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The stock market hates HP's new strategy

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Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#51

Post by ghshephard »

Daishiman wrote: post #44
justincormack wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think that big enterprise software and its sales model, as perfected by Oracle and SAP is dead long term, it will be killed by an on demand cloud products. HP maybe had a chance to get into this market eventually, and WebOS was part of his strategy. But instead they decided to chase last decades model which makes high margins in the short term. And why does no one want to try to compete with Apple?

> Personally I think that big enterprise software and its sales model, as perfected by Oracle and SAP is dead long term, it will be killed by an on demand cloud products. HP maybe had a chance to get into this market eventually, and WebOS was part of his strategy It's not going to be the market it once was, but those companies have very, very good reasons to use enterprise software: they can't rely on no-name cloud p…

Interesting perspective - Particularly as I see so much crappy enterprise software being installed in our company, for pretty much the reason you are communicating.

But, where does salesforce.com come into play? They seem to be pretty successful.

If I had to bet - it will be short-term (5-10 years) enterprise software continues to be successful. But longer term (10 years+) cloud software demolishes the whole concept of "Local installs and management of every enterprise software under the sun."

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#52

Post by dennisgorelik »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #19
aresant wrote: post #10

Barron's nails it: a) "decision to cease all webOS devices (including the TouchPad) a mere 48 days after the launch" - Leadership doesn't know what they're doing w/acquisitions. b) "expensive acquisition of Autonomy" - $10b to jump into a new market via acquisition which we just proved we're not good at. c) "material layoffs" and "talent drain over the next 12-24 months' - I believe this. Current talent bails. Changi…

That's a Wall St. view that completely misses the point. You could look at it very differently. The new CEO is making some bold moves to undo a bunch of bad decisions his predecessors made. Buying Palm was nonsense. HP was never the company to make it work. Contrary to that, Autonomy, one of the best software companies in the world, is a good fit for HP's enterprise strategy. Spinning off the PC business is very like…

Isn't it better to buy stock in the midst of the panic?

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#53

Post by gamble »

edw519 wrote: post #29

I said, "No, I'm never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It's my job for life. It's the best company because it's so good to engineers." It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion and innovation. So I…

HP is so far from the founders' ethos that hearing people talk about the old days is like looking at pictures of Beirut before the civil war. I have friends who still work for HP, and it's an amazingly toxic environment with absolutely no concern for good engineering or quality products. I honestly think Fiorina and Hurd would have been delighted if they had the ability to fire every engineer in HP and outsource all product development to China.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#54

Post by barake »

unohoo wrote: post #47

I wonder if Nokia had approached / will approach HP to acquire WebOS. With Elop @ Nokia's realm, I am skeptical. RIM is too busy building its on OS to be really interested. Amazon, Intel and Samsung seem like very likely candidates to take WebOS off HP's hands.

Nokia, RIM and Samsung seem pretty committed to their choice of OS. Rumors of Amazon tablets running Android keep surfacing but Amazon and Google are not exactly friends - Android is likely the least painful OS choice. They could buy WebOS and be free of Google and avoid developing their own OS from scratch.

If you think about all the services Amazon offers they're basically just an OS and some hardware away from being a "full stack" iOS competitor.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#55

Post by misterbwong »

gacba wrote: post #14
aresant wrote: post #10

Barron's nails it: a) "decision to cease all webOS devices (including the TouchPad) a mere 48 days after the launch" - Leadership doesn't know what they're doing w/acquisitions. b) "expensive acquisition of Autonomy" - $10b to jump into a new market via acquisition which we just proved we're not good at. c) "material layoffs" and "talent drain over the next 12-24 months' - I believe this. Current talent bails. Changi…

You forgot the "we're refocusing ourselves to our core competency as a software company". HP hasn't had competent software for years since HPUX and even then, it's questionable. They are a hardware/printer company so this is going to be a painful transition for them.

Unfortunately in the enterprise space, competent software isn't necessarily a requirement.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#56

Post by [deleted] »

waterside81 wrote: post #26
aresant wrote: post #10

Barron's nails it: a) "decision to cease all webOS devices (including the TouchPad) a mere 48 days after the launch" - Leadership doesn't know what they're doing w/acquisitions. b) "expensive acquisition of Autonomy" - $10b to jump into a new market via acquisition which we just proved we're not good at. c) "material layoffs" and "talent drain over the next 12-24 months' - I believe this. Current talent bails. Changi…

I have to give the HP board the benefit of the doubt that when they hired the new CEO they knew he'd steer them in this direction. He used to work at SaS so his expertise is software services. He must have told them in the recruitment/appointment process that he'd give some things a shot (webOS, TouchPad etc.) and failing that, he'd steer them towards services and become more like IBM. I made a lot of assumptions, bu…

[deleted]

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#57

Post by hello_moto »

misterbwong wrote: post #55
gacba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot the "we're refocusing ourselves to our core competency as a software company". HP hasn't had competent software for years since HPUX and even then, it's questionable. They are a hardware/printer company so this is going to be a painful transition for them.

Unfortunately in the enterprise space, competent software isn't necessarily a requirement.

That is changing, albeit slowly.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#58

Post by krupan »

notatoad wrote: post #35
camiller wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realize that a different CEO was in charge at HP when the acquisition of Palm occurred and the new CEO came from an enterprise software company (SAP) and seems intent on turning HP into a company he knows how to run, rather than running HP as the company it is. Someone (maybe at precentral.com) likened it to when a sports team gets a new coach he recruits players for his style of game instead of building with the tal…

>seems intent on turning HP into a company he knows how to run, rather than running HP as the company it is. but what is HP currently? all their consumer-level products are shit. i don't have any experience with their current enterprise services, but from the way apotheker is talking i'd assume they have a decent infrastructure in place there to build upon. their last few CEOs have kind of run their consumer hardware…

They have been moving towards enterprise services since Carly. Mark Hurd bought EDS and Mercury specifically to strengthen HP's enterprise offerings. Mark buying Palm seemed really out of place at the time.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#59

Post by prayag »

Silhouette wrote: post #46
justincormack wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what they think. MySpace bought HP servers, but Facebook doesnt. That market will commoditise too, as cloud that uses software not hardware redundancy doesnt need the high margin features. And the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox and so on. The landscape will change drastically. While there is innovation in clients, owning a platform is still part of a viable…

Respectfully, I don't think you appreciate the scale of huge companies and the requirements for the software and suppliers that help to manage them. If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the problem until it was solved. They might not even bother to market the result publicly, to avoid diluting their brand, but if they chose to do so, the…

>If HP or IBM or SAP or Oracle wanted to do what, say, Dropbox does, they would throw effectively unlimited funding at the >problem until it was solved.

And if there is one thing we've learned from Microsoft etc. is that throwing unlimited funding at a problem fixes it.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#60

Post by smackfu »

roedog wrote: post #7
dblock wrote: post #6

Do look at what the rest of the market is doing! So the market doesn't specifically hate HP that much, maybe a couple %.

HPQ was down 15% and the DJIA down 0.26%. The gap appears to be widening.

IBM is down 4% too, so maybe it's the services sector.
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