Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The stock market hates HP's new strategy

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 108 posts

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#61

Post by mst »

kitsune_ wrote: post #31
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…

Does anyone have any experience with Autonomy and its IDOL technology? I visited their site and they look a little bit shady :)

I used to run their dev servers (briefly back in 2001). I don't entirely understand what you mean by shady but the tech does work - and provided you use it for the right thing, extremely well. The key is to realise that it tries to be a semantic search, not a text search - if you want brute force grep you'll be better with a google search appliance or similar, I suspect.

The development team were well looked after and the CEO now is the same as then, so I'd hope the internal culture is still pretty pleasant - I really enjoyed working there and most of the employees genuinely believed in the product's ability to deliver (when not mis-sold, which, well ... seemed to happen reasonably rarely, which is about the best I've seen in any sales department). I only left due to discovering I really HATED living in Cambridge, which wasn't really something they could fix.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#62

Post by _delirium »

wheels wrote: post #40
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…

> the future of business software is gradually being built by Salesforce, Google, Dropbox What color is the sky on your planet? Enterprise software -- the largest software market by a long-shot -- is not scared of ... Dropbox. That's like saying that cars will be wiped out by lawnmowers. The statement doesn't make any sense. Nor does using Facebook and MySpace as examples of enterprise infrastructures. They're medium…

I mostly agree, but Google Apps for Business is slowly chipping away at some of the market that 5 years ago might've bought an enterprise "email solution", especially at the lower end of the market, like universities, state governments, and medium-sized businesses. Less success among very large businesses, but a few have adopted it.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#63

Post by defen »

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…

> Autonomy, one of the best software companies in the world,

By what metric? From my perspective they are reviled by their clients and their own (engineer) employees.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#64

Post by cookiecaper »

hello_moto wrote: post #57
misterbwong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is changing, albeit slowly.

Not really. I doubt it will ever change. Why do you say it's changing? All the same BigCorp programmers I know remain employed...

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#65

Post by pemulis »

guelo wrote: post #24

Another MBA type killing a great tech company. I don't understand why it doesn't occur to these boards that engineers/technologists/innovators should lead tech companies. For some reason they can't imagine that technology can save a technology company. It wasn't some genius business maneuver that turned Apple into the biggest company in the world, it was genius technology.

Not to discount the idea that tech companies should be run by innovators, but Apple wouldn't be one of the biggest companies in the world if not for its ingenious vertical integration, which ensures that competitors are always a year or more behind. A few famous examples include the way they temporarily monopolized the supply of a crucial type of flash memory for iPods, and still control the entire supply of certain touchscreen sizes for tablets. They provide the up-front capital to build factories in China to produce these new technologies in exchange for exclusivity. And after the exclusive period is over, Apple pays a discounted price, which means that their competitors actually subsidize Apple's products. There are plenty of other examples of operational genius within Apple along the same lines. Without those genius business maneuvers, they would probably be a successful company, but certainly not the biggest company in the US. The key thing is that this innovation in business ops is in the service of grand technological vision. Ops without vision dooms a company in the long term.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#66

Post by tsotha »

metageek wrote: post #39
waterside81 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>He used to work at SaS SAP.

Heh, well, maybe what they need is SAS.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#67

Post by Daniel_Newby »

gamble wrote: post #53
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…

Many of the good parts of the old HP were spun off into Agilent. http://www.home.agilent.com/

Any Agilent people here who can say if it still follows the old HP spirit?

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#68

Post by tsotha »

gamble wrote: post #53
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…

The really interesting engineering that happened at HP was all spun off as Agilent in 1999. What's left is just your garden variety technology company that does a lot but doesn't seem to do any of it very well.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#69

Post by Daniel_Newby »

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…

... they can't rely on no-name cloud providers for legal and ass-covering reasons, they need the local installations and control of their infrastructure, ...

Amazon Federal http://aws.amazon.com/federal/

"Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers federal government agencies a secure, reliable, and cost-effective computing platform in the cloud. By using AWS products, government organizations can focus on meeting their mission-critical objectives, and spend less time procuring, developing, or managing IT resources. "

"Security: In order to provide end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy, AWS builds services in accordance with security best practices, provides appropriate security features in those services, and documents how to use those features. AWS’ compliance framework covers FISMA Low, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA."

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#70

Post by johnohara »

I installed ten (10) HP 3130 desktops two months ago for a local dental practice. No issues. Not one. Nice machine, fast, quiet, runs cool, plenty of space, 4GB, etc.

The list price is $789.00 but they were purchased for about $599.00. At that price the margin can't be very much. My guess -- $150.00

But it takes a lot more energy and logistics to move 1MM desktop PC's than it does to move 1MM iPhones.

If HP is getting out of this market (behind Dell and IBM) it must mean desktop PC's as we know them are dead.

Post reply on HN