Carly Fiorina’s undoing was her inability to capitalise on the 2002 HP-Compaq merger, seen as her bet-the-company move. HP is on shaky ground at the moment because its product portfolio has become too large and diversified to manage, and lacks organisation-wide synergy. The printing and imaging business account for a disproportionate share of the profits, while its enterprise divisions lag. The options that stand before HP’s board range from organisational restructuring, to a complete split of the company. Which of the many strategies is eventually adopted depends on the identity that HP decides to create for itself.
Facts:
A few brief facts about the exit of Carleton S. Fiorina, 50, Chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard, on Tuesday, the 9th of February 2005: Robert Wayman, the CFO of HP, has been appointed the interim CEO, and has made it to HP’s board of directors. Wayman has been at HP for over 30 years now. Patricia Dunn, a board member since 1998, is now the interim non-executive Chairman.
Carly Fiorina contends that disagreements with board over how to execute the company’s strategy led to her ouster. In a statement, she said “While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP’s strategy, I respect their decision.”
Wall Street reacted favorably to the news, with HP’s stock rising $1.36, or 6.8%, to $21.50 in midday trading on February 9. [18]
HP said that it would start looking for a CEO immediately. The top contenders within the company appear to be Vyomesh Joshi, executive VP of the recently-combined printer and PC business, and Ann Livermore, executive VP of the Technology Solutions group.
What did Carly do wrong?
For all the post-mortem analysis that has been done over the exit of Carly Fiorina, one conclusion that everyone seems to have made is that she lacked vision and focus. The focus part is readily seen, given the huge and diverse range of products, services and markets that HP’s been saddled with after the Compaq merger. Further, all agree that it would be the success or failure of the Compaq deal which would eventually decide Carly’s fate. Carly managed the Compaq acquisition brilliantly, but was unable to leverage Compaq’s precence in the PC business into increased sales for the new HP.[15]
HP had entered the high-end computing market only a year before the Compaq merger. Carly claimed the Compaq merger would give the company an edge over Dell in the low-end PC market. This was clearly an attempt to dominate the entire range of the computing equipment market, all at once. Far too ambitious. Also the merger increased HP’s dependence on the high-volume, razor-thin margin PC business, and brought it into direct competition with Dell [14].
So did HP’s merger with Compaq successfully propel it to the number one position in the PC market? Look at these figures[16] for the answer:
2000 Market Share:
Compaq: 13.1%
Dell: 11.5%
HP: 7.8%
IBM: 7.4%
Fujitsu-Siemens: 5%
2004 Market Share:
Dell: 17.9%
HP: 15.8%
IBM: 5.9%
Even before the Compaq deal, the company had tried to acquire PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting division, but when the price balooned to $18 billion, HP gave up. A couple of years later, IBM successfully acquired the same divison for $3.5 billion. That failed acquisition, followed by the ease with which IBM managed the same thing, did not reflect very well on Carly’s leadership skills. Analysts have often termed her a great manager, but a poor leader.
Now again, HP combined its PC and printer business in 2005 to be able to sell complete “digital imaging solutions”, as its Pavilion range of computers advertises. The PC business is a notoriously low-margin, slow-growth market – PC market growth is slated to fall below 10% this year.[15] Tying the printer business to the PC one does not make good business sense for the former, because the growth opportunities for HP’s printer business are immense, as we shall see later in this article.
Brand positioning and differentiation:
At the time of the acquisition, Compaq (plus DEC and Tandem) was the dominant low-end computer vendor. It positioned its brand as the premium home and business computer. HP, on the other hand, had a reputation of producing the best computing instruments in the market, especially its scientific calculators. The question was how Carly would manage to differentiate between the two brands when brought under a common management. The answer was not very well. HP could not afford to jettison the Compaq brand because it was too valuable. At the same time, having two product lines for both desktop systems and notebooks made marketing much more difficult. The result is that if you look at HP’s website today, there is only a very feeble attempt at brand differentiation. An average consumer’s puzzled by the two brands and wonders how to choose between them:
Notebooks: For Home and Home Office.
HP Pavilion notebook PCs: Productivity and multimedia tools on the go.
Compaq Presario notebook PCs: Desktop performance and integrated wireless features.
Desktops: For Home and Home Office.
HP Pavilion desktop PCs: Perfect for digital imaging needs
Compaq Presario desktop PCs: Advanced home and wireless networking capabilities
The only shred of differentiation is that the Pavilion line has better multimedia/imaging capabilities and the Compaq line’s geared for the power user. But that isn’t great shakes. There is plenty of overlap between the lines. Look at the specs for the Pavilion and the Presarion notebooks and you’ll find some from the former line virtually indistinguishable from some from the latter. Ditto with the desktops. What makes me choose one over the other? And because of all this chaos, there’s no answer to “why would I buy any of these instead of a Dell or an IBM Thinkpad”?
Poor performance from the Enterprise servers and storage division in the third quarter last year (revenue was down 5%, and losses were $208 million)[19] dragged down HP’s performance in the printing, imaging, PC and services business. This was in spite of the same market segment (servers and storage) showing a resurgence that quarter. Fiorina blamed the mess on problems with a new order-processing system in the US. This caused HP to miss some order altogether, and to ship others by air. She also admitted that the usual “acceleration” in server sales towards the end of the year was “muted”. Promising “immediate management changes”, HP fired the head of Enterprise Sales, the EMEA head of the Customer Solutions Group, and the head of Enterprise sales for the Americas[5]. This was seen as many as a knee-jerk reaction, perhaps unnecessary, and unlikely to have any significant impact on what appears to be a problem in execution strategy.
What are HP’s problems?
HP has a wide range of products and services. There are consumer-oriented areas and business-oriented ones. Consequently, HP has a problem of positioning itself, because it has too wide a portfolio. It tries to succeed in enterprise IT, personal computing, peripherals, and emerging technologies. It competes with Dell in the low- and mid-range PC business, against Sony in the consumer electronics segment, and against IBM in the enterprise. All of these three competitors are focussed on their industries. Since Dell does little spending on R&D, has a focussed approach to cutting operating costs, and sells direct to customers, its operating overheads are 10%, as compared to 18% at HP (and 42% at Sun). IBM, at the other end of the scale, has decided it does not want to be in this business at all, and has sold its PC business.
HP can be viewed as being made up of three major units. The printing and imaging business, the PC business (these to were combined in January), and the high-end, enterprise business (Here too, the hardware, software and services businesses were combined to form the Technology Solutions Group).The printing and imaging business is clearly HP’s strength. It accounts for only 30% of HP’s revenue, but generates 75% of its profits. However, because it is dependent on the performance of the rest of HP, it is missing out on growth opportunities. The PC business is large: HP is the world’s second-largest vendor of PCs, behind Dell and ahead of IBM-Lenovo. But Dell’s efficiency in its delivery model is widening the gap between Dell and the rest. Margins in this business are razor-thin, and the industry consensus is that if you’re not purely in the PC business, then stay out of it. Which is precisely what IBM did. As far as the high-end business goes, there are numerous problems there too. They’ve been discussed in a later section.
An interesting point [20] is how HP became a victim of its own “centrist” strategy, the “Switzerland” syndrome. HP tries to diplomatically offer both Windows and Linux servers on the x86 architecture, without resounding success with either. IBM, in contrast, is a staunch supporter of Linux across its product line, the Power-based pSeries, the Intel-based xSeries, even its zSeries mainframes. Sun has injected itself with an adrenaline shot named Solaris 10, and is pushing the Operating Environment with the zeal of a holy war. Sun has come up with all sorts of innovative ideas – such as its pay-per-use grid computing initiative, to which HP has no answer. Finally, both IBM and Sun have assiduously cultivated developers for their product base, and now have a large developer base, which fuels third-party applications and plugins being written on top of their middleware. HP has no developer base to speak of, and no middleware to write applications for.
Therefore, HP’s printing business is the only one which is doing well now, and which has potential for driving HP’s growth. The questions that HP’s new CEO must answer are:
How can HP leverage its strength in printing and imaging?
How does HP define its identity?
How can HP find synergy across its product lines?
What are the future growth areas for HP?
Where is HP losing market share, and what do HP do about it?
Do we keep HP together or do we split it? If so, how?
Breaking up HP into two:
A section of the industry advocates that HP be split up into two companies, with very different markets to target. This is primarily to address HP’s lack of focus, and to end its identity crisis. One, the enterprise business, would be focussed on business customers – the Medium and Large businesses. The printing, imaging and PC business would focus on consumers, small-and-meduim businesses and retail sales. This is IBM’s key differentiating feature: IBM does not focus on consumers, and even sold its PC business while it was still generating profits. In contrast, HP tries to be an enterprise company and a consumer-electronics company at the same time. Patricia Dunn, the interim Chairman, and Bob Wayman, the interim CEO, are, like Fiorina, opposed to a split-up of HP. During Fiorina’s tenure, spinning off the printer business was discussed at least twice, but rejected each time. In case HP is indeed split, the printer business would be headed by Vyomesh Joshi (current executive VP of the combined PC/printer division). The other business (high-end servers, storage, software and services, collectively known as the Technology Solutions Group) is headed by Ann Livermore (executive VP of that division).
Problems with a breakup: The Enterprise business is sick
The PC/printer division might do well/better, with greater autonomy. But the other, high-end high-margin business, is already underperforming (as can be seen from profit-to-revenue ratios). First of all, HP has a very complicated product line[6], which it had begun simplifying after the Compaq merger[7]. Most of HP’s revenues in this market come from selling high-end PA-RISC and Itanium servers with HP-UX installed (although HP also sells Intel x86-based servers running Linux, Windows and OpenVMS).
After end-of-life-ing Compaq’s Tru64 UNIX OS, and abandoning plans to build AdvFS and TruCluster technologies from Tru64 into HP-UX [4] (instead using Veritas’ Storage Foundation Cluster File System and Storage Foundation) last December, HP seems to be giving out signals that further innovation in HP-UX is slowing down. The delivery date for HP-UX 11iv3 has slipped consistently from 2004 to the first half of 2006.
The other problem is the hardware platform. HP-UX runs on the PA-RISC platform and the Itanium. HP has refused to port HP-UX to the x86 architecture [11]. It announced end-of-life for its HP 9000 series running on the PA-RISC. The Itanium (and the Itanium 2) never gained a decent market share in the first place[8], and have been all but superceded by AMD’s Opteron and Intel’s own Xeon EM64T 64-bit processors with 32-bit extensions, which can run both 64-bit and 32-bit applications at native speeds. In addition, HP’s statements on the Itanium do not match its actions. It has announced that “we continue to see Itanium as the future 64-bit microprocessor”[7], implying also that the PA-RISC does not have a future. But late last year, HP dropped its Itanium workstation line, admitting the shift towards 64-bit extension technology [9], and ended its design work on the Itanium[10]. Also, HP sells over 90% of the Itanium servers sold in the market, implying negligible volumes from the rest of the industry.
Clearly, both the OS and the hardware platform are in trouble. HP, therefore, is increasingly being seen as a reseller of other companies’ technologies, rather than investing in its own.
Maximizing returns from the printing and imaging business:
To repeat, the printing and imaging business accounts for only 30% of HP’s revenue, but generates 75% of its profits. If the company is indeed split, this area of the business could grow phenomenally. There is also another strategy that HP could use[2]: Keeping the company together but turning it into an imaging-centric one. Focussing all product and services lines on the imaging business. Here are some of the possibilities:
Buy Eastman Kodak (valued at $9.8 billion) or Xerox ($14.2 billion) and merge the printing business with the new acquisition. This can open up new customers and can help expand the business further. HP can make such an acquisition. It has $14 billion in foreign profits[2] which can qualify for a one-time tax break if this money is invested in the US. HP’s share price in case of breakup would be $27-28 a share[2], out of which the printing business itself is worth $20 appx.
Printing and imaging also has the most opportunities. HP has 40%+ share in the conventional desktop inkjet/laser printer market, but has not yet entered the high-end networked printers market. Today this is dominated by Xerox, Canon and Ricoh. That is why Xerox is a good acquisition for HP. Demand for photo printers and digital cameras is expected to shoot up over coming years. This makes Kodak attractive, as Kodak has strong prescence in the photo printing market as well as in-store kiosk printing/online printing services.
On the enterprise side, HP could use its expertise in high-performance computing and apply it to emerging markets, where again, margins are high. High performance, special-purpose microprocessors from HP could be used in computer simulations for gaming, weather forecasting, bio-informatics and genetics, and medical imaging. These are all areas where the market either is too nascent yet, or is highly fragmented. HP has an opportunity here to become an industry leader by being first off the blocks.
Conglomerate HP:
The alternative to an outright split-up is to build a conglomerate out of HP, like GE. The advantage of a conglomerate is it can take advantage of market fluctuations. When certain segments of the market are doing badly, the management can focus strategy around the other segments, thus minimising overall impact. In HP’s case, [1] when consumer spending is hot, it can gain an overall edge on IBM, which has no consumer business but competes against HP for corporate contracts; if corporate zooms, HP can then move ahead of rival Sony in consumer electronics. This appears to be a less popular sentiment than either a spin-off of the printing and imaging business, and a split of HP.
Conclusion:
We’ve been through a range of issues in the analysis above: Where and why Carly Fiorina failed for HP, why HP needs a change in strategy, and various strategy options for the company. The right strategy is one that strikes a balance between the need for HP to redefine itself radically, and yet maintains the strength of a unified HP. That one appears to be restructuring HP completely around its printing and imaging business. That way, HP can target both the consumer and the enterprise, position itself attractively as the ultimate in everything print and image, and keep itself from a difficult and risk-ridden split. What HP ultimately should do is a tough question Carly’s successor will have to answer.
References:
[1] Fiorina steps down at HP. News.com
[2] Choosing a new HP chief and mulling strategy
[3] HP must open source Tru64 goodies – users
[4] HP laughs off Tru64 promises, welcomes Veritas
[5] New round of HP firings to cost $200m
[6] Hewlett-Packard Server Snapshot
[7] HP Product Roadmaps
[8] Only 3,500 Intel Itanium Servers shipped in 2002
[9] HP gives Itanium the boot
[10] HP sends Itanium designers to Intel
[11] Livermore: No need for HP-UX on x86
[12] Does HP need a new course?
[13] HP combines printer, PC units
[14] HP-Compaq merger: Worth the wait?
[15] Analysis: HP PC Unit’s Future Unsettled
[16] HP Analysis: Carly Fiorina Facing “A Skeptical Business Press”
[17] Fiorina’s fuzzy vision
[18] Where Fiorina Went Wrong
[19] Storage, servers bruise HP earnings
[20] Fiorina falls victim to HP’s Switzerland syndrome
bout the author:
Rahul Gaitonde works as a software developer for IBM’s India Software Labs at Pune, India, chiefly in the areas of filesystems, distributed computing, storage area networks and network security. His present areas of interest are the Linux Kernel, Linux on the Desktop and collaboration software. He also writes frequently on a variety of issues, mostly technology-related ones. www.rahulgaitonde.org houses information about him and his work – along with occasional glimpses of his non-work life. He has 3 articles published on OSNews previously: “The KDE 3.2 Beta 2 User Review”, “Giving XFce4 a Spin” and “IceWM – The Cool Window Manager”.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
This is one of the best I have read here. Very nice.
The author did a great job. I knew that HP was in trouble, but I never knew why. They seen to get into everything (the new HP iPods they probably make very little money on come to mind) while they do well at nothing.
I could sense that something was wrong, because who the hell would want Compaq? Then all the support for the Itanic. Gosh, it was like HP had these plans for the best thing to do and did the opposite. I glad this explained the mistakes. Meanwhile competitors such as IBM are trimming up and heading forward.
Sounds like an article from Business Week…. This is not a compliment.
Conclusion of the article is: focus on printers and imaging (cameras/scanners/etc). This is just a rehash of what is written in all articles written about HP since Carly left.
This article contains just general thoughts, the same kind I heard at the pub yesterday.
There is no real business analysis in these. Uninteresting article.
Printing and imaging also has the most opportunities. HP has 40%+ share in the conventional desktop inkjet/laser printer market, but has not yet entered the high-end networked printers market. Today this is dominated by Xerox, Canon and Ricoh.
Say what? high end network printers dominated by Xerox, Canon, and Ricoh? I call BS on this one. I can’t remember the last time I saw a networked laser printer that wasn’t an HP or a Lexmark. In fact, I can’t ever remember seeing a networked Canon in a business.
all the Mid size companys i have seen allways run the high end Xerox and Ricoh systems. that shows, I have never seen a large/highend hp printer anywhere..
I’ve seen the High end Xerox Document Center systems out there, but they are outnumbered about 25 to 1 by HP 8000 series printers. Maybe the guy was talking about multi function devices like that. I took his use of the word “printer” to mean literally that.
The way I see it, acknowledging that I am an outsider and only have the news stories for facts, I think Carly was a loose cannon but she’s also a scapegoat. Carly bit off more than she could chew and yet everyone sat around and let her.
I think the over-wound leaders at HP who elected her must have been focused too much on how cool it would be to have a female CEO and too little on her quality and experience.
Apparently, her performance sucked to put it plainly in the end. How many stories have we heard of high-profile CEOs/CIOs getting into a company, making big, showy moves, then quitting or “stepping down” and leaving the company high and dry while getting paid millions to leave?
I think the fundamental problem is with the Investors. They let the inept Board let the company go to pieces. They should respond by pulling their money. But what do they do? They sock more money into HP just because they fired…I mean because Carly “stepped down”. This is the fundamental problem – ignorant investors.
After reading all of this, and other stories, I’ve come to this conclusion:
HP is too fat, they got fat too fast, they are disorganized and have too many (probably overpaid) chiefs and I’m thinking to myself: Why in Hell would I want to own HP stock?
I just looked at the price chart. I’d consider the period from 1996-2002 to be all bubble over-valuation at least. How would they grow my money better than I could or another company as they are?
The Board members responsible for the state of this disorganized company are lame. They deserve the next highest level of blame after the investors who dump their money. They watched her performance all of this time – what took them so long to start straightening things out? I realize there was a fight between those who wanted the HP/Compaq merger and those who did not, but I think the problem started well before that.
I think there should be a cap on any pay and benefits for CEOs/CIOs and the leaders should be paid as Warren Buffett does – the leaders are paid based on performance.
The Board needs to be more responsive and responsible for shareholder money. I’d say for the most part, the leadership of most companies do not treat investor money as sacrosanct as they should. They just like to fatten themselves up on the ignorant money of the sheeple that throw their money at them. The Board members responsible for choosing Carly would do well to “step down” themselves.
I think HP should sell the PC business. They should focus on their printing/imaging and get their technology solutions group up to quality so that we feel as good about HP servers as we did about Compaq servers. And as far as processors go – I think they should port to x86 and IBM Power series processors – those are two areas of survivability.
Linux is the future. Make those printers print in Linux as easily as they do in Windows, run your servers on x86 and Power and port to Linux. Get it together HP leadership! Respect the investors’ money!
> And as far as processors go – I think they should port to
> x86 and IBM Power series processors – those are two areas of
> survivability.
Port what?. You mean port hardware?!?
If you’re talking OS, then Linux is already on x86 and PowerPC. If you’re talking HPUX, why?. HPUX works best on PARISC going to PowerPC is a waste.
I think openvms and linux on itanium is where they should fucus more instead of hp-ux. and I think they should either slit off or sell there printer division to allow for more focus on a more demanding market.
Rahul,
You’ve wasted your time in writing an article when you could have been on working on the Linux kernel.
It’s ridiculous for you to say that HP should get rid of everything and focus on the imaging/print market when everyone knows that market is pretty much saturated.
How often are people going replace laser jets etc? Even on the enterprise level – a printer is a printer that prints. That’s just it.
I don’t give a rats a$$ if the latest and greatest model of HP LaserJet 7000 prints 4 ppm faster and can talk to MS Exchange 2003 blah blah.
HP has gone through some rough patches (like any company who merges with another large company) and will get through it. You say HP’s enterprise market is the worst? Why don’t you purchaase one of their DL class blade servers and compare them to the crap that Dell pumps out and then maybe you’ll think otherwise.
Your comments about HP-UX are baseless as well. Do you see IBM putting a lot of $$$ in AIX R&D? NO – why? Because they know that competing against Linux is pointless especially when you have a large community of developers investing into Linux for FREE.
Get back to debuggin that kernel Rahul – you’re “business” commentaries are worthless.
Milione
and let compaq do all the PC stuff. before the merger and up until last year, compaqs were by far the most well built and best in class desktops when compared to dell, gateway, hp, emachine…..ect
HP was in a tough position before the Compaq deal, now it’s a company almost impossible to manage, with major engineering and manufacturing workforces scattered around the US and the world. Getting back to the old idea of HP standing for innovation will be really tough with all this baggage.
They can sell the printing business and that would please the stockholders, but the rest of the company has grown dependent on that cash cow.
The board really screwed up by not vetoing the Compaq deal. Hewitt’s son did his best, but he apparently didn’t have enough clout on the board as he lacked substantial experience in both business and technology.
Back in the day, I said that HP/Compaq was a very bad idea, and I was surprised when it passed. There was a cult of personality with this CEO, and simply not a good one. When she received something in the neighborhood of 55 million for the deal in options, stock, cash, and the CEO of Compaq received in the 20+ million, I knew it was a scam. It didn’t serve the company, it served the CEOs. When is America, and the world going to awake and take back what is rightfully theres? Seems the board of HP is doing just that, and it is about time. I have to applaud HP, unfortunately they didn’t want to see it coming, nor did the majority shareholders.
Printers, imaging, PC’s, HP-UX, etc… this is about summarizes all that hp does now, and it still should do this in the future, but without the PC’s. Dropping the PC business would free up lots of valuable resources that could be invested into the printers (like providing really good drivers and support for linux), and other consumer electronics (scanners, etc..). As for HP-UX…i personally think that HP needs to define itself on this level also. Think of it as “two (equally important) faces of one company – one face is a company that makes the best printers in the world (i am dead serious about this – i would never want a printer that is not an HP printer), and other printing/imaging related gadgets that run equally good on windows/linux/macosx and the other face would be the face that would be shown to large business customers: a stable and rock solid UNIX, with excellent support, excellent storage hardware and powerful office printing solutions (i am talking the 9000 series of printers). I think that if HP would pull this off, it would boost the company out of the shit it is in now, and put in on the map in bold
I think there should be a cap on any pay and benefits for CEOs/CIOs and the leaders should be paid as Warren Buffett does – the leaders are paid based on performance.
Steve Jobs’ annual salary is $1.-
OK. Plus bonuses he makes like 50-60 millions a year.
And stock climbed from $19 to $88 in a year: Investors (should) love him.
HP bought Compaq right when Compaq servers were going down hill. Compaq desktop were always complete garbage. They also should have advanced the PA-RISC CPU or at least developed a new(er) architecture in house and left intel out of it. Hell they had the Alpha patents and the brains behind it plus the PA-RISC guys i would think they could have come up with some cool stuff to further their superior HP9000 line of hardware and OS.
I agree with the article writer. Good stuff.
The Compaq deal was their biggest mistake.
Btw, I am still amazed Kodak came back from near extinction.
“Great article. There is depth in here that I’m not surprised the majority of readers here can’t grasp.”
Indeed. Many of the people commenting seem to extrapolate from their LAN party experiences, thinking that the enterprise is just a grander version of the same kind of thing – more marble and gold-plated taps or something.
LM wrote “Steve Jobs’ annual salary is $1.-
OK. Plus bonuses he makes like 50-60 millions a year.
And stock climbed from $19 to $88 in a year: Investors (should) love him.”
That’s the idea but paying one person that much of investor money is ridiculous. I will not say that someone should not be allowed to have that much in exchange for what they do, but I will say that no one is worth that much. There again, an example of irrational overpaying on the board’s part.
Not only that but I doubt apple is worth 88.00 per share, especially in one year. Just because of the ipod? More bubble building – trying to relive the late ’90s.
I’d rather read this then some lame new Linux Distro same-old story. This has depth, references and analysis.
It failed to note however, that HP Pavilions are totally lame.
How can you possibly compare Sun’s operating expenses to those of Dell? You’re making a big deal about a re-manufacturer. Dell is more of an offshore account than a tech company. And why would HPQ want to acquire Kodak or Xerox when they can’t even digest Compaq. Your own article points out the failure of buying competing products. I’ve never seen a network printer that wasn’t HPs. And finally lets put Carly to rest. She made a 100 million dollars for screwing a company. That’s some street walking they do on wall street.
One lesson from the HP Enterprise Computing Saga is simple: never depend on another vendor for your core CPU.
PA-RISC wasn’t great, but it was HPs. When HP went with Itanic, it put its high-end server line into someone else’s hands. As everyone knows now, Itanium is pretty much a POS.
SGI did the same thing, and look where they are now.
Sun and IBM, however, still control their own destiny because they control their processor (Sun, of course, has a big question mark after it).
As it is, nobody really wants to migrate off of PA-RISC to Itanium. They’ll probably move to Linux on Operon (or Solaris on Opteron) if they have to move. This leaves a nice opportunity for the other vendors. After all, if you have to recompile for Itanic, why not recompile to Linux or Solaris instead?
Fix the website. Simplify, use open standards, minimize script.
Start thinking about hardware design with finished software that can be open sourced and free to the customer. Look to buy smaller start-ups doing hardware design/sales for large markets this way.
Reduce the PC line to 3 desktop and 3 laptop models. Get rid of the Compaq brand and the Pavilion line.
Reduce the inkjet cartridge types for mass-market printers down to 1.
Sell a fast, cheap, quiet black only inkjet.
The Kodak picture stations are a good idea, but they use ordinary PC devices and the thing crashed on me once, it probably uses Win. HP can design their own station, open source the software, and patent/lease the hardware. Get out of the digicam market, and maybe think about video production stations instead.
Look into the possibility of designing low priced electronic test equipment.
There’s still potential in HP-UX/Linux on PARISC. It would have been possible to sell cheap Linux/PARISC supported boxes, just as IBM with their Linux on POWER strategy.
But they have probably agreed with Intel long time ago to abondon all CPU business. Looks like HP is going the way SGI did
Interesting how this chick got all those
benefits for screwing up a company.