Live data from Hacker News

Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

online.wsj.com

71–80 of 119 posts

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#72
post #18
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP is so far behind Samsung in the consumer market that it hurts thinking about it :-). They failed at smartphones and tablets, their computers are kwap, the printers are absolutely awful. Their strength is (was?) enterprise and business hardware from what I can tell.

A relative of mine with credible information tells me HP is apparently losing a bunch of ground in the server market because of low build quality. HP's trying to compete on prices by slashing them, but their deployments are just that bad.

Ouch. They used to offer some awesome workstations a few years back, but the restrictions on peripherals were insane - I mean, what idiot decided to implement whitelists on processors and PCIE graphics adapters?

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#73

I worked for HP in early 90. At that time, I remember old HP (mainly instrumentation groups now Algilent) had a rule of if a product line is > $100mil. They will spin it off to a separate P/L division. It seems like a good sharding algorithm for scaling out a corporation. They stopped doing it after PC/Printer div/group. A cynical view was it was good for high level corp managers to hide the cost of fleet of corporat…

Looks like it's back. Agilent is spinning off the measurement group into a company called Keysight. Announcement was 2 weeks ago. http://www.agilent.com/about/companyinfo/company-separation....

Seems to make sense to separate the life science side from "normal" agilent side of biz. Life science have completely different set of customers, market need, etc. Also the time for life science, diagnostic type ROI is probably different than the normal scope/logic analyzer type ROI.

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#74

Also worth noting is that Ebay has just recently announced a split (splitting Ebay and PayPal), and many are suggesting that Cisco split into two businesses as well.

Yeah, they know: http://www.zdnet.com/john-chambers-predicts-brutal-consolida...

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#75

The most amazing thing for me of the piece is the realization that HP still had $110B+ in revenue last year - its a useful reminder to us (put myself squarely in this category) of some of the behemoths in the valley that get short shift at times in the "Silicon Valley" PR ecosystem. There's apparently some interesting research still going in HP labs - one smart friend moved out here to work on Memristors with them (o…

Might you know what HP's current stance on memristor research is, by any chance? It's one of those technologies we've all seen simmering away hopefully, and HP's been (or, perhaps, was?) one of the few large SV corporations with an interest in longer-term R&D.

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#76
post #4

I really hope they name the spun-off computer division "Compaq."

I actually liked when they had Compaq as their low-end brand and HP as their high-end. They should bring that back. It works for car companies. Right now HP sabotages their own brand name with their cheap low-end crap, even though they make some good devices.

I want to ser a win/android compete with apple properly - a well-defined and short list of mid-to-high skus and no cheap stuff to apologize for.

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#77
post #35

There was a time when HP believed it was a big supertanker, impossible to steer. So they split up. Agilent was born. Shortly after that a new CEO believed, HP needed to be bigger. So they bought Compaq. Now they are too big again. "All of this has happened before. And all of it will happen again."

[deleted]

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it's back. Agilent is spinning off the measurement group into a company called Keysight. Announcement was 2 weeks ago. http://www.agilent.com/about/companyinfo/company-separation....

dafuq? I was just getting used to the dumbass name "Agilent."

It's been 15 years.

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#79
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I am hoping for "H" and "P".

They'd save a lot of money on new logos and letterheads by just flipping their existing logo upside down. HP and DY. It'll be fine.

The upside-down hp was the logo of a subsidiary, DYNAC (1956–1958) renamed DYMEC (1958–1959) and finally resorbed as the Dymec Division (1959–1967) of HP.

Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two

#80
post #7

Relevant parts of the article, since it's paywalled: > Hewlett-Packard Co. HPQ +2.00% plans to break in two, separating its personal-computer and printer businesses from its corporate hardware and services operations, according to people familiar with the matter. > The company plans to announce the move as early as Monday, the people said. It is expected to be effected as a tax-free distribution of shares to the comp…

... or read it via Google: https://www.google.ca/search?q=online.wsj.com/articles/hewle...
Post reply on HN