Gigabyte?

Please Remind Me . . . .

[mallyn]

Folks:

I am a 63 years old young man and I think my brain may need a software upgrade :) Or do I need to step into a Tesla coil and give my self a control alt delete reboot? :)

Who was HP? I have an HP 202C Audio Oscillator. It's one of those instruments that have the tubes (little glass bulbs that glow dimly in the dark) inside it and creates audio tones. I truly wonderful piece of test equipment. :)

Now, please remind me, who are HP now? I don't think they make test equipment; isn't it computers now? Or is it printers? I forgot. Or do they only manufacture layoffs now?

Re:Please Remind Me . . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Please Remind Me . . . .

[TheGratefulNet]

they create software that time-bomb explodes at a future date and disabled somewhat-working hardware.

I, like you, have agilent and old hp test gear at home and love it. but hp has stopped being the hp we knew about 20 years ago.

Re:Please Remind Me . . . .

[unixisc]

That's in HPE now. Surprised that they're still making those.

Re:Please Remind Me . . . .

[vandamme]

All the heavy duty instruments were spun off into Agilent.

Re:There's a plus side

[Neo-Rio-101]

Well, if you get past their impossible interview process....

Don't bother applying unless you can answer the following vague. open-ended question that you could not possibly prepare for during the limited time of an interview:

"If you were to build amazon.com today, how would you do it?"

Optimistic, perhaps?

[TiggertheMad]

I got a kick out out of the use of the word 'slump'. It suggests a temporary drop, as opposed to a permanent decline in demand for a new computer.

Re:Optimistic, perhaps?

[hairyfeet]

The problem is the industry took the numbers of PC that were sold during a bubble and based their businesses around those inflated numbers.

For those that may be too young to remember from around 93- 05 there was a PC bubble caused by what was later called "the Mhz Wars". Now people didn't WANT to replace their expensive PCs every other year but because the speed of the CPU was jumping so rapidly and it was so easy to take advantage of MHz jumps a PC sold the year before would struggle to run the latest software and one that was 2 years old would probably find several programs it simply could not run. Before the bubble most PCs were treated more like appliances where you simply did not replace before the other one died but one simply could not do that during the bubble because of how quickly that PC owner would find their PC incapable of running the software they would find on store shelves.

But all bubbles eventually pop and in the case of PCs it was when both AMD and Intel ran into a thermal wall and switched from more MHz to more cores, which is a hell of a lot harder to program for than just taking advantage of increased MHz. Now even 10 year old C2D and Phenom X2s are more than capable of basic web and office tasks and even gamers don't have to replace every year and a half like they did during the MHz wars because paired with a decent mainstream GPU an Intel C2Q or AMD Phenom II can easily play the latest and greatest at 1080P.

So it isn't a "slump" or even a downturn, its just the market returning to the norms that existed before the MHz wars, but just as those speculating during the housing bubble thought numbers would only go up so too did these PC OEMs look at the bubble numbers and thought it would never end. But this isn't "the death of the PC", in fact I'd argue most have more computers in the home now than they did during the bubble, they just don't replace them until the previous model dies.

Re:Optimistic, perhaps?

[nukenerd]

Now people didn't WANT to replace their expensive PCs every other year

Agreed. When I considered buying first PC there was a choice between 286's and 386's. 286 was regarded as perfectly satisfactory for things like word processing, spreadsheets, and simple games like Startrek and Space Invaders. For example IBM wasted massive man-years getting OS/2 to run on 286's even though the 386 was aready around. It was assumed that 386 would only ever be needed by power users and servers and that the 286 (with minor improvements) would be the processor for everyone else for ever. The hardware was built like a tank accordingly. A bit like camera makers like Nikon make a camera line for professionals and a separate line for amateurs.

But suddenly the CPU race took off. One year's "professional" PC became the following year's entry level PC. After dithering between a 286 and a 386, I actually bought a 25 MHz 486 which was soon old hat anyway.

If the CPU race is still going I have lost interest; my 10 year old PC does all I need. My bottleneck is the speed of my internet connection.

Re:Optimistic, perhaps?

[TheGratefulNet]

I recently upgraded many of my systems to new mobos and cpus.

the reason is that I can run fanless, now. there are many i5 and i7 chips that are 35w now (!!) and that is fully in the fanless catagory, by using a htpc case with heatpipes going to a large heatsink.

also, new m.2 drives that speak nvme are worth having! 2000MB/sec on hdparm tests is nothing to sneeze at. I'm using to getting 500 on fast ssd's but with 2000 being the new number (samsung pro 950) its amazingly faster than anything before.

that's what made me upgrade. good support for mini-itx m2 ssd using nvme (not sata anymore; sata is too slow, lol) and good low power cpus that are super fast and very low power.

There was support ?

[sjwest]

Years ago i was tasked with sorting out a hp computer for a friend so i used the live chat in windows help. Alas i was not an american - no help. Years later the phone line support (charged) gave me the wrong phone number when the windows key became invalid.

Since i dont need or want a windows license, and can buy linux computers without the microsoft tax why would i want to buy hp internationally ?

That old hp computer is still working but now has linux on it, hp wont be supplying the replacement.

Re:World’s Smallest Transistor Is Just One N

[nukenerd]

When this [nanometer transistors] is ready for mass production, we're about to see a boom in computing that will make the 80s and 90s look like nothing.

No it wont, it will just make my system unit smaller, or rather the microchips in my system unit smaller. For which I don't give a toss because my system unit is already small enough to fit unnoticed in a corner under my desk, and can already do more than I need it to as a computer despite being over 10 years old.

If you are talking about microchips getting smaller (and cheaper) enough to be put into more and more things, then that revolution is already happening (or has happened already - credit cards for example); but I would not define that as "computing". So the processor in my credit card will be smaller, but it will still be a credit card.

Re:Intel and Microsoft make it easy to manufacture

[nukenerd]

I've got to give credit to Microsoft and Intel for making it easy to create a PC company. Intel produces a reference PC design, and a large number of chips. So, the design can get minor tweaks, for putting the design into manufacturing. So, you have to manufacture, sell, and provide warranty support for the PC. Today, manufacturing can be outsourced .....

I missed where Microsoft came in.

It was IBM who made it easy to create a PC company. When they introduced the PC they did not think it important enough (a passing fad, they preferred mainframes) to make most of the stuff themselves so they contracted it out. Intel and Microsoft were just two of those contractors. And IBM did not stop those contractors from selling the same stuff to third parties - other computer makers. So a cottage industry of PC clone makers sprang up using Intel chips and of course MSDos, among other things.

In fact Microsoft made things hard for those other PC makers - and still do - like charging silly prices and stopping them from pre-installing OS/2, Beos or Linux. Alan Sugar (of Amstrad) said of the price of Microsoft's software : "... as a computer manufacturer we are really a servant of Microsoft ... the bill of material content of our computers, the highest price ticket item in there, is the royalty we pay them [Microsoft] to put Windows in the box"

PCs aren't dying, they're just a niche player now

[ErichTheRed]

HP and all the other manufacturers are caught in the perfect storm of:
- PCs having enough power for almost anything an end user can throw at them (including games) for a much longer period of time
- Tablets cannibalizing the "information consumer" side of the market
- Nothing really exciting and new in the PC space for years

The industry in general is hyping the cloud as well, which basically reduces PCs to thin clients...even though all those JavaScript front ends require at least a full processor core and 16 GB of RAM to run efficiently (sarcasm...in case you didn't notice.)

I do end user computing in the business world. Yes, Millennials are bringing their phones and tablets in, but outside of a few niches, most of the real work gets done on PCs or Surface-esque full PCs in a tablet form. I sure hope HP is using these 4,000 layoffs to refocus on providing a rock-solid line of business PCs and dumping all their consumer junk down the toilet. That's the side of the industry that is falling off a cliff...you can't make margin on $300 PCs, and consumers don't need them as much as businesses need $700 PCs with real warranties and support.

HP + Samsung

[p51d007]

Gotta feel for the employees of Samsung's printer/MFP division, who HP purchased. I bet a LOT of them will get terminated also.

LOL. All the PCs are made in China, BUT, the cuts

[WindBourne]

are mostly in America. IOW, this is just more BS.

Re:WE need communism now!

[unixisc]

If the workers of the world all lose their jobs and become unemployed, are they still being exploited? Communism is about addressing worker exploitation issues. In this case, the chains - binding them to their jobs - are all gone. Unfortunately, w/ that goes the chains of their wages to them.

Stocks

[DarthVain]

Well both of those things probably attributed to the issue, I think this probably has more to do with profitability and short term stock returns than any actual "trend" in PC sales.

I heard very recently that HP was spinning off the most profitable part of the company into another one. I've heard that the largest investor of HP with something like a 6% stake is suing the company because he will be with the with the less profitable PC and Printer business which is being held up by the other. This could be simply a way to make the company look more profitable in the short term so the CEO doesn't get sued for hobbling the company's share prices.

Tried looking for the news online, but can't find it... It could be that HP has just been sued so many times and that this is very recent news so it is like a needle in a online haystack.

Re:Intel and Microsoft make it easy to manufacture

[unixisc]

Warranty support? Barely 1-3 years, when nothing happens to your PC. After that, good luck. Better idea - have an annual contract w/ the Geek Squad, if you're not technically inclined.

Re:I have the solution!!

[unixisc]

Actually, fire Meg, and replace her w/ whoever is running Quanta or Compal or Arima. Move headquarters to Taipei, and let HP headquarters provide office space for the coders who they wanna kick out of downtown Palo Alto (the story on this on /. some weeks ago)

Re:There's a plus side

[unixisc]

Patent single-click purchases, like it worked so successfully for you....

Slowing r and d also?

[Dripdry]

Someone who is in the industry probably has more insight than myself, but if money into PC desktops goes down, will r&d also go down and slow future progression in technology such as VR? Seems to me the office environment could benefit from AR or VR.