Putting in a buy order at $20
The stock market hates HP's new strategy
91–100 of 108 posts
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#92Barron'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.
> HP hasn't had competent software for years since HPUX and even then, it's questionable.
I just going to say it like this: There was a reason HPUX bit the dust.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
They have no interest in doing what Dropbox does now. It is not a threat. But its a beginning. Dropbox is raising a lot of money to go after some aspect of the enterprise market. From niches will come the important profitable software of the future. Start with revenue from small businesses. SAP and Oracle are simply not innovating in that way.
> But its a beginning. Dropbox is raising a lot of money to go after some aspect of the enterprise market.
They really aren't. Revenues 2010 from various quickly Google'd sources and Wikipedia:
DropBox $100M
IBM $99.9B
Oracle $26.8B
SAP $17.9B
All of the big players there saw double-digit revenue growth relative to the previous year, too.
If you're about to reply with something about DropBox having a $5B valuation according to their next funding round, please consider that (a) AFAIK the round hasn't actually closed yet, and the markets have been pretty messed up recently so it's a lot less likely now than it might have been even a month ago, (b) GroupOn have been getting "valuations" well into 11 figures as well, which tells you how much this crazy maths is actually worth as a guide to future potential, and (c) DropBox are probably still small enough to be wiped out just by bad press and/or lawsuits over their reportedly dubious security and privacy policies, at least until any new round of funding goes through, and (d) in any case, a $5B valuation is a long, long way from having $5B in cash available to invest in attacking the enterprise market.
> From niches will come the important profitable software of the future.
I'm not sure what sort of niches you're imagining here. Pretty much every deployment of the heavyweight enterprise software is bespoke. That's why the developers tend to have teams dedicated to each major customer: they make a fortune on the consulting and customisation, on top of the cost of the software itself.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#94Barron'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 :)
Ive used idol very extensively for approx 5 years. Its like combining oracle db with google search and then adding language analytics. Basically its a very advanced db (these were the first guys to really get nosql into the enterprise). You dont query the db, you search it. Keyview is also a nice addition to the IDOL stack.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Its worked well enough for them so far. MS Office killed Lotus 123 and Word Perfect. Internet Explorer killed Netscape. The XBox 360 is outselling the PS3. The only place where the "spend money until the problem goes away" strategy hasn't worked is in phones, and even there, the final chapter is hardly written.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#96Earlier 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 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…
I doubt it. Yeah, it might be technically feasible. But politically? No way. Corporations are control freaks. I've seen it time and again - as corporations grow, they require a level of customization that generic third party cloud providers can't provide and they bring their infrastructure in-house.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#97I really wish HP would stop chasing for a market and double down on the one they are good at. HP chased the hot and fresh tablet market. Flop. This move to a more enterprise serving model just looks like HP is chasing the cloud.
You know what I want? I want a new HP calculator. I love my HP 50g, but it's about time for some innovation. It wouldn't even be too demanding on R&D (if that department even exists...), just strip down some of those tablets and sick'em in calculator body, make software and hardware hacker friendly. I don't think it is too much to ask for a calculator that is comparable in utility to a consumer level PC for mathematics processing.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#98I 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.
I still stand by my belief that Nokia should've bought WebOS.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#99the market always hates big risky decisions. it isn't any indicator of whether it is a good choice or not.
If this was accurate then there is a strategy of buying every company that makes big risky decisions. If the market always hates them, but in general some are good then this strategy will win.
Of course few simple strategies are good so this one probably is not either.
Re: The stock market hates HP's new strategy
#100Barron'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.
It kind of rankles when I hear people say HP is a "printer company" (I know you also said "/hardware', but still). You could just as reasonably call them a "calculator company". They're also the company behind the PA-RISC. When people lament the lost engineering culture at HP, they're not feeling bad for the printers.