HP is Tech's New Top Dog? 192
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek argues that HP is the new Big Blue: 'Now, tech is about to get a new biggest behemoth. It's HP. The Palo Alto, Calif., PC and printer giant had higher sales than IBM last quarter, and analysts project it will finish 2006 with greater annual sales than Big Blue for the first time ever: $91 billion for HP vs. $90.5 billion for IBM. The reason HP pulled ahead is simple: IBM last year sold off its $11 billion PC business to Lenovo Group Ltd. But, because the companies have chosen fundamentally different paths, with HP aggressively going after consumers while IBM focuses on corporations, HP is expected to grow faster than IBM in coming years. Since both use blue in their logos, you might say there's a new Big Blue in the house.'"
Carly, carly, carly... (Score:5, Insightful)
She was certainly vilified when they ran her out of the corner office. If it turns out that her years were the ones that built the foundation on which a renewed greatness was built, will anybody remember?
laughable (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, don't you mean (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway this is interesting but isn't such a big deal to me perfectly. Nearly all the HP products I care about went to Agilent...
Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which would you like to have a 40% profit on 1 billion or a 1.4% profit on 10 billion in sales?
So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see a lot of "new era for HP" in this story, nor do I see a lot of strategy for success. What I do see is that HP, which was once one of the leaders in technology R&D, has settled into a role where it's fundamentally a printer company.
Am I missing something?
Only one Big Blue (Score:4, Insightful)
If your were going to a technology based war.... (Score:3, Insightful)
HP or IBM?
Personally, IBM research and development puts me in a constant state of awe. I believe they have some of the most brilliant minds in the world pushing the boundries of science. Maybe thier end products don't always reflect the level of R&D invested, but don't kid yourself... the last thing HP wants is IBM's full, undivided attention at it's market share.
IBM's strength is in it's diversity. Just because they cut PC's to Lenovo doesn't mean anything about the future of the companies presence in the future technology market.
Remember this little gem?..... http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportat ion/index.html [ibm.com]
Danger for HP (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, once upon a time HP made great printers. Plenty of LaserJets still in use today. But nowadays you're more likely to find out that your HP printer is slow, noisy, requires a 30MB driver download that's buggy as all hell, and breaks in under a year.
Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Carly had reached the point that she was a perpetual distraction, everyone was talking about her more than HP, so I would be inclined to say HP is doing better because she is gone. She was a one women wrecking crew for morale at HP, and her blatant elitism is offensive to most. In particular employees hated her when she was laying them off but buying Gulfstreams, having HP pay to move her yacht from East to West coast, and on perpetual company funded jet setting trips with celebrities mostly to build her political career. She acted more like a Duchess than a business person.
Her most famous quote "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We all have to compete for jobs.", while probably true is a purely stupid thing for a CEO of an American company, with American workers, dependent on sales to a lot of American geeks to say out loud.
Re:B.I.G. (Score:3, Insightful)
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." - Carly Fiorina
While working in Manhattan I saw two entire floors' worth of HP staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. At the same time she was eliminating and/or offshoring thousands of US tech jobs, Carly Fiorina and her ilk were cruising around in Jetstreams and luxury yachts, hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians. She epitomizes the grasping callousness, hypocrisy and greed that permeates the top levels of corporate America.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just one thing... Laser printer technology is improving, and becomming much cheaper. With consumer-level color laser printers comming on the market, as well as HP's now poor reputation in printers, their high-margin ink business looks like it will dry up soon (no pun intended).
And one more thing on the subject... Damn how I hate Epson.
Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know where people get the idea that sales matter much. Profit is the point of business. Go talk to Amazon about it. $9 billion in sales last year, but they would have been better off stuffing their money into Certificates of Deposit. I know people with salaries higher than Amazon's earnings and they're only considered upper middle class these days.
I'd invest in the local video outlet with sales of only $9 million before I'd dump money into Amazon, because they're more profitable.
KFG
Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:1, Insightful)
This doesn't change the fact that she most certainly built the foundations of the IBM-challenging HP this article is talking about.
The Next Big Thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
What is the next big thing in computing and technology? Would either HP or IBM or even Intel recognize it if they saw it? I doubt it. There is something about becoming a behemoth that prevents a company from seeing fast moving trends or foresee future ones. Or, if they do see it, they are too slow to respond in a timely manner. It has something to do with bureaucracy and the inevitable proliferation of internal operating rules. IMO, IBM and HP should create small quasi-independent research labs and give them the task of finding the next big thing. And I would tell them to look for solutions to current insolvable huge problems in the industry, such as the software reliability crisis. Indeed, the first company to come up with a solution to this problem (and obtain the lion share of the IP) is guaranteed to dictate the course of the computing industry for decades to come. One man's opinion.
Re:Well duh... (Score:3, Insightful)
HP everything never came back. Printers, computers, notebooks...designed well, ran well. The only thing that ever really sucked was their digital cameras.
What Carly destroyed was the Engineering genius that used to work there. Just as well, many of them now work for Google or Apple.
HP used to be an envious place to work for if you were an engineer. Now it's a PHB breeding ground.
Re:Carly turned a failing $40M PC business into... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Danger for HP (Score:4, Insightful)
It actually is 30MB... of RAM!
Our HP Color Laserjet 2550L has, as many devices do, a web-based interface. Except this printer has no network support. How, then, does it have a web interface?
Because the driver installs a web server on your machine!
And guess what? The web server is written in Java! So the driver installs Java on your machine!
Of course, they both autostart as services. That's well over thirty megabytes of RAM, consumed constantly, to support what looks like a 45k HTML web app with a trivial USB backend to talk to the printer.
Utterly, utterly despicable.
--
Dum de dum.
But what do they _do_??? (Score:3, Insightful)
They nearly created the printer market, and now their printers are crap.
They've only released one new RPN calculator, and it's...questionable.
They're actively trying to kill off the HP-UX server/OS line.
They've already killed off the PA-RISC processor line.
All of their worthwhile tech gear got spun off as Agilent.
All they do now is make crappy printers and passable PCs in server cases. That's great--I'm sure they'll make tons of money grinding out crap without doing any basic research anymore, but it's lousy for the industry.
I don't think that HP will ever recover from Carly F. She destroyed the company and is still running free on the streets.
Cute article but HP still looses (Score:3, Insightful)
1) That article is based on estimates. We'll see what happens at the end of the year.
2) If I sold a $100 lead weight to everyone on the planet would it make me a technology leader? Sales is an arbitrary statistic and probably one of the worst. Why not use profit margin or return on investment?3) How about patents?
4) How about leading-edge custom processor design. IBM owns this generation of game consoles (Wii, ps3, xbox360 processors are all being designed at IBM). Why? IBM has an entire service organization that will build you your very own custom processor and will let you be as hands-on or as hands-off as you want. And they win awards for doing it!