I really hope they name the spun-off computer division "Compaq."
Or one company's Hewlett, and the other Packard?
When I saw the headline, I remembered making this joke ~10 years ago, and then I said, "wait, they're breaking up again?"
Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#62Earlier 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.
It's been a real shame to watch the decline of HP.
In the early 90's when I was just starting out in IT, their brand was very highly regarded, especially their laser printers which phenomenal workhorses.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they are the 3rd largest in revenue in the IT / Software services segment after IBM and Fujitsu.
Good point, and how often are the blogs and podcasts overflowing with news about IBM and Fujitsu? I discovered long ago that there is a huge difference between generating news and generating the things companies are created to generate (money, products, services, employment, research, etc.) One consequence of this difference is that our unconscious estimates of the comparative scale of what is going on at various com…
You just found a great advantage that exists for investors that put money in "old" companies. Many of these old companies will make more and more money for decades to come. But most retail investors are only interested in "big growth" from companies such as Twitter, FB, Gopro, etc.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#64The 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…
If you get out of the VC/Silicon Valley/Tech universe these companies are appreciated much more. In the wider business world, they still get a lot of attention, largely because they are good businesses despite not having the sex appeal that smaller, but quickly growing companies might have.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#65I 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....
dafuq? I was just getting used to the dumbass name "Agilent."
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#66Also 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.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#67It really bothers me what has been been done to HP as an engine of innovation and product development. It's extremely similar to what the leadership at IBM has done to that company the last ~15 years. I feel like the destiny for both of these companies is to slowly be split into ever smaller pieces until half of those pieces are eventually acquired by other US or Chinese firms for dirt cheap (and nothing against Chin…
And that's why we must understand that at executive level gender does not matter. What matters is strategy and ability to execute. When HP announced "Meg Whitman" as CEO everyone was so voraciously attacking how HP is is being in bad condition because of male CEOs. Being male does not matter. Whitman has failed tremendously. Not only HP has laid off thousands of people from US ( some of them I knew personally very we…
An example from earlier in HP's history:
When Carly Fiorina was ousted from the company she wrote a book all about how she was despised at HP for being a woman in charge of a major engineering firm. But being a woman had nothing to do with it; being an idiot who didn't understand engineering culture and who damn well nearly broke the company had everything to do with it. Steve Ballmer was ousted from Microsoft for similar reasons.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I left HP around 6 years ago there were maybe 3 HP employees left working on calculators, no joke. They were doing their best to keep the dream alive, but they just didn't have a lot of backing or resources.
They would be mostly managers handling outsourcing contracts...
Yes
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#69I'm excited I think this break up will be revealing in the mid term showing the insane revenue declines in personal computers and printers( still profitable though) , and then showing how little revenue is actually flowing through enterprise business, but how fast it is growing.
It's been a long time HP strategy to use the revenue in device sales and the growth in the enterprise to keep the stock prices strong. If you break those two up you show two businesses with big upsides and big downsides.
Should be interesting to see how the markets react to the separated numbers.
Re: Hewlett-Packard Plans to Break in Two
#70It is sad seeing this happening.
I used to enjoy HP printers and HP-UX was the only commercial UNIX I ended up using across multiple employers.