HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs 291
Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times:
"China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers."
An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.
wait... what??? (Score:5, Interesting)
HP still has a R&D division? Has hell frozen over? Is a CEO being intelligent for once??
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
They are cutting jobs but concentrating efforts on sales. Yeah.. What I hear is please by from us but don't expect cutting edge, anything innovative, or decent support after the sale.
That pretty much puts the final nails in the coffin for what once was an inovative tech company.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its more like they are cutting jobs to show a profit. Its says we are clueless and know no other way of turning a profit. So we will toss out our knowledge base people and hope the cheaper ones in China will work out. Kodak tried this except the engineering went to Japan and Xerox is still trying it. Good luck American worker.
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The funny part is that the Chinese are complaining that they can't find new workers willing to work for peanuts any more.
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Yes, we need to cut these jobs, so I can show a profit this quarter [or maybe next quarter], then I can get a nice big bonus.
Lather, rinse, repeat...
But why? (Score:3)
We as a society have chosen to give M
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One thing I have noticed about US/UK and Japanese companies is that the US/UK ones tend to think "what does the customer want?" when developing new products. The Japanese companies think "what cool stuff can be create that customers will want?". A few US and UK companies have managed to figure this out, e.g. Dyson, Google and Apple, but in Japan it is the norm.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's good news in this.
HP has been making trash equipment for a long time. Their printers are garbage, the software for them is worse. Their business laptops ship with non-functional radio chipsets and I've been told they just won't be fixed. I've gotten servers shipped to me with unsigned drivers that just don't work, and their foreign tech support is the consistently the worst I've ever had to deal with (and over phone lines that barely work). Not to labor the subject, but I actually had someone in India call me a thief when I called to ask them to replace a missing part on a laptop that came back from depot service. Worse yet, I've seen zero indication that they intend to do anything, about any of this, for years.
Any company that pumps out crap product and treats its customers like garbage for the sake of short term cost cutting, trying to squeeze out another .03 bump in their stock price, deserves to die the kind of death HP is going to suffer.
For my part, I say, "fuck em".
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Insightful)
+1
I totally agree, I stopped using HP 5 years ago after suffering with crappy products and zero support.
If you are R&D company it should take you no effort to develop on successful platforms like Palm, instead they just killed it.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Informative)
I agree in a non-humane principled sort of way. But my bet is that it's not those 10,000 peoples faults that HP is where it's at today. Which makes me sad. 10,000 poppa's and momma's are going to have to find jobs doing something else in a depressed economy. The well to do management will experience a drop in their earnings, but they won't suffer the same way.
The only way I'd be happy is if the story stated that among the 10,000, every single "product manager" employed by HP was being terminated. In every company I've watched or been part of that has tanked in the last 20 years, it's always been accompanied by a growing role of the "product manager."
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Informative)
The only way I'd be happy is if the story stated that among the 10,000, every single "product manager" employed by HP was being terminated. In every company I've watched or been part of that has tanked in the last 20 years, it's always been accompanied by a growing role of the "product manager."
As a former product manager at IBM who knows several PMs who left for HP, I can offer some insight here. I have to post as anon for obvious reasons.
First off, I basically agree with your sentiments. While I've known a couple sharp product managers who were critical in getting improved products out the door, most are self-styled "thought leaders" or MBAs who do not have a technical background, do not understand the technology, and are incapable of recognizing technology trends until they are already old news.
That said, the major bottleneck is going to be the company's executives. PMs do not have free reign to do what is best for the product. They also do not have any R&D budget. Ideally, they come up with ideas for improvements, and shepherd the whole thing through a Concept/Plan/Build/Release cycle. Every step has a checkpoint the executives can use to shut the whole project down.
Here are points from my experience:
Add this all up, and here's what you get. The PMs offer incremental improvements that are mostly business changes (e.g. sell through a new channel, offer a slightly different model). Products stagnate.
The PM is an important role, because this is the one person who is the glue binding all the other departments (sales, eng, r&d, marketing, etc.). A talented PM who is given some autonomy can do big things. But for the reasons described above, the corporate culture just sucks.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:4, Interesting)
The 10,000 layoffs will suck for the 10,000, but it spreads well past that. A huge subset of them will need at least temporary unemployment benefits. Their house payments may get iffy, and the market is already precarious. Households will cut back on spending, affection the microeconomies around them. There are tremendous costs to be born now.
This is why I don't like the idea of the MBA US President. Bush #43 was an MBA, and so is Romney. Neither one of them has shown any ability to look at the big picture, at anything larger than the bottom line of a single company, from the point of view of the company. Layoffs for a company are great; they boost your stock price a bit. You pay a relatively small cost, because you've been taught since day 1 on your MBA that you should externalize costs as much as possible, essentially make your costs every one else's responsibility. Every layoff affects others, large layoffs affect a lot of people.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:wait... what??? (Score:4, Insightful)
to contrast, HP once was the pinnacle of high end test equipment. these days, its called 'agilent' but the old 20+ yr equipment still pulls in good money on ebay for used test gear.
I go out of my way to buy (and use) older 'made in usa' HP, tektronix and fluke gear. the chassis were thick metal, the user manuals had *schematics* and parts/vendor lists (oh the shock and horror!) and the units ran for decades without needing repair.
compare to today: you'll pay the same high price but HP^Hagilent is made overseas, is not built to the same standard and is probably not even designed in the US anymore, let alone made here. its throw-away and its becoming rarer to find true service manuals anymore.
my old HP voltmeters, function generators and such are still some of the best stuff in the world. I would be hard-pressed to seek out any NEW hp gear, though. for my money, I'd just assume buy a chinese rigol scope.
the passing of an era is sad; and HP was a source of pride for many decades (nearly half a century, in fact).
RIP HP. at least you did leave behind some really great gear that continues to work well.
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I dunno, sounds like they are going to try the Oracle model of business and it sure seems to work well enough for them.
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They are cutting jobs but concentrating efforts on sales. Yeah.. What I hear is please by from us but don't expect cutting edge, anything innovative, or decent support after the sale.
That pretty much puts the final nails in the coffin for what once was an inovative tech company.
It's a common downward spiral. TFA *does* say that R&D will be spared, as well as HP's entire China component. So they appear to be making a good faith effort to provide new products.
Re:wait... what??? (Score:5, Informative)
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I don't know about "alive and well". Their instrument business has lost out to competitors lately. Their oscilloscopes rely more on the name than actual market leading quality and features.
Their efforts in the consumer and server markets have not turned out well either. The Microserver is about the best thing they made in the last decade, and they ruined that by swapping the PSU for a really loud one after the initial (well reviewed) batch.
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HP actually has a hell of an R&D division, even in house. The problem is the same type of attitudes which prevailed over 30 years ago with they turned down Wozniak on the Apple PC. The plan goes like this. Ignore anything that is too different from what you have now. For other things, invest some money, but slightly less than necessary to have a complete and potentially successful product. Look at the tech demo and say, yeah you have some nice ideas there. Every now in then make the rest of the in
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Should be... (Score:5, Funny)
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Because they will quietly re-hire another 30,000 people to fire again.
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Don't forget that the 30k re-hires will reset the benefits clocks -- healthier younger people who will work with less actual taken vacation.
Re:Should be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you know why they call it the Cato Institute (Score:4, Informative)
Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC
"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.
Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.
Re:Should be... (Score:5, Informative)
Been working as a contractor for HP. Not a single paid hour of vacation in 8 years. I hate this place with a passion
Who's fault is all of that? Why's a contractor expecting paid vacation? If you want paid vacations, you should be an employee.
I'm a contractor. When I finish a project, I take time off, on my dime. I also don't work for anyone that won't pay me a decent wage. I don't work on stuff that I don't want to, or I think doesn't need to (or shouldn't) be done.
What's your problem? Yeesh.
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Bolstering the sales force (Score:4, Insightful)
Because when you offshor^H^H cut a bunch of jobs, you need more salespeople to sit by the phones to answer calls about products you offshor^H^H have sold-off in order to mak^H^H save money.
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Speaking as a consumer the last time i bothered to contact hp the person on im (built into help) wanted to know if i was american, saying european got me disconnected [some years ago]. We did not buy a great deal of hp stuff after that
It might explain why i never even bothered to look at hp for a recent replacement thing (plus issues with the windows tax), and we also thinking of dumping our hp printers when they die due to annoyances with consumables and there blow up chips in toner cartridges.
The funnies
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure cutting out 10% of the workforce, shoving even more extra work on everyone else, will just be a huge moral boost.
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot the adverb.
You get 1 person doing 3 people's work badly.
--
BMO
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:5, Funny)
If those 30,000 employees all work on print drivers, maybe we'll see them (the drivers) shrink to a reasonable size...
Management Logic: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.
If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!
Re:Oh yeah, that'll help. (Score:4, Informative)
...200% more productive.
All of which goes to executive compensation and maybe dividends for shareholders. The worker gets none of the benefit of added productivity.
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The 21st century formula for a successful company (Score:5, Insightful)
The modern CEO doesn't grow his company in the long-term. He doesn't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. He doesn't pay shareholders modest dividends and tell them about his long-term strategy for slowly growing and maintaining a profitable company. That shit is old school!
The 21st century CEO boosts short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. He shows the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and they call him a visionary. He hides debt with a shell game, cuts workers to hide sales declines, and outsources everything he can to some sweatshop that produces crap product to lower prices. The 21st century CEO looks AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEO has long since bailed out with his golden parachute. Let Uncle Sam bail them out.
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Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
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I'm sure they have plenty of chaff to cull from the EDS merger. As a former worker for a *profitable* EDS group that was spun off, they were in what I call the Control Data spiral before being snapped up by HP. The CD spiral is when you sell off all of your profitable divisions to keep your stock from going junk, which in turn dooms your company. Anyway, I have nothing but ill to say about EDS, so I probably shouldn't say anything. Motherfuckers.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:4, Interesting)
Eh? The old HP which everyone knew and loved (well, mostly) had a claim to fame to PCs, workstations, calculators, printers, scientific instruments, and a host of other fringe but cutting edge stuff. That's what gave them a competitive advantage, respect for their brand name. Y'know, back when they were a leader in the tech industry. Their problems right now are due to "retooling" to become a generic PC repackaging brand. They got exactly what they wanted - they're now leader in a market with probably the thinnest margins in the tech industry, indistinguishable from the likes of Gateway.
If you find yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing, you are by definition an also-ran. You should be creating the hottest new thing. Like back in the day when businesses would pay a premium for HP workstations, printers and scientific equipment; and geeks would pay a premium for their calculators - because they were considered the best and most advanced. They didn't dominate the inkjet printer business because their sales department did a good job marketing them. They dominated the inkjet printer business because they paid a few geeks to play around with using electrostatic forces to spray ink - they nearly single-handedly invented the inkjet printer market.
Unfortunately they gutted their R&D which was producing their high-profit distinguishing products, in favor of sales to promote their high-revenue generic products. I'm sure the high revenue looks impressive on their sales staff's resume, but if it's on razor-thin profit margins it's not really helping the company. I don't see how shifting their sales from one thing to another is going to help. They need to revive their R&D departments if they want to become an industry leader again and enjoy cushy profit margins.
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Yes - but you don't just shift people over into emerging technologies. I'm good at what I do, but if you want me to develop mobile apps, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You first get rid of the people who don't have the skills you need for the future, and then you hire people who have those skills. That's why I said that it is an open question whether she can execute on the turnaround: firing is easy, hiring is about the hardest thing you can do. Now that she's planned the firing, I'd like to see what
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As Google will tell you, there's a huge gap between having a product that you know has to succeed, and having a product that is actually successful.
R&D (Score:2)
Though to his credit it seems they might not touch the R&D which would be contrary to what you are talking about. That is of course if it is true...
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Outside of the obvious gender bias, I agree with most of what you said. HP Shareholders should realize that the 30,000 people they are about to screw over are also customers, and advocates of HP products. Obviously this is going to drop 30,000 people from their customer and advocate list, plus all of their friends and family members will think twice about buying or using HP.
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Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Informative)
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person. One must choose either "he" or "she" or the much more awkward "he/she." I supposed one could also go with "it" but most humans take offense to being called an "it" for some reason. Being as most CEO's are men, I chose "he" in this instance. I think that's a reasonable choice.
And as for Meg Whitman, well I'm sorry if I may have offended the woman who just threw 30,000 families into dire crisis. I suppose she'll just have to live with it.
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I believe Futurama established that the correct pronoun is "shklee".
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:4, Funny)
My favorite answer to this problem: Clearly, saying "he, she, or it" every time is a bit cumbersome, but at the same time we want to be inclusive. This eventually leads to the contraction "h'or'sh'it"
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You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person.
This isn't true. There is a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun for a person. In the nominative case, that pronoun is "he". In the objective case, it's "him".
Yes, it's ambiguous that the gender-neutral pronouns are spelled and pronounced the same as the masculine ones, but it's far from the only case in English where we've got two words spelled and pronounced the same that mean different things. I always figured if people wanted to communicate in an unambiguous fashion, they'd choose a langua
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Or you could just re-write the sentence without the need for a he/she/it reference, which is usually the first choice.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:4, Funny)
Nice idea except the HP CEO *appears to be* a woman.
There, FTFY.
Women are people, and people have souls, therefore Meg Whitman is not a woman.
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Life is always a two way steak.
AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
On a side note, the rest of your post is now invalid.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the plane in free-fall and on fire behind you, as you float to your new private island on a parachute stitched from gold thread and destroyed lives.
Rigth... (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought a HP netbook, believing that I would have something of quality. Big mistake. I think is not going to help increase the number of sellers, if you only have crappy products for sale.
Disgraced Republican Candidate for Governor (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone who watch Meg Whitman run for governor should realize by now that she is an abject retard.
I wouldn't put her in charge of a car wash, much less a multinational company.
I guess after that other Republican candidate, Carley Fiorina started driving HP into the ground they needed another mentally handicapped Republican to finish the job.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Anyone who watch Meg Whitman run for governor should realize by now that she is an abject retard.
But...but... She said in her campaign that we were supposed to vote for her, because she was in business and knew how to create jobs.
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Oh, and don't even get me started on the High Speed Rail system that is, even before it has broken ground, doubled in cost. What a freaking boondogle that is already!
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I noticed that you never mentioned the LIBERAL parts of the problem.
1) High Speed Rail (underfunded referendum)
2) Underfunding CALPERS on purpose, by granting huge retirement benefits (in the late 90s) to garner the support of Government (tend towards liberal) workers.
3) Illegal Immigration and social programs that become entitlements that can never be revoked. Oh, and I'm a racist for even mentioning it .
4) it wasn't the internet bubble of the (Liberal) Silicon Valley that got people like Feinstein, Boxer
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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SPLC is a hate group. And yet they don't list themselves as one, I wonder why.
http://www.cis.org/node/54 [cis.org]
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/02/local/me-cap2 [latimes.com]
http://webworks.typepad.com/lakecountyfiscalrangers/2010/06/cost-of-illegal-immigrants-from-a-california-teacher-working-in-a-title-1-school.html [typepad.com]
http://sosguy.net/articles/264 [sosguy.net]
http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/news/investigations/122630554.html [bakersfieldnow.com]
http://capoliticalnews.com/2012/03/06/antonovich-la-county-cost-for-illegal-aliens-is-1-6-billion-per-year/ [capoliticalnews.com]
The probl
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...because if HP instead had a liberal democrat for a CEO, they would suddenly once again become a vibrant, thriving company due to having no shame to tap into an endless supply of government money just like GM.
Works for Apple. Yes, Steve Jobs was a staunch Liberal. So is Steve Wozniak. Besides Eisenhower [who taxed corporations and the wealthy in high numbers] not a single Republican President has ever balanced the budget once. But in reality, HP cannot find Hewlett or Packard with their technical prowess and ability to find skill to rebuild HP in its current form. HP is better of breaking up into several corporations and selling off some of the units, fire all the MBA hats making decisions and take 18 months to
H.P. (Score:4, Interesting)
Did it bug anyone else that they kept using H.P. instead of HP?
Maybe it's just me...
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Did it bug anyone else that they kept using H.P. instead of HP?
Maybe it's just me...
They're just re-branding; they got tired of hiding the fact that they are run by a Lovecraftian Horror, so they're just going to run with it.
Need a new server? Why settle for the lesser of two evils? Just don't look too closely at the docs... that way lies insanity.
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When they talk about themselves, do they call themselves the "N.Y. Times""?
HP is like a giant QA department (Score:2)
it seems like almost everything they sell is OEM'd by someone else and HP just makes sure it works together, rebrands the drivers, rebrands the hardware and markets it. I've bought HP branded Emulex HBA's that looked just like the Emulex branded ones. drivers were compatible as well.
except printers and ink does HP really make anything on it own?
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One of the products I do tech support for was last updated back in 1999. It works just fine on almost all computers, but there are specific models of HP/Compaq that they do not work no due to an incompatible audio chipset that is only on specific HP/Compaq computers.
CEO Meg Whitman? New Products? (Score:2)
CEO Meg Whitman wants to use the savings for new products? Oh, come on.
She just needs more cash to pay her household staff. You can't have people talking, you know.
Bad CEO replaced by bad CEO replaced by bad CEO (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Bad CEO replaced by bad CEO replaced by bad CEO (Score:5, Funny)
A new CEO was hired to replace an outgoing CEO. The outgoing CEO met with the incoming CEO for an exit interview. During the discussion, the departing CEO stated he had placed 3 very important letters in his drawer just as his predecessor had done for him. He explained that the new CEO would find opening the letters in order most useful when a serious event took place. He also stated the letters left for him had really helped him over his tenure.
Several months passed before a major event came up. The new CEO now remembered the letters and noticed they were numbered 1, 2, and 3. The former CEO had instructed they be opened in order for maximal benefit. The new CEO opened letter #1 and the paper inside had the words “blame it on your predecessor.” The new CEO did as the letter stated and amazingly he was able to avert serious problems and keep his job.
Several months passed before the next serious event took place. This one was growing in magnitude and things were starting to get ugly at the company. There were even calls for the CEO to step down. In desperation, the CEO opened the drawer and pulled out letter #2. With great fear he, opened it carefully to read the word “reorganize.” He followed the instructions and just as before he was saved. The whole company quieted down and went back to business as usual.
After about a year, a third serious event took place and it was much worse than the rest. The CEO knew how to get out of the mess because he had a third letter left to open. With a smile he reached for the letter #3 and opened it to read “write 3 letters.”
Re:Bad CEO replaced by bad CEO replaced by bad CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a board issue. They're not picking the right people for the job (I would've said person, but this has happened twice within as many decades).
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The worst? He's up against some tough competition for that title!
HP used to hire from within, and got good results. The good people have of course been forced out, but they haven't ceased to exist. HP should recruit some veteran who practices the old HP way and has gone on to work in one of the emerging markets.
Farewell gift (Score:2)
meg whitman, not a job creator (Score:4, Informative)
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Trimming a bloated state government would have been a disaster. I'm sure the state's pension problems will just magically disappear. Jerry brown is probably trying to figure out how to stop residents and businesses from leaving the state if it is to dodge their high taxes.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315404575250822189252384.html [wsj.com]
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Time will tell if this is a good thing for HP. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that with the EDS acquisition, as well as all the other companies HP went out and bought, there are tons of people hiding out waiting to see which group of employees survives the merger. With the PC and printer divisions merging, that looks to me like a lot of sales guys, account managers and customer liaison people are going to be looking for work as well. HP has 300,000 people or something like that. It's kind of like IBM -- once a company gets too big, people can build themselves a very safe spot without doing too much work simply because it's too hard to keep track of everything.
I've had some limited experience with EDS, and from what I saw, there's LOTS of room to cut there. Outsourcing contracts can only support so many project managers, support staff and liaisons-to-liaisons without affecting the number of actual workers who do work.
The problem is that mass-firings like this, especially ones led by management consultants, tend to gut product engineering and design teams, and leave the overhead in place. Even though Whitman may be sparing HP Labs, which was cut to the bone under Fiorina and Hurd, that doesn't account for the everyday hardware engineers who have to design HP's next products. If HP wants to stay successful long-term, they need to ignore the typical McKinsey speak and keep the people who can build stuff that HP can sell.
I'm working in one of the very few dinosaur-era fields that actually needs to buy good-quality PCs and servers for customer projects. Think stick-in-the-mud customers, low or no network bandwidth and old applications. HP and Lenovo are basically the only choices if you want a decent, well-made business grade PC with a warranty and stable configuration. All the hardware manufacturers need to lay off the cloud kool-aid and realize that there will be a balance between local, private and hosted for quite a while. Not every business is ready for the cloud, the cloud doesn't make sense for some businesses, and even the cloudy people need decent machines to run VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. on. In HP's case, I'm sure the McKinsey people read the Gartner people's Magic Quadrant stuff, concluded that every business will be in the cloud by 2017, and recommended that HP get out of the traditional PC and services business, and become strictly a cloud provider. Problem is, when the social media/Web 2.0/cloud bubble pops, things are going to swing back to a sane mix of hosted and local, and HP might not have anything good to offer anymore.
Not enough H-1b workers (Score:3)
They need more H-1b workers from India. That's the solution.
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The problem with H-1B isn't that it encourages engineers to come here. The problem is that it encourages them to go home.
If the program had the same number of seats, but encouraged the participants to settle here permanently, the number of engineering jobs in the US would increase because firms go where there are engineers to be hired. San Jose and Des Moines rank near each other in the rankings of US cities by livability, with Des Moines scoring slightly better. So given a choice, where would you open a s
How many from EDS? (Score:2)
I know at least one (talented) person who has been let go from what was once EDS. I'm willing to bet that a lot more less-talented ones are on the way out.
Seriously. I really don't know what GM did to EDS before HP bought them, but from the stories I've heard, they have to be the largest collection of mental defectives to run an IT shop. Their processes were totally divorced from reality. I half expected Randall P. McMurphy to show up as new employee one day.
I'm no fan of "resource actions", having been
Didn't that loser run on job creation platform? (Score:2)
Great job on walking the walk
Saddest Part (Score:5, Interesting)
"While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers."
How ironic and sad that this is HP's claim to fame now days. There was a time when this was simply so not true. There was a time when you bought HP stuff (and you paid top dollars for you), you knew you could throw it against a wall or drive a car over it and it just kept working. Quality was #1, bar no competition. That was back when the engineers still had a bit of say in what went down there.
Re: (Score:3)
There was a time when you bought HP stuff (and you paid top dollars for you), you knew you could throw it against a wall or drive a car over it and it just kept working.
You misspelled "IBM". I've been using HP equipment for a long time and while I used to expect quality, I never expected it to be bulletproof.
Any idiot can cut costs (Score:3)
Any large company that thinks giving 10% of their workforce to their competition is going to make them a better competitor in their market has got to be dreaming.
But, obviously, clearly, cutting 10% of your overhead must immediately increase your profitability by 10%. This is truth.
For truly it is said: 'any idiot can cut costs, only a true leader can grow sales'
Slowly dying HP...... (Score:3)
Their documentation is in such a disarray your have to navigate a shit labyrinth of documents on their website to find the one you need, only to realize its just flat out wrong.
God ford bid you actually need to speak to any one, India is the only place you can call, if you try your sales rep, or "regional manager" they give you the same shitty number where the ass clown in India tells you to restart your entire server cluster, in the middle of the day, to fix a failing HD issue.
I welcome this as an opportunity to jump ship on a sinking empire that has lost its way.
Meg Whitman (Score:3)
Only if the culture really changes (Score:2)
HP, at least in San Diego, is your nightmare enterprisey hellhole full of desperate low talent people just hanging on because any one with any drive and talent left long ago. Endless meetings, no clear vision, you're just puttering along and hoping you don't get fired - quietly collecting your salary as long as you can since your skills have completely stagnated.
This is not the sort of place makers and geniuses would want to work, unless their R&D department is a lot different.
Jobs Relocated (Score:2)
Job cuts at HP?!?! (Score:2)
I wonder how many more corporate jets Meg is going to buy now. That's what Carly did after she cut jobs after all.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you take yesterday off?
Re: (Score:2)
Trust me people no nation ever improved its status with factories.
Except all the countries who had industrial revolutions and built large manufacturing bases.
Re: (Score:3)
So Africa with it's lack of factories should have a very good standard of living then?
A local manufacturing base helps with social divides by giving the lower classes a way to become the middle class.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh come on... This is HP we are talking about. They likely have 30,000 people in the packaging division responsible for the absurd amount of trash every time you buy an HP product.
The trash is actually on the hard disk. The packaging is actually much more easily got rid of.