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HP is Tech's New Top Dog? 192

Posted by Zonk from the top-of-the-heap dept.
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.'"
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HP is Tech's New Top Dog? More

HP is Tech's New Top Dog?

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  • Carly, carly, carly... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by penguinstorm ( 575341 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:05PM (#15503987) Homepage
    If this is true, you think Carly Fiorina will feel vindicated?

    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?

    • Be careful. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You seem to have a long term view of things. That isn't compatible with Slashdot or the market. :-)

    • Uh, don't you mean (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That what this demonstrates is that as soon as Carly Fiona stopped holding the company back, it sprung forward to greatness?

      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)

      by Retric ( 704075 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:14PM (#15504083)
      I don't think HP is doing better than IBM. IBM is doing a lot of high margin sales where HP is doing slightly higher volume low profit sales.

      Which would you like to have a 40% profit on 1 billion or a 1.4% profit on 10 billion in sales?

      • Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by kfg ( 145172 )
        Yeah, yeah, they're losing money on each sale, but they're gonna make it up on volume.

        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 b

    • Re:Carly, carly, carly... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by demachina ( 71715 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:49PM (#15504336)
      No :)

      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.
      • HP's stock price went up %7 when she was fired!

        That means she has a negative networth well into the billions. :-)

        So if you ever feel down and broke just think you are worth hell of alot more than Carly Fiona.
        • "HP's stock price went up %7 when she was fired!"

          Its doubled since the was ousted!

          "That means she has a negative networth well into the billions. :-)"

          Excepting of course that her severance package was worth $42 million which makes her worth a hell of a lot more than you or me.

          I see in the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on her that a couple of big institutional investors have filed a civil suit against HP because her golden parachute exceeded HP's cap on executive compensation.

          She is also raking it in from serving on a b
    • ....a failing $80M PC business by buying Compaq. What a bad move for HP that was.
    • If it turns out that her years were the ones that built the foundation on which a renewed greatness was built, will anybody remember?

      That is kind of illogical.

      It seems more logical that the company improved because of her firing.

      And she did almost kill the company with the merger with compaq... Then ended up doing away with most of that corpse before they were able to recover.

    • What about Hurd? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Billly Gates ( 198444 )
      He actually made the company profitable and focused on emerging markets and retailers.

      Fiona focused on screwing the engineers and developers and rewarding the sales department whenever something good or innovative happened. Alot of good people left and were undervalued. What a shame?

      Hurd at NCR was used to having multiple products unrelating and knowing how to make money off them. HP refocused their strategy with selling computers to neophites and including software for pictures and video editing and reduci
  • HP makes great corporate-grade stuff.

    Their consumer stuff is crap. But I guess Dell's is even worse.
    • That is changing.

      Many analysist think HP beat Dell because they now include software for photo and video management not to mention their laptops are great. Especially their compaq line.

      Some of their printers have went down in quality but htey are going back up again.

      Oddly Dell which used to make reliable quality systems is following the mistakes of old HP and gateway with crappy products in order to save a few bucks for the bean counters. Will these companies ever learn?

  • Yay. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vengeance ( 46019 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:06PM (#15504004)
    Self-igniting batteries are the path to success in business. Who would have guessed?
  • not everyone can be the best all the time.
    time will tell if there's a new big blue.
    the key word is consistantcy.

  • Well duh... (Score:4, Informative)

    by JoeLinux ( 20366 ) <joelinux@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:07PM (#15504019)
    It's amazing what you can do when bad management gets out of the way.

    Good riddance Carly! You destroyed a good engineering house almost single-handedly!

    Compaq is to HP what Etch-A-Sketch is to art...

    • Re:Well duh... (Score:3, Informative)

      by billatq ( 544019 )
      Compaq is to HP what Etch-A-Sketch is to art...
      Actually, all of HP's servers are based upon pre-merger Compaq hardware. Same with most of the PC business and PDA business. Printers and Cameras were about the only product line kept intact from pre-merger HP.

      • Re:Well duh... (Score:3, Informative)

        by Cerberus7 ( 66071 )
        They even kept the product lines' names from the Compaq days. The good stuff coming out of HP is all Compaq. The Deskpro line became Evo while Compaq was still on its own, and HP just kept them going. ProLiant servers have been around for many years, and the support software from Compaq is still what HP uses. I'm thankful HP was at least smart enough to keep those two lines of products going.

      • Re:Well duh... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @03:21PM (#15504636) Journal
        really? [hp.com]

        I guess you haven't seen the Integrity line then. Serious performance, blows away both the Sun and IBM UNIX systems. Superdomes rock. :)

        • itanic integrity (Score:3, Interesting)

          by rubycodez ( 864176 )
          you must be joking, it's been two years and still no new Itanium2 chip, the integrity line is stagnant and future looking bleak. There's rumors of Intel selling off the whole Itanium fiasco to jap consortium since they can't get dual-core to work
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • laughable (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was a corporate lawyer for years and I did deals with IBM. Corporate is where it's at, man! One deal, millions of bucks, strict negotiations over service level agreements that require priorizing and funneling of calls. Consumer-oriented business can't compete... all those millions of dorks out there struggling with their PC/printer/scanner/whatever which they paid a grand for in one small transaction... one support call wipes out the profit for several sales! Hell, look at Logitech... I had problems with

    • Companies sell items that cost $3 to make for $90, and you're suggesting that consumers are leeches? The entire call center industry is tuned to deal with most troubles in a single, short call. It's called a one-and-done. This is where most calls end. The few that go beyond this to a case or commitment or call transfer and analyzed ad nauseum until they can be made one and dones.

      Just because you are personally high maintenance doesn't mean most are leeches. May I remind you that you are a lawyer? Haven't yo
    • Consumers are not leeches. If a company doesn't want to be in the business of selling to consumers, fine. But don't name call.

      Also, it is interesting how all these "free market" people are the first to start complaining when things don't go their way. Wah, wah - the airlines need another bail out! Wah, wah, supporting our crappy and poorly designed products costs too much, please let us not honor our warranty! It is all the customer's fault that our shit doesn't work! Wah!

      Fucking babies. They should have le
    • The main problem is that all the coporate business would not even exist without consumers paying for it at the other end of the pyramid. Sure there is more money to be made in a strike with corporate business, but the whole thing is more like a pyramid, if you constantly insult consumers like that the whole pyramid will crumble and all the corporate business will come to a standstill as well. Even worse given all I can see what is going on in the world I am saying the entire system as we know it will come

  • So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:14PM (#15504088) Homepage
    From my read of TFA:
    1. IBM is an enterprise IT company, HP is going after consumers.
    2. Margins on consumer technology are razor thin.
    3. Fortunately, HP has created a printer business with huge margins on ink jet cartridges etc.
    4. ???
    5. HP Profits, IBM quakes in its boots.

    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?

    • Danger for HP (Score:3, Insightful)

      by metamatic ( 202216 )
      People are also starting to catch on to the fact that HP's newer printers are crap.

      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.
      • 3o MB? try 300 MB for newer ones.

        • Re:Danger for HP (Score:4, Insightful)

          by sasami ( 158671 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @04:40PM (#15505331)
          30 MB? try 300 MB for newer ones.

          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.
          • Luckily, linux users can avoid installing hp drivers and use cups with the laserjet postscript .ppd: works for me, a networked 2550ln, and a 128 mb pc with ubuntu.
          • My last experience with HP, for much longer yet, was helping a friend install an HP printer driver under Windows 2000 a couple of years back. The HP driver borked the OS so badly the only recourse was to boot the system in safe-mode. HP provided some software support to remove the pesky printer driver. I tried to run the HP uninstaller, but it reported:

            Your screen resolution is insufficient to run the borked HP printer driver uninstall program.

            I'm in safe-mode here, my options for screen resolution are

      • Don't agree (Score:3, Informative)

        by brunes69 ( 86786 )
        When looking for my most recent inkjet, I *specifically looked for* a good deal on an HP model. Why? Because they fund and develop Linux/CUPS drivers for almost *all* their printers, and they're *all* open source, and they all work flawlessly.

        Much more than can be said of Canon, or Lexmark, or many other inkjet vendors.

        Have been perfectly happy with my all-in-one inkjet / copier / scanner since day one, and I never had any problems whatsoever getting ever piece of functionality to run under Ubuntu, Fedora C
      • Plenty of LaserJets still in use today.

        I've recently picked up a pair of older laserjets - a LaserJet 4L and a 5mp. $5 apiece. The 4L needs a new cartridge, the 5mp needs a little grease. I talked to a guy at a computer shop who used a 4L of his own for printing invoices: "the thing's built like a mack truck, take care of it and it'll go forever."

        The 4L is dated October 1993, "Made in U.S.A. from foreign and domestic components." Don't see that anymore.
    • HP is still big in the corporate and server business, for both x86 and Unix markets. While TFA makes some broad sweeping remarks about HP doing more consumer business than IBM, it doesn't reflect the entire spectrum of HP's product line. Up until 9 months ago I worked for a company that was a distributor/reseller of servers from both companies. Where IBM diferentiates itself is with their army of Global Services consultants. That's where the biggest margins are.
      • You mean this IBM Global Services? [kuro5hin.org]

        We had expected IBM to stay for about three months, which all by itself would have blown our budget, given their $325/hr bill rate. But they were in our company for more than seven months, burning through more than a quarter million dollars a week. And Global Services wasn't the entirety of the IBM damage. We still had licensing and support fees for Websphere, Websphere Portal, Websphere Content Management, Tivoli Access Manager, and DB2.

        IBM, which had promoted itself

    • Am I missing something?

      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.

  • Only one Big Blue (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DrWho520 ( 655973 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:15PM (#15504096) Journal
    There will only ever be one Big Blue. If IBM wants to solve a problem, IBM finds a way to solve the problem. When HP builds a computer can beat a Grand Master at chess, then they can be the Big P.
    • There will only ever be one Big Blue. If IBM wants to solve a problem, IBM finds a way to solve the problem. When HP builds a computer can beat a Grand Master at chess, then they can be the Big P.

      And HP would probably have do it with relabeled IBM hardware... seeing as how printers, scanners, and fax machines can't do that kind of stuff. Or help smash atoms. Or help decode the human Genome. Comparing HP to IBM is like comparing IBM to Lockheed Martin. A little similair, but not so much. I wonder when S
  • HP the top dog? <shudder> I'll return to attempting to make OpenView work now.
    • Yeah, but Tivoli makes even Openview look good by comparison...if Openview is a steaming pile of shit, then Tivoli is a putrescent, rotting corpse.
      • I am so obviously too old for myspace. WTF is up with everybody calling you Vic? Or, alternately, WTF is up with you calling yourself sydbarret? I'm confused.

  • IBM is still killing them in market cap (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrSbaitso ( 93553 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:20PM (#15504129)
    IBM [google.com] Market Cap: $120.5B
    HP [google.com] Market Cap: $84.3B

    IBM has refocused itself to a large degree as a service company, whereas HP still relies on shipping units.

    In any event, neither company holds a candle to MSFT or GOOG in terms of market cap, and those are really the "top dogs of tech" if you want to use a clumsy phrase. HP is certainly more of a "top dog" in hardware, but who cares about that?

    • Re:IBM is still killing them in market cap (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cowscows ( 103644 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:31PM (#15504204) Journal
      I would hope that there are enough people on /. with a solid enough grasp of technology to be less impressed with market numbers, and instead be able to actually see what a company has contributed. At least when ranking them in terms of a top dog in tech.

      Google has done some cool stuff, no doubt, but their contributions to the tech world are a mere blip on a timeline that has IBM footprints all over it. Not that that's Google's fault, they're a relatively new company, we'll have to wait and see how long they remain relevant for.

      MS certainly is a top dog, although one can argue over the value of some of their contributions, everyone else definately pays attention to what they're doing. I don't think the average techie is particularly concerned with HP's upcoming ideas/products. But I will agree with the article summary on one point, their logo is definitely blue. Good catch on that one.
    • In any event, neither company holds a candle to MSFT or GOOG in terms of market cap.

      MSFT sure, but Googles market cap is 118B.

    • Googles market cap is $120 Billion so I think that IBM can hold a candle to them.
    • There's more to a company that it's market cap. For example - IBM employes 330,000 people. Over 5 times MSFT's 61,000. Their annual revenue of 91 billion dollars (about 2.5 times MSFTs) is greater than the GDP of every country in the world save the top 53. IBM's "real world" assets - the property, factories, and equipment they own - boggle the mind. While MSFT has a simmilar value placed on it's "assets", much of those are not real-world assets - they are arbitrary values placed on things like trademarks

  • If your were going to a technology based war.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Crizzam ( 749336 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:33PM (#15504215)
    who would you want on your side?

    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]

    • On the other side of the coin, it's IBM that inflicts the seeping wound known as Lotus Notes/Domino into the IT world. If IBM re-write that application to not utterly suck ass, I might be able to give them a little credit, but for now... no. When your email product is worse than Outlook/Exchange, just give up and do something else.

  • Revenue != profit (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lulu of the Lotus-Ea ( 3441 ) <mertz@gnosis.cx> on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:38PM (#15504251) Homepage
    It's moderately interesting that HP has managed to sell more things than IBM has. But selling a whole lot of low-margin low-end systems doesn't really make for a bigger company overall. IBM still seems to have a better focus (despite its huge size), as well as better margins. Of course, no one has the huge margins than a monopoly gets you; but IBM is one of those companies that actually earns its money relatively honestly.

  • HP deserves to win over IBM (Score:4, Interesting)

    by totro2 ( 758083 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:42PM (#15504289)
    I work in a datacenter at a billion-dollar software company with many HP and IBM big iron servers. I don't work at IBM or HP. We like HPs **way** better, as they are far easier to manage:
    -HP's boot way faster
    -HP's have sane BIOS's. IBM's have text-based, very slow BIOS's.
    -HP's break down less often. IBM's have more fragile hardware.
    -When HP's do break down, the fix is always way faster and straightforward.
    -IBM tech support guys need to visit us so often that there is a desk dedicated to them!
    -HP's report hardware errors in plain english, IBM error codes always are obscure, like 20EE000B (which means "no bootable disk found")
    -HP's website is better when you're searching for updates and such
    • -HP's boot way faster

      We're talking about servers. You shouldn't be booting these often enough that the boot time matters.

      -HP's have sane BIOS's. IBM's have text-based, very slow BIOS's.

      "text-based" BIOS? As opposed to those lovely GUI AMI BIOSs of the mid-90s? Someone brought that abomination back?!

      You're a server admin. If navigating a textual interface bothers you, I shudder to think how you react to a real problem. Oh, and "big iron servers" don't come with anyting called a "BIOS".

      I'll agree with you tha
    • Most of that can be said for their desktop PCs as well. I've got a Pentium 2 one. The POST takes over a minute with "quick boot" enabled, and it hangs if you reboot it in Windows. On the other hand, it did manage to survive a lightning strike...
    • I agree, the only thing I am missing are the IBM Updatexpress cd that updates firmware in all the devices in the server, when you boot from the cdrom.

      When I needed to update the HP blade enclosures, I had to install windows on a server in the rack to run the update program, which sucks because it was only running SAP on 64bit SUSE.
    • HP has (or used to have) great support of discontinued products.
      A friend of mine got an ancient HP 486 server, and we decided to wisit HP's website. The latest BIOS for that server released in 2001 (the server was made in 1994 or something like that). Usually hardware companies like ASUS, Gigabyte etc. release new bioses and drivers no more that a year after a product is released, so I'd say HP had excellent support, at least for servers.
      Oh, and my HP Laserjet (made in 1995) still works perfectly on any OS,
    • IBM's website should be classified as a war crime. The only company with a worse web presence is Cisco. Ugh.

  • The difference is this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @02:46PM (#15504315)
    The difference is this: IBM actually does research and development of new technology. HP sells printers.
  • How much of this revenue comes from consumers and how much comes from business customers? IBM no longer serves the consumer market, so these new numbers might just be a result of a sizable chunk of IBM's revenues becoming property of Lenovo.

    I cringe to think that HP is pulling ahead due to some kind of brand loyalty among consumers. Their consumer line of products is probably the worst you can buy at major retailers. I replaced my PSC 1310 quickly after I found that HP's OS X drivers put a line in /Libra

  • What "big blue" means.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The original poster is aparently unaware of the meaning of "Big Blue". It isn't because of IBM's color choice that it got that name. It is because it is the most famous and largest business in the world. ( Even if that's not still literally true, it certainly was when it got the name ) "Big Blue" derives from it being a "Blue Chip" stock, which is a Wall Street nickname for companies that are (usually) large stable company that seem to always do well. IBM is/was the strongest company the market had ever se

  • The Next Big Thing? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MOBE2001 ( 263700 ) on Friday June 09, 2006 @03:16PM (#15504587) Homepage Journal
    FTA: Both have had their ups and downs but persevere because they have a knack for getting out of stagnating businesses and finding the next big thing. Size may not guarantee the market power it once did. But it does imply a certain staying power.

    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.
    • 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.

      These sound like kegger facts to me. Would you care to point out the "next big things" that HP/IBM are missing out on?

      • Would you care to point out the "next big things" that HP/IBM are missing out on?

        I know one. It's called "signal-based, synchronous software model" as opposed to our current algorithmic model. But then again, IBM and HP are not alone. The entire industry seems to be in a coma in this regard, although a few people are beginning to wake up. Essentially, we've been doing wrong ever since Lady Ada wrote the first table of instructions (algorithm) for Babbage's analytical engine. I've made myself a lot of enn

    • 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.

      You called that one spot on. See, big companies by definition are slow, lumberin
  • HP technology leading things? How much [slashdot.org] more [slashdot.org] bad [slashdot.org] news [slashdot.org] can we have today?
  • That's a lot of ink. Do they sell anything else any more?

  • But what do they _do_??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @12:57AM (#15507672) Journal
    HP has actively thrown away all of their technical edge to become Yet Another PC Vendor.

    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. ...As well as the Alpha line which they acquired.
    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)

    by uarch ( 637449 ) on Saturday June 10, 2006 @01:06AM (#15507705)

    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?
    IBM
    Profitability
    Profit Margin (ttm): 9.27%
    Operating Margin (ttm): 13.72%
    Management Effectiveness
    Return on Assets (ttm): 7.35%
    Return on Equity (ttm): 26.48%

    HP
    Profitability
    Profit Margin (ttm): 4.07%
    Operating Margin (ttm): 6.56%
    Management Effectiveness
    Return on Assets (ttm): 4.96%
    Return on Equity (ttm): 9.61%

    3) How about patents?
    According to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), IBM earned 2,941 patents last year (2005), more than any other company. This is 13th consecutive year IBM has led the nation's patent production.

    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!
    • IEEE ACE - Design Team of the Year: IBM & Microsoft - Xbox 360
    • IEEE Spectrum - Emerging Technology: IBM/Sony/Toshiba - Cell
  • Is a company which once was an icon of high tech has settled into printers and its overprized in and computers the dell way... I would not say this is a big blue, this seems more like a thin ground to me.
  • Since IBM is more a service and contract company, I cannot see how the sales numbers are really that important, the big bugs for IBM are service contracts and consulting, as well as project contracts. Most of its "end" user sales stem from servers and its processor division. But that is a mere shadow of its support and consulting money

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