Some time back, I promised to double-check Sun executive Larry Singer’s “Reality Check” missives on HP. A week ago, Mr. Singer penned a Reality Check that, in light of HP’s decision to cancel its TruCluster integration effort, does in fact reflect more reality than rhetoric. It also reflects Mr. Singer’s opinions, some of which differ from mine. Presented herewith is Larry’s write-up, laced with a few comments of my own.
We used to buy HP NetServers almost exclusively, in fact at one point we had over 20 of them powering our datacenter.
That was before the HP – Compaq debacle (ie merger). I think that this was a terrible merger and I think that products like HP-UX are taking the brunt of these mistakes.
In most mergers, the idea is to expand your market. For instance, with Daimler/Chrysler you had a company specializing in high-end autos and a company specializing in mid-market autos joining forces. Makes sense.
With HP/Compaq, what do you have? Basically two companies that serve the same exact market. So, while HP has spent that last 3 years staring at its own belly-button — trying to figure what parts of Compaq to keep and what parts of HP to get rid of — the IBM’s, SUN’s, and even Dells of the world have snapped up many of their customers.
This is not intended to be a rant against HP, I used to love the company, I just feel dismay at what they’ve become.
Sometimes you also have a merger because the dominant player wants eat up the installed base of the lesser player (see Oracle and PeopleSoft). But these often end up being wasteful fiascos that hurt employees and customers. I’ve been involved in a couple of these situations myself, and I’ve watched on the sidelines for many more, and, for the life of me, I can’t understand why companies are so eager to merge and buy each other out. 90% of the time it turns out bad. The most usual scenario is when a large company buys out a smaller one, makes a weak attempt at continuning the smaller one’s business/product, fails, then ditches that product, and goes on with business as usual, having wasted all that effort and money in the process. The HP/Compaq debacle is only noteworthy for its scale.
A someone who had worked closely with both HP-UX & Tru64 (At driver level) I could tell from day 1 that HP would struggle to put TruClustering into HP-UX. Tru64 was designed around a microkernel thus enabling the easy addition of other kernel level subsystems. HP-UX is a monolithic Kernel. With these differences it would have been virtually impossible to add the TruCluster stuff into it. IMHO, the best bet would have been to ditch HP-UX and add a HP-UX personality to Tru64 but I guess that option was just too difficult for those with HP(sauce) running through their veins.
Tru64 was a far more advanced Unix system than HP-UX.
So, where does HP go from here?
IMHO, they will milk their Printer Cash Cow for another years or so. Their Inkjet Ink is already in the same price league as Chanel No 5 Perfume on a cost per ml(see http://www.pcpro.co.uk for a comparison) Then their market share all around will drop away and they will become a second tier player.
And at the end of the day, what has HP have to offer that everyone else doesn’t?
I mean, lets look at the list; if I want a fleet of low cost corporate desktops, I would be mentally insane for not going with Dell, as for high end UNIX gear, its a full gone conclusion, its between IBM and SUN; the only people HP has won with their programme are customers with SUN and IBM machines from over 10 years ago.
As for the midrange servers, want cheap low cost servers, you’ve got Dell, IBM and SUN. What has HP have to offer? expensive, proprietary, and poorly designed servers and desktops? their crappy slow service?
I mean, at the end of the day, where does HP fit into the IT world? I mean, its not just a HP problem as a company, but as an organisation within the IT world, where does it fit into the grand scheme of things?
Want cheap, reliable, low cost desktops, Dells your vendor. Want good middleware and consultancy from all under one roof, go for IBM, want Opteron and SPARC machines loaded with Solaris, a massive range of good quality middleware under one roof, and services sold by SUN partners, you head of SUN. So where does HP fit into that?
Nothing in HPs portfolio would ever convince me to purchase their gear. If I want a desktop, I’ll purchase a Dell, for a printer, Epson, and for a server, a SUN Opteron loaded with Solaris 10.
You were truly the coolest of the computing world, setting the
bar and INNOVATING ( which a CERTAIN mega-corp has yet to learn) in many areas.
For VMS, we thank you. For the Tru64 aka Dec Unix aka OSF/1, we thank you. For the Alpha, we sing your praises.
You were truly the coolest of the computing world, setting the bar and INNOVATING ( which a CERTAIN mega-corp has yet to learn) in many areas.
For VMS, we thank you. For the Tru64 aka Dec Unix aka OSF/1, we thank you. For the Alpha, we sing your praises.
I think you’ve forgotten one of the sadest things, the demise of Tandem under the crappy management of Compaq. The world leader in fault tolerant, indestructable hardware and software; the only way to take it out would be to explode and atom bomb above the damn machine.
Its truely sad when trail blazers like DEC and Tandem are bought out my clueless PC-weenie run companies like Compaq, which wouldn’t know what R&D is, even if it came out and bit them in the ass, then introduced itself.
Hi Shannon,
My take is your comment is on the very positive side of things, which makes me wonder why.
Just wondering if you are a HP consultant, meaning most of your revenue comes from adding value on top of HP products. If yes, then I think your opinion is not much different to Carly’s.