http://www.osnews.com/story/9810/An_analysis_of_HP_s_future_strategy_post_Carly_Fiorina Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:12:18 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? This is one of the best I have read here. Very nice.

The author did a great job. I knew that HP was in trouble, but I never knew why. They seen to get into everything (the new HP iPods they probably make very little money on come to mind) while they do well at nothing.


I could sense that something was wrong, because who the hell would want Compaq? Then all the support for the Itanic. Gosh, it was like HP had these plans for the best thing to do and did the opposite. I glad this explained the mistakes. Meanwhile competitors such as IBM are trimming up and heading forward. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 20:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sounds like an article from Business Week.... This is not a compliment.

Conclusion of the article is: focus on printers and imaging (cameras/scanners/etc). This is just a rehash of what is written in all articles written about HP since Carly left.

This article contains just general thoughts, the same kind I heard at the pub yesterday.

There is no real business analysis in these. Uninteresting article. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Printing and imaging also has the most opportunities. HP has 40%+ share in the conventional desktop inkjet/laser printer market, but has not yet entered the high-end networked printers market. Today this is dominated by Xerox, Canon and Ricoh.

Say what? high end network printers dominated by Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh? I call BS on this one. I can't remember the last time I saw a networked laser printer that wasn't an HP or a Lexmark. In fact, I can't ever remember seeing a networked Canon in a business. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? all the Mid size companys i have seen allways run the high end Xerox and Ricoh systems. that shows, I have never seen a large/highend hp printer anywhere.. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I've seen the High end Xerox Document Center systems out there, but they are outnumbered about 25 to 1 by HP 8000 series printers. Maybe the guy was talking about multi function devices like that. I took his use of the word "printer" to mean literally that. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The way I see it, acknowledging that I am an outsider and only have the news stories for facts, I think Carly was a loose cannon but she's also a scapegoat. Carly bit off more than she could chew and yet everyone sat around and let her.

I think the over-wound leaders at HP who elected her must have been focused too much on how cool it would be to have a female CEO and too little on her quality and experience.

Apparently, her performance sucked to put it plainly in the end. How many stories have we heard of high-profile CEOs/CIOs getting into a company, making big, showy moves, then quitting or "stepping down" and leaving the company high and dry while getting paid millions to leave?

I think the fundamental problem is with the Investors. They let the inept Board let the company go to pieces. They should respond by pulling their money. But what do they do? They sock more money into HP just because they fired...I mean because Carly "stepped down". This is the fundamental problem - ignorant investors.

After reading all of this, and other stories, I've come to this conclusion:

HP is too fat, they got fat too fast, they are disorganized and have too many (probably overpaid) chiefs and I'm thinking to myself: Why in Hell would I want to own HP stock?

I just looked at the price chart. I'd consider the period from 1996-2002 to be all bubble over-valuation at least. How would they grow my money better than I could or another company as they are?

The Board members responsible for the state of this disorganized company are lame. They deserve the next highest level of blame after the investors who dump their money. They watched her performance all of this time - what took them so long to start straightening things out? I realize there was a fight between those who wanted the HP/Compaq merger and those who did not, but I think the problem started well before that.

I think there should be a cap on any pay and benefits for CEOs/CIOs and the leaders should be paid as Warren Buffett does - the leaders are paid based on performance.

The Board needs to be more responsive and responsible for shareholder money. I'd say for the most part, the leadership of most companies do not treat investor money as sacrosanct as they should. They just like to fatten themselves up on the ignorant money of the sheeple that throw their money at them. The Board members responsible for choosing Carly would do well to "step down" themselves.

I think HP should sell the PC business. They should focus on their printing/imaging and get their technology solutions group up to quality so that we feel as good about HP servers as we did about Compaq servers. And as far as processors go - I think they should port to x86 and IBM Power series processors - those are two areas of survivability.

Linux is the future. Make those printers print in Linux as easily as they do in Windows, run your servers on x86 and Power and port to Linux. Get it together HP leadership! Respect the investors' money! Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > And as far as processors go - I think they should port to
> x86 and IBM Power series processors - those are two areas of
> survivability.


Port what?. You mean port hardware?!?

If you're talking OS, then Linux is already on x86 and PowerPC. If you're talking HPUX, why?. HPUX works best on PARISC going to PowerPC is a waste. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think openvms and linux on itanium is where they should fucus more instead of hp-ux. and I think they should either slit off or sell there printer division to allow for more focus on a more demanding market. Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Rahul,

You've wasted your time in writing an article when you could have been on working on the Linux kernel.

It's ridiculous for you to say that HP should get rid of everything and focus on the imaging/print market when everyone knows that market is pretty much saturated.

How often are people going replace laser jets etc? Even on the enterprise level - a printer is a printer that prints. That's just it.

I don't give a rats a$$ if the latest and greatest model of HP LaserJet 7000 prints 4 ppm faster and can talk to MS Exchange 2003 blah blah.

HP has gone through some rough patches (like any company who merges with another large company) and will get through it. You say HP's enterprise market is the worst? Why don't you purchaase one of their DL class blade servers and compare them to the crap that Dell pumps out and then maybe you'll think otherwise.

Your comments about HP-UX are baseless as well. Do you see IBM putting a lot of $$$ in AIX R&D? NO - why? Because they know that competing against Linux is pointless especially when you have a large community of developers investing into Linux for FREE.

Get back to debuggin that kernel Rahul - you're "business" commentaries are worthless.

Milione Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and let compaq do all the PC stuff. before the merger and up until last year, compaqs were by far the most well built and best in class desktops when compared to dell, gateway, hp, emachine.....ect Thu, 24 Feb 2005 23:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? HP was in a tough position before the Compaq deal, now it's a company almost impossible to manage, with major engineering and manufacturing workforces scattered around the US and the world. Getting back to the old idea of HP standing for innovation will be really tough with all this baggage.

They can sell the printing business and that would please the stockholders, but the rest of the company has grown dependent on that cash cow.

The board really screwed up by not vetoing the Compaq deal. Hewitt's son did his best, but he apparently didn't have enough clout on the board as he lacked substantial experience in both business and technology. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Back in the day, I said that HP/Compaq was a very bad idea, and I was surprised when it passed. There was a cult of personality with this CEO, and simply not a good one. When she received something in the neighborhood of 55 million for the deal in options, stock, cash, and the CEO of Compaq received in the 20+ million, I knew it was a scam. It didn't serve the company, it served the CEOs. When is America, and the world going to awake and take back what is rightfully theres? Seems the board of HP is doing just that, and it is about time. I have to applaud HP, unfortunately they didn't want to see it coming, nor did the majority shareholders. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Printers, imaging, PC's, HP-UX, etc... this is about summarizes all that hp does now, and it still should do this in the future, but without the PC's. Dropping the PC business would free up lots of valuable resources that could be invested into the printers (like providing really good drivers and support for linux), and other consumer electronics (scanners, etc..). As for HP-UX...i personally think that HP needs to define itself on this level also. Think of it as "two (equally important) faces of one company - one face is a company that makes the best printers in the world (i am dead serious about this - i would never want a printer that is not an HP printer), and other printing/imaging related gadgets that run equally good on windows/linux/macosx and the other face would be the face that would be shown to large business customers: a stable and rock solid UNIX, with excellent support, excellent storage hardware and powerful office printing solutions (i am talking the 9000 series of printers). I think that if HP would pull this off, it would boost the company out of the shit it is in now, and put in on the map in bold Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Great article. There is depth in here that I'm not surprised the majority of readers here can't grasp.

If any of the people who write here took any of these idiot's advice and did other things then there would be nothing to read here.

Really, these haters need to jump off a cliff. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? FVCK off AQ - where exactly is there depth in the article? Put out or fvck off ... Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I think there should be a cap on any pay and benefits for CEOs/CIOs and the leaders should be paid as Warren Buffett does - the leaders are paid based on performance.


Steve Jobs' annual salary is $1.-
OK. Plus bonuses he makes like 50-60 millions a year.
And stock climbed from $19 to $88 in a year: Investors (should) love him. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? HP bought Compaq right when Compaq servers were going down hill. Compaq desktop were always complete garbage. They also should have advanced the PA-RISC CPU or at least developed a new(er) architecture in house and left intel out of it. Hell they had the Alpha patents and the brains behind it plus the PA-RISC guys i would think they could have come up with some cool stuff to further their superior HP9000 line of hardware and OS. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 02:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I agree with the article writer. Good stuff.

The Compaq deal was their biggest mistake.

Btw, I am still amazed Kodak came back from near extinction. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 04:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Great article. There is depth in here that I'm not surprised the majority of readers here can't grasp."

Indeed. Many of the people commenting seem to extrapolate from their LAN party experiences, thinking that the enterprise is just a grander version of the same kind of thing - more marble and gold-plated taps or something. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 09:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? LM wrote "Steve Jobs' annual salary is $1.-
OK. Plus bonuses he makes like 50-60 millions a year.
And stock climbed from $19 to $88 in a year: Investors (should) love him."

That's the idea but paying one person that much of investor money is ridiculous. I will not say that someone should not be allowed to have that much in exchange for what they do, but I will say that no one is worth that much. There again, an example of irrational overpaying on the board's part.

Not only that but I doubt apple is worth 88.00 per share, especially in one year. Just because of the ipod? More bubble building - trying to relive the late '90s. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'd rather read this then some lame new Linux Distro same-old story. This has depth, references and analysis.

It failed to note however, that HP Pavilions are totally lame. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 14:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How can you possibly compare Sun's operating expenses to those of Dell? You're making a big deal about a re-manufacturer. Dell is more of an offshore account than a tech company. And why would HPQ want to acquire Kodak or Xerox when they can't even digest Compaq. Your own article points out the failure of buying competing products. I've never seen a network printer that wasn't HPs. And finally lets put Carly to rest. She made a 100 million dollars for screwing a company. That's some street walking they do on wall street. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? One lesson from the HP Enterprise Computing Saga is simple: never depend on another vendor for your core CPU.

PA-RISC wasn't great, but it was HPs. When HP went with Itanic, it put its high-end server line into someone else's hands. As everyone knows now, Itanium is pretty much a POS.

SGI did the same thing, and look where they are now.

Sun and IBM, however, still control their own destiny because they control their processor (Sun, of course, has a big question mark after it).

As it is, nobody really wants to migrate off of PA-RISC to Itanium. They'll probably move to Linux on Operon (or Solaris on Opteron) if they have to move. This leaves a nice opportunity for the other vendors. After all, if you have to recompile for Itanic, why not recompile to Linux or Solaris instead? Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Fix the website. Simplify, use open standards, minimize script.

Start thinking about hardware design with finished software that can be open sourced and free to the customer. Look to buy smaller start-ups doing hardware design/sales for large markets this way.

Reduce the PC line to 3 desktop and 3 laptop models. Get rid of the Compaq brand and the Pavilion line.

Reduce the inkjet cartridge types for mass-market printers down to 1.

Sell a fast, cheap, quiet black only inkjet.

The Kodak picture stations are a good idea, but they use ordinary PC devices and the thing crashed on me once, it probably uses Win. HP can design their own station, open source the software, and patent/lease the hardware. Get out of the digicam market, and maybe think about video production stations instead.

Look into the possibility of designing low priced electronic test equipment. Fri, 25 Feb 2005 19:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There's still potential in HP-UX/Linux on PARISC. It would have been possible to sell cheap Linux/PARISC supported boxes, just as IBM with their Linux on POWER strategy.

But they have probably agreed with Intel long time ago to abondon all CPU business. Looks like HP is going the way SGI did Fri, 25 Feb 2005 20:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Interesting how this chick got all those
benefits for screwing up a company. Fri, 04 Mar 2005 20:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments