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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

#81

Post by protomyth »

krupan wrote: post #58
notatoad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I am not so sure it was out of place. If you think of WebOS as a client to the enterprise software, it provides an interesting story. No need for Microsoft licenses and somewhat common (good enough for marketing) development set with the web people.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#82

Post by protomyth »

smackfu wrote: post #60
roedog wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, I am pretty sure you are right. I think we are going to have to wait a month to see the true delta.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#84

Post by Hoff »

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…

"HP Upline" was that service:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2286656,00.asp

and it was discontinued in 2009:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2341804,00.asp

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#85

Post by dennisgorelik »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #71
dennisgorelik wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The best time to buy is when a panic subsides. It's better to miss the first 10% of a recovery than to lose 20% catching falling knives. That's what I have learned painfully in 2008. (I just wish hadn't forgotten it by 2011 :)

How do you know that +10% is after the bottom and not a temporary bump on the way down?

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#86

Post by hello_moto »

cookiecaper wrote: post #64
hello_moto wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The Java and .NET ecosystems seem to preach a better/agile way to develop software: Continuous Integration, unit-tests, keep it simple, etc.

Sure, some of the code are still crappy, but at least they are less crappy than yesterday.

Are all of BigCorp programmers doing this? No.

Will they? maybe, especially with the newer/younger generations.

Mobile and tables are making in-road to enterprise.

Enterprise slowly decided to give cloud (SaaS, not the other *aas) a chance because they don't like to have in-house IT departments (whether this is good or bad I don't know).

When you see BestBuy using Google AppEngine even for their simple app, I think that's a sign of change.

Is it going to get better all across the board? probably no. But they're changing nonetheless.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#87

Post by CamperBob »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #16
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…

HP at a 20% discount is looking pretty good... ~50billion market cap, 5.8 p/e, 2% dividend, and they're getting out of unprofitable sections of their business. At risk of being cliche, think of it as failing fast and pivoting. Go big or go home kind of thing. Success is far from certain but it may be better than staying the course and crashing into the beach.

Also, that $1.2 billion isn't going to look like such a bad investment when Apotheker sells the Palm patents to Apple or Google or Microsoft or Samsung for 5x that price.

In this case getting out of the business of making stuff was probably the right thing to do. Blame the US patent system, not the HP execs. The decision would've been an easy one after the Motorola sale.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#88

Post by alrs »

guelo wrote: post #42
darksaga wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason they hire MBA types instead of engineers is because the main purpose of the company is to make money. A lot of MBA's don't take a long view on technology for various reasons. Thus, when every product you make isn't shipping a million pieces a month, these guys get worried and make stupid moves. In HP's case, they made a succession of stupid moves. Apple does have genius technology, but you can't under…

I meant to include Steve Jobs when I referred to engineers/technologists/innovators

Steve Jobs is not an engineer.

"Technologist" is sufficiently squishy that I can't make an argument against it, but I can cite Stross in "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing." Stross has a good anecdote about how Jobs didn't know how to use an email client when he was running NeXT, and that he would have his secretary print everything out for him.

http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/068912135...

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#89

Post by d2vid »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #85
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best time to buy is when a panic subsides. It's better to miss the first 10% of a recovery than to lose 20% catching falling knives. That's what I have learned painfully in 2008. (I just wish hadn't forgotten it by 2011 :)

How do you know that +10% is after the bottom and not a temporary bump on the way down?

You could look at trading volume to determine whether the stock has "settled down". That would at least indicate decreased volatility.

Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy

#90

Post by fauigerzigerk »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #85
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best time to buy is when a panic subsides. It's better to miss the first 10% of a recovery than to lose 20% catching falling knives. That's what I have learned painfully in 2008. (I just wish hadn't forgotten it by 2011 :)

How do you know that +10% is after the bottom and not a temporary bump on the way down?

I don't, but at that point the fundamentals matter again. The decline isn't self feeding any longer.

Most investors set stop loss levels for themselves. So when a stock crashes through those levels it triggers a lot of sell orders which makes the stock go down more triggering more stop losses, etc. Once the cascade has stopped, the game changes a little bit and fundamentals are reconsidered.

[Edit] And I didn't mean a 10% bounce immediately after the fall, but rather a gradual move up over the course of a few weeks.

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