Why cancel the TouchPad? Why not just spin that out with the hardware business to Compaq (which is the idea, yes?)? It seems they've devalued that unit by killing WebOS.
All PC makers are on razor thin margins... apart from Apple. A post from yesterday [1] painted an interesting picture where Dell, through a series of seemingly rational decisions, essentially taught Asus the PC business, allowing the Taiwanese manufacturers to eat US PC makers for breakfast in later years.
Notice HP did not pull the Pre and Veer phones from the shelves or put them on fire sale.
HP's reasons for keeping the webOS lights on are probably threefold. 1) Phones are still for sale. 2) HP has a liability to show some support for webOS devices it sold or risk a class action lawsuit. 3) HP could still sell the Palm assets to someone and the company is lot more valuable if it comes with employees.
Ignoring the iPad, I don’t understand how the TouchPad could be less successful than all the other tablets. Android can’t be the reason, that’s not how the tablets are presented. They are the Samsung tablet, the Motorola tablet, the Asus tablet, the HP tablet. It’s not even obvious that the Motorola and the Samsung tablet run the same OS, at least if you are a casual shopper, trying out tablets. To me, Android and webOS didn’t feel different enough to make one the clear winner, at least if you have limited time and are just playing around with it. The price certainly can’t be the reason, they all cost about the same.
Android tablets seem to at least be a little successful, why is the TouchPad not at all successful?
I'd imagine one of the biggest reasons is patents. If they spin out the business they have to sell the patents. If they're going into a new market where they don't traditionally have alot of expertise their only chance of not getting sued into oblivion is to be able to cross license patents.
Spinning off the Palm patent portfolio significantly hurts them in this regard.
With the price of patents being what it is these days, it might have been worth more to them to keep the patents and bury the project.
I keep hearing this but then think I saved 30% by building my own PC so it doesn't ring true. Also I would expect HP to get parts at least 10-20% cheaper than a consumer increasing this margin. And the time assembling is not that much to warrant additional costs. Maybe because I have a high end rig there are some margins here... but in this context it feels like there are decent margins there to me.
And if patents were the problem they could have required a cross licensing agreement with any buyer as a condition of sale.
Good CEOs who can revamp stagnant companies are hard to come by, particularly in the consumer space. Hurd was that CEO, Apotheker is not. And getting out of the consumer space, at a time when there are several paradigm shifts going on, means missing huge opportunities.
Apotheker comes from Oracle's competitor SAP. To that effect he isn't shy of focusing on interests that happen to conflict with Oracle's. To that end, what Gruber is saying is right - the board always wanted more Enterprise focus and that required going against Oracle. That's what Apotheker is doing.
As for missed opportunities - it does not matter. HP just does not have the DNA to do great in the already saturated PC and phone/tablets market. Not having to deal with that means they can focus their resources and capital where they are well oiled to do great. It only mattered if HP managed to get a CEO that can change its DNA - Neither Hurd nor Apotheker were into that. If they could have found a great consumer focused CEO with proven and relevant record, then it would have been worthwhile to risk competing in consumer space when it meant losing focus on Enterprise. Otherwise its just not really smart.
And they are still not giving up on webOS. But the only catches here are they don't yet know what to do with webOS and the Oracle/Itanium problem. With PSG off their bottom line they could now afford to ignore webOS until they find the right thing for it and focus their hardware resources to sell more proliants and fix the Itanium problem. That's the idea.
What's that got to do with strategy? Or are we claiming that it's "okay to lie" about why someone is being fired..?
Hurd made HP very toxic place to work (I know that first hand): and how the heck you can compete with Apple when your engineering force is demoralized?
Also what would be HP future under Hurd helm?
As of Larry's comment... Larry talks his book. He does not care what will happen to HP and he needed a guy to clean up Sun hardware division. So of course he will praise Hurd.
Apple is where it's at today because of what Steve Jobs learned and grew from his "failures".
Moreover Apple went on the verge of bankruptcy before Steve Jobs came back. So it was still a bad decision for the board to fire him.
For HP, at this time, I'm not sure I agree. Why? It's as simple as Apple is in that market as well and nothing HP (or anyone really) has done has stopped or caught up with their momentum.
In fact I think it's smart for them to transition to the enterprise world entirely. We don't hear about it often on HackerNews or Techcrunch, but that market is massive and HP has been acquiring companies within it for years. They likely make more money in the enterprise market (security specifically) than in the PC business. Hell, they just bought a company called Autonomy for 10 billion dollars. What do they do? Enterprise search and information management.
Simply put (and this has been happening for four or five years now) Assus Acer and Lenovo are eating HP's lunch on the low end and Apple is eating their lunch on the high end. All the while they are playing second fiddle to Dell ( and to an increasing extent to Assus) in between.
Additionally HP would need to play serious catch up to Apple, HTC, and in the international market Lenovo (maybe even Motorola although I don't know how that is going to work post acquisition) in mobil. And as Dell has learned, playing catch up in mobil requires throwing a lot of money down the drain without a guarantee for positive returns. (This last part about Dell is just my perception. For all I know Dell's margins on mobil have been stellar, but I don't think that's the case)
I understand the market's reaction to HP's pivote, although I think a lot of it is panic and hedging bets and some bad timing on HP's part, but that is what markets are suppose to do. I don't so much understand the tech industry's reaction to the move.
What HP needs now is focus and that is what Apotheker is doing. Some people are disappointed that it is not consumer orientated, but when you look at the "smart phone wars" this seems reasonable to me. HP can't compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft there. Look at Nokia and Blackberry.
Yes and no. Focusing would be to reduce the surface of the corporation to its core business, basically what Jobs did when he got back to Apple.
What Apotheker is doing is to change HP's business altogether.
No he isn't, he's reducing its scope to the most profitable and future-proof business units. HP is one of the world's biggest enterprise software business. Yes, also before they bought Autonomy. They just also make PCs and printers and the likes, which makes consumers not know any better than "HP is a PC and printer maker".
I'm actually curious to see now if we had this same discussion when Dell started to pull back on their consumer division. It's still there, but their business offerings seem to either have been given more attention, or for whatever market reasons have dwarfed Dell consumer.
Autonomy is a leader in their field
I worked in a startup, whose competition was Autonomy's consumer internet spin-off in 2001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_enterprise_search_vendo...
"Organizations already benefiting from Autonomy technology include Avis, BAE Systems, BBC, BMW, Coca-Cola, CNN, Ericsson, Fiat, Financial Times, GlaxoSmithKline, Isabel Healthcare, KPMG, Linklaters, Lloyds TSB, NASA, Nestle, Oracle, Philips, Safeway, Schneider Electric, Shell, T-Mobile, The European Commission, The U.K. Houses of Parliament, The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission."
If Autonomy isn't enterprise software on the order of SAP (if not exactly the same business), they sure write confusing marketing copy.
There are 14 board members in total including Leo the CEO. Out of 13, 6 were appointed in 2011 while the board leader (Lane) was appointed at the same time as Leo Apotheker. That means out of 14, only 6 precede Leo.
That indicates he didn't do much research. Another thing that indicates lack of research is that his comparison of Autonomy to SAP is wrong.
1. Why software is eating the world, 20th August. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651...
2. HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2905410
I was talking to an insider last year about how HP wanted to be a computer maker. I said, "I know them for their printers, they make awesome printers." He said, "Yeah, they're not so interested in printers these days. They think the money's in computers."
I guess it's whatever the "money's in" this week.
Obviously if you keep doing multi billion dollar acquisitions, and then trash it all and fire everyone a couple years later when you switch CEOS, and then when things get even worse, fire that CEO with a golden parachute and bring it his cousin to do it all again, pretty soon your company headquarters are going to be an abandoned grassy field.
Talk about burn rate!
target - sold out
best buy - sold out
online hp shop - sold out
office depot - sold out
amazon - ripping off customers with original price
newegg - rip off also
where am i gonna get my touchpad future android mega device? ;(
