Ex-Board Member Says HP Is Committing 'Corporate Suicide' 394
theodp writes "If Apple's looking for a seamless transition, advises the NYT's James B. Stewart, it definitely shouldn't look to Hewlett Packard. In the year after HP CEO Mark Hurd was told to hit-the-road-Jack, HP — led by new CEO Leo Apotheker — has embarked on a stunning shift in strategy that has left many baffled and resulted in HP's fall from Wall Street grace (its stock declined 49%). The apparent new focus on going head-to-head with SAP (Apotheker's former employer) and Oracle (Hurd's new employer) in enterprise software while ignoring the company's traditional strengths, said a software exec, is 'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes.' Former HP Director Tom Perkins said, 'I didn't know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.'"
Re:Gave up too quickly (Score:5, Interesting)
I want what HP is smoking... (Score:5, Interesting)
Their winCE thin clients have had timekeeping bugs in certain models(that engineering kindly verified and then decided not to fix...) Their linux ones have glaring security deficiencies that they wouldn't even acknowledge our bug reports about(Hypothetically, if you were adding a diagnostic page that allowed the user of a 'kiosk' system to use ping to verify connectivity, would you implement it by giving them a freeform text field and then prepending 'ping' to whatever they entered and dumping it straight to the shell without any sanitization? Well, the input "$IP_ADDRESS && xterm" certainly suggests that HP did... For extra credit, the 'kiosk' program was running under a passwordless account on the sudoers list...)
The firmware of their network printers has been a mess for years, and their printer drivers(even for the workgroup networked printers with PCL/Postscript, let's not even talk about the direct-attached inkjet shit) actually seems to be getting worse as time goes on. Servers and workstations are ok, largely by virtue of being more or less stock intel or AMD kit, with drivers provided by people who don't utterly suck.
I know that hardware's margins don't keep the Wall street boys happy; but what sort of insanity could convince HP that they are a software company?
WebOS - Try Samsung (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, reportedly, Samsung is still interested in WebOS. Where before they were interested in licensing it off of HP ( http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/29/hp-confirms-its-in-talks-about-licensing-webos-samsung-tipped/ [engadget.com] ), they may now just grab it outright.. even if only as a precautionary move to the recent Google-buys-Motorola move ( http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-webos-rumors-reignite-amid-ex-hp-pc-vp-grab-29174760/ [slashgear.com] ).
Personally I'm not sure why they'd be doing that. They're going strong with Android - which, while heavily Google-influenced, is under governance of the OHA - while on their lower-end systems they've got their own OS already - Bada.
Though if there's any chance of WebOS going forward, Samsung would be a good place to start. Them or Huawei, perhaps. Not seeing HTC being interested.
Re:Gave up too quickly (Score:5, Interesting)
I was looking at ebay over the weekend and the Touchpad 16GB auctions were all closing at around $250-$270 - and we are talking about 1 auction closing per minute!
So, this means that they could have sold the Touchpad at around $300 (more for the 32GB version) and still sell-out in a few days. This would have been at a loss of R&D, as the cost of making them is astimated at around $315 & $330 for the 16GB and 32GB versions.
Now, after selling out in a few days they would have a big installed WebOS base, so maybe the app store would take off.
But nooo, they HAVE to sell their tablet at least $400, even though they are trying to enter late in a market dominated by Apple. And when they obviously can't do that, they simply give the tablets away and call it quits!
Now THAT is corporate suicide and yet it stands second to Nokia's recent "FU developers - we take back our promises, BTW we are just another windows phone maker now".
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Interesting)
HP has had so many leaders within the past 10 years that they have no idea what assets they have.
Hell, HP bought a company that was a start up for the cloud idea back in... 2006 I think. They did nothing with it.
Now they are scrambling to fix it up, and the offering wont be that great if current middle management has its way.
HP lacks direction because quite simply HP hasnt had anyone worth a damn at the helm, leading to assets that they bought in the past to stagnate.
HPs problem is literally itself.
Their management style needs to change, middle management needs to be cleaned out and those that are smarter need to rise up.
Until then, this company will bleed money, sell off divisions, and end up as small as it was back in 1995.
If HP sells its printer lines, then you know they are in trouble.
Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party (Score:5, Interesting)
To add more evidence to this, consider how well Carly Fiorina has been treated in the press. When she was running for public office, all the press was on how she was a successful businesswoman who knew how to make an organization successful, despite all the evidence that the opposite was true.
Re:Perhaps hardware outsourcing doesn't work (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it just means that they have no clue how Apple is doing it.
Re:Deja vu (Score:5, Interesting)
The problems started when Fiorina, maybe even before that with the Compaq merger. They really haven't been able to do anything other than sell large volume servers since. No major projects really have come to fruition. Everything seems to turn into a clusterfuck for HP every time they swap CEOs.
I remember a number of years ago a documentary on Silicon Valley where an ex-HP engineer said "HP's slogan is 'Invent', we stopped doing that years ago". I think that statement pretty much sums up HP.
Ford DID make airplanes (Score:4, Interesting)
"'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes."
You realize that Ford DID make airplanes a long time ago. Not only that but they were GOOD at it.
Re:Gave up too quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd love to know whether there's something about the tech industry that makes it susceptible to this level of mismanagement, as so many tech companies seem to have been badly mismanaged over the years.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Andy Grove at Intel (and perhaps Lou Gerstner turning around IBM) stand out amongst the rest as inspired CEOs, even if some of their business practises have left a little to be desired at times. But so many other once-dominant-in-their-field companies have just seemed to crash and burn.
Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.
WSJ Piles On: How to Kill HP in a Year (Score:4, Interesting)
H-P's One-Year Plan (WSJ): Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it [wsj.com].
Re:Gave up too quickly (Score:5, Interesting)
The people you mention were engineers and technologists, not bean counters. I guess that's the difference.
Re:Gave up too quickly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party (Score:2, Interesting)
I think here on /. there seems to be an instant association with a CEO as either a psychopath or sociopath. I don't think you can just write off every CEO as being "either or".
The thing is, when someone is in a position of power and has a great network of people to play golf with, it goes to their head. They care about their image in the media more so than the employees and communities and world they effect.
There's also the pull the rug over your head effect. The CEOs when they make these moves probably already have them figured out months ahead of time. They just want to implement at the best possible time. Anyone who thinks he didn't have an opinion about what to do with HP, before working there is naive.
A CEO should do an MTV style 'a day in the life of' where we see them day to day doing their office work. Then for the next 10 episodes, they should do a job in each division of their company preferably in a labour position.
I want to see the CEO program a computer, assemble ink jet cartridges and pack them in boxes, smell the fumes of assembly lines in China and work 18 hour days on the line. I want to see him deliver a computer to a corporate client. I want to see him do some tech support.
Re:IBM did the same (Score:4, Interesting)