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melgross

macrumors 6502
Jan 23, 2004
446
394
New York City
Seriously?

Quite frankly, I'm surprised at this. HP was so quick to get rid of Hurd, not only
Y because of his relationship and expense reports, but also because he was highly unpopular there. He almost destroyed the R&D department with horrific cost cutting. His was a rule that emphased the present profitability against long term viability.

He was not a good CEO at all.
 

theBB

macrumors 68020
Jan 3, 2006
2,453
3
Is there some compelling HP product or service that I might want to buy? Something better than what other companies sell? Just wondering cuz I really don't know.
I don't think any of us here can tell, as HP is shifting towards software heavy enterprise infrastructure business that consumers or even most employees at the client corporations do not interact with.
 

pward

macrumors regular
Nov 26, 2008
135
41
Yup, and the crazy thing is, if Hurd was still in charge, you can bet that right now HP would have a fair size of the mobile market firmly in their pockets.

No, they wouldn't. Yes, HP bought Palm and so had the opportunity to enter the mobile market but were unwilling to spend the money necessary to enter and remain in the market.

----------

Quite frankly, I'm surprised at this. HP was so quick to get rid of Hurd, not only
Y because of his relationship and expense reports, but also because he was highly unpopular there. He almost destroyed the R&D department with horrific cost cutting. His was a rule that emphased the present profitability against long term viability.

He was not a good CEO at all.

Completely agree; he was unpopular and by some accounts a bit of a bully. He also only know how to do one thing and that was cut costs. This helps short term profitability hence the Street and investors loved it but ultimately you cannot cut your way to prosperity.
 

rmwebs

macrumors 68040
Apr 6, 2007
3,140
0
No, they wouldn't. Yes, HP bought Palm and so had the opportunity to enter the mobile market but were unwilling to spend the money necessary to enter and remain in the market.

Actually before the ousting they were spending money - they invested a lot of money into their mobile devision. They had plans for a small version of the touchpad as well as a pretty good roadmap for WebOS. The reason we never got to see this is because Hurd was ousted before any of the marketing for the Touchpad was released.

If you actually read what Hurd did at his time with HP you'll see that he was actually a pretty great CEO for them, one of the best they had ever had in fact.

One such quote from the New York Times:

Though not without detractors, Mr. Hurd pulled off one of the great rescue missions in American corporate history, refocusing the strife-ridden company and leading it to five years of revenue gains and a stock that soared 130 percent.


----------

Completely agree; he was unpopular and by some accounts a bit of a bully. He also only know how to do one thing and that was cut costs. This helps short term profitability hence the Street and investors loved it but ultimately you cannot cut your way to prosperity.

Surely a certain Mr Jobs fit into that first sentence pretty well. A lot of CEO's are bullies. Its in their nature.

Cost cutting was really something that HP had to do though. When Hurd took over, they were bleeding cash. Carly Fiorina had left the company in a huge mess, destroying moral of the staff and alienating customers.
 

alent1234

macrumors 603
Jun 19, 2009
5,688
170
I don't think any of us here can tell, as HP is shifting towards software heavy enterprise infrastructure business that consumers or even most employees at the client corporations do not interact with.

i've interacted with HP Enterprise software, it sucks

I still can't understand how HP beat dell in the server biz. Every time i deal with HP i get the feeling like its this huge unorganized organization where everything is a band-aid solution.

dell i can go online, type in the serial number of a device and get data about it right away. HP's site is still a convoluted mess after all these years
 

sseaton1971

macrumors 6502
Feb 9, 2012
431
11
I've speculated that it was BECAUSE he was ejected from Apple that Jobs was able to do the things he did later. He needed time to grow, to learn, to mature. Only after spending time in the wilderness could he come back with the best of the 'old Jobs' along with the skills he picked up along the way and be the visionary he was in his last decade. In '84 he had all sorts of great ideas but he didn't know how to run a company.

Many people have suggested this, and Steve jobs, himself, said that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to him.
 

theBB

macrumors 68020
Jan 3, 2006
2,453
3
Quite frankly, I'm surprised at this. HP was so quick to get rid of Hurd, not only
Y because of his relationship and expense reports, but also because he was highly unpopular there. He almost destroyed the R&D department with horrific cost cutting. His was a rule that emphased the present profitability against long term viability.

He was not a good CEO at all.
In his defense tough, would more spending on R&D make a difference? HP was, and is, in the generic PC business, where everybody uses the same OS and roughly the same hardware blueprint. To keep the prices competitive, a company needs scale and low costs, in other words not much "R", but rather some quick "D". Printer business is not going to grow, either, so that is another area where inexpensive "D" rather than "R" is needed. In response, he tried to shift HP into higher value enterprise software and consulting businesses, where "R" might actually make a difference. He was also smart enough to see the potential in mobile devices and the value of owning the OS to prevent a repeat of race to the bottom generic PC situation and bought Palm. That was a risky move, so there is guarantee that HP could execute, but you cannot make money without taking risks.

On the other hand, the ranking of employees against each other and 10% mandatory cull every year is not a good move. It destroys productivity in areas where you need teams of people working together. People tend to avoid joining groups with good employees to avoid getting ranked against them. Going through reviews every quarter wastes a lot of employee time, too.
 

KPOM

macrumors P6
Oct 23, 2010
18,020
7,863
thanks for the etymology! I always thought it was related to “apothecary,” looked it up just now and see that yep, apothecary comes from apotheke, “storehouse."

Perhaps it's because Leo Apotheker ran the company as if he were on drugs the entire time?
 

MeFromHere

macrumors 6502
Oct 11, 2012
468
16
I would have agreed with that had I not known how far HP has fallen since then. Since Hurd left, HP hired a software guy to run a hardware company, exited the smartphone and tablet markets (Palm purchased under Hurd) and threw away the $1.2 billion it cost to acquire them, flirted with exiting the PC business, fired the software guy, hired Meg Whitman as CEO who, as an HP board member approved the bonehead moves Apotheker made, laid off 27,000 employees after posting a profit decline of 31%, wrote off $8.8 billion from their purchase of Autonomy and increased the number of pay offs to 29,000.

I bet the HP board wishes everyday, check that, multiple times a day, that they didn't fire Hurd.

Hurd was a complete disaster for HP. His only game was cost-cutting. He gutted R&D, slowing product development to a near-standstill. The flagship stuff that HP shipped while Hurd was CEO was nearly all in progress before he arrived. Much of HP's recent malaise is the result of Hurd's strangulation, which is now bearing its inevitable fruit.

Apotheker was hardly around long enough to matter, and all of his big "dumb" decisions were fully supported by the board of directors. HP's board was, and remains, once of the most inept in the industry.

HP is no longer the giant of Silicon valley that people remember fondly. It's a shadow of its former self, populated by demoralized husks wondering when it will be their turn to be laid off.
 

theBB

macrumors 68020
Jan 3, 2006
2,453
3
i've interacted with HP Enterprise software, it sucks

I still can't understand how HP beat dell in the server biz. Every time i deal with HP i get the feeling like its this huge unorganized organization where everything is a band-aid solution.

dell i can go online, type in the serial number of a device and get data about it right away. HP's site is still a convoluted mess after all these years
The people who make such purchase decisions rarely have to operate these software suites or deal with hardware support issues themselves, so their decisions are influenced by other factors. How else can you explain the success of SAP? :)
 

qtx43

macrumors 6502a
Aug 4, 2007
659
16
HP's legacy was spun off as Agilent, and confirmed by numerous decisions to focus on becoming a commodity printer and PC maker.
 

theBB

macrumors 68020
Jan 3, 2006
2,453
3
Apotheker was hardly around long enough to matter,
It was long enough to scuttle WebOS and any participation in the explosive growth of mobile devices, to overpay for Autonomy and to announce an exit from PC business only to reverse it a few months later.

and all of his big "dumb" decisions were fully supported by the board of directors. HP's board was, and remains, once of the most inept in the industry.
Well, don't discount Yahoo's board from that competition, although its last hire seems to be promising. :)
 

darkplanets

macrumors 6502a
Nov 6, 2009
853
1
Is there some compelling HP product or service that I might want to buy? Something better than what other companies sell? Just wondering cuz I really don't know.

HP is known for it's enterprise solutions -- mainly servers. I have no expertise in that area so I can't say for sure, but some say the support structure is crap, likely due to the large size and mismanagement in the company.

WebOS would have been something. It was a pretty slick OS that they nuked through being inept.

Spinning off Agilent was also a mistake. Whether it would have blossomed under HP, who knows, but I prefer many of Agilents products to say, GE.
 

gatearray

macrumors 65816
Apr 24, 2010
1,130
232
Only the hard core Apple haters and pseudo techies (basement nerds) refuse to acknowledge that Steve Jobs had, and still has, tremendous influence over Silicon Valley. Almost all of the now famous startups were mentored or modeled their businesses after Steve Jobs and Apple. Even Microsoft, with the decision to produce the whole package of hardware and software, has been influenced over the years. That there is this hateful movement to denigrate and marginalize Jobs' and Apple's place in tech history is shameful. These people are delusional.


Spot on.

Not only that, but many of these senseless haters of Steve Jobs around here are probably teenage Americans, which never ceases to amaze me.

So instead of taking inspiration from or even showing a modicum of respect for a visionary man who pulled himself up from nothing to accomplish so many amazing successes and achievements, they bray at the feet of Samsung, a shameless rip-off artist with muscle, basically run by the Korean mafia. Whatever.
 

76ShovelHead

macrumors 6502a
May 30, 2010
527
32
Florida
Maybe HP used to a good company. Maybe Jobs never owned a recent HP product. But every HP/Compaq I've owned (which was two) fell apart on me in the same order within 5 years.

Hinges go first. Plastics crack. Battery stops holding charge. Hard drive starts failing. Power adapter no longer giving power to the machine/or machine power input just broken.

Happened to me with a 2000 Compaq. Happened again with a 2005 Compaq.

Both of these machines lived their life on a desk.

Now my sisters new HP has the worst trackpad I've ever used. Its impossible to use.
 

wizard

macrumors 68040
May 29, 2003
3,854
571
For some reason, I find that comparison completely absurd.

The problem is it takes two to have normal sex. Many of these claims are after the fact when a relationship goes sour. To put it plainly woman can be very manipulative and know that the law is on their side and that a few tears shed in public will get them whatever they want. This is reality and sadly is what makes sexual harassment claims something to always be questioned. It is sad because there is a legitimate problem with sexual up harassment but there is also the reality that problably 50% of the cases are directly the result of conspiracy on the part of the woman involved.

In the end you will likely never know what is up with this specific case. Was the claim real? Was there a relationship that went sour? Who initiated the relationship? In this regard this could simply be a case of corporate politics and in that regard is similar to Steve's case. One thing is for sure nobody speaks the whole unabridged truth in these cases.
 

wizard

macrumors 68040
May 29, 2003
3,854
571
HP is known for it's enterprise solutions -- mainly servers. I have no expertise in that area so I can't say for sure, but some say the support structure is crap, likely due to the large size and mismanagement in the company.
The corporate world is in a world of hurt right now as they don't have a reliable partner for their IT needs. Both Dell and HP have burnt many bridges with their corporate customers.
WebOS would have been something. It was a pretty slick OS that they nuked through being inept.
There was certainly a lack of commitment to the product.
Spinning off Agilent was also a mistake. Whether it would have blossomed under HP, who knows, but I prefer many of Agilents products to say, GE.

This is the funny part, no one at Agilent would say that. I've heard it said that they where very happy with the split as they considered at the time that they got the better half of the management team. Looks like they where right! I also use some of Agilents products, mostly DVMs of different sorts and power meters - good stuff! It is interesting that Agilent has remained viable while companies like Tektronix have ended up loosing their independence. Part of that goes back to the management team which at Agilent appears to have that rare combo of business sense combined with the technical knowledge to sustain the company.

As a side note I've often wondered what would happen to Agilents devices if Apple acquired them and added iOS to many of their instruments. We would enter into the age of smart DVM and O'Scopes with all sorts of apps. If there is one thing I hate about Agilent, and the other big instrument makers, is the unbundling of software enhancements and the general gouging for those enhancements. Imagine a DVM, or O'Scope API like the current APIs for things like the accelerometer on iOS devices.
 

Will do good

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2010
666
391
Earth
Why do you ask? Are you in the industry? Who cares, what somebody does fpr THE INDUSTRY??

Yes I am. I support my family thru technology that Steve and Apple had made, so does most of my friends and suppliers.

Do you know how many people make a really good living off technology (THE INDUSTRY). That's why I care.
 
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