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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.
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.
Nah, its a consequence of Windows 10
Nobody wants to buy a new desktop or laptop if it comes with a shitty OS
Note that "across the board" does not refer to the board of directors.
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?
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,
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.
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.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
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.
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.
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.
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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. ...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.
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
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
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?
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
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).
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
are mostly in America. IOW, this is just more BS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.