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HP to Spin Off PC Business as Sales Stagnate
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For the moment at least, HP has 3 separate units:lol so what does this mean?? translation for the stupid please??
so they are no longer making PC's or what?
- Personal Systems Group: business and consumer PCs, mobile computing devices and workstations
- The Imaging and Printing Group: inkjet, LaserJet and commercial printing, printing supplies
- Enterprise Business: business products including storage and servers, enterprise services, software and networking
As per servers, even if they intend to sell the PSG division off entirely (no more consumer, business, or workstation computers with an HP or different label, but otherwise unchanged at the time of the split if it is to be a new company), save the WebOS software rights, the servers will still be available, as they're handled by the Enterprise Business Group (where the money is for HP anyway).
We don't know for certain yet, but even if they sell of the PSG entirely, there will still be HP branded computers. They'll just be servers developed by the Enterprise Business Group.
This won't affect their printers or supplies. That would be another spin-off or sale, but there's still money in the supplies portion of this division, so it seems they want to keep it around for the moment.
Yes. They're called clusters.
hehe don't read the forums, it is overrun by morons who flamebait the hell out of the place just to get some reaction. <-
who flamebait the hell out of the place just to get some reaction. <-
No. At that time, Steve Jobs was a college drop-out with an interest in drugs and industrial design. I took him a lot of talking to get Woz to quit his job at HP which he loved very much and to commit fully to this adventure named Apple.
Woz was and still is an engineer at heart and back then, HP offered him everything that he wanted and he could do there what he liked. There was no need for him to do something else or move on.
Jobs, on the other side, was NOT a technical person and certainly NOT an engineer and had nothing else to do.
Don't get me wrong here: It's Jobs' TASTE for design that made every Apple product what it was. Obviously, this taste is ultimately more important for a product and the culture around the product than any of the technical aspects involved. Also, Steve Jobs is an awesome salesperson.
Anyway, back to the real topic here: HP.
It's not a big deal, really. They only make the same move that IBM made a couple of years ago. Maybe Lenovo will also buy the PC business from them, as they did with IBM. Maybe somebody else will.
For companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP and even Dell, the consumer market is basically a cost-center and thus an afterthought. They make their money in the business/enterprise sector - the very market that Apple never was able to enter.
That basically means that HP/Compaq workstation computers and their entire server line including HP/UX remains completely untouched, just the consumer computer products go away to another company.
As for the tablet products and WebOS -- that probably is a smart move for them, too. It's easier to sell a software platform when you do not compete with your OEMs. That's exactly why Microsoft never entered the PC hardware business.
Quality focus
I think is interesting th Apple computers continue to see growth in their sales during an world-wide economic downturn.
I think it is because Apple laptops and mobile devices, represent a 'bit of nice' during otherwise troubled times. These products are expessive but they are obtainable, people can strecch to the prices and clearly are. Despitre the high ticket price, people are still buying Mac's iPhones and no iPad's over other sometimes much cheaper (but Cr*p) products.
I think companies like HP, Dell and others are surprised. But then big companies do not always understand their customers. Also, rather than develop their own idea's they will often sin ply buy into a company to fill a gap; I am thinking like when Dell bought Alienware.
20 years, as an engineering student I visited a Ford factory in Liverpool, England. At a time, were the cars they made here would often be visibly rusting after only 4 years. I looked round and could see some of the reasons why. The sheet metal was sometimes starting to rust before they pressed it into body panels and built into car shells. Once built they simply spray painted the body shells, no rust prevention treatment. I asked the question "why don't you do something about rust prevention?", I was told, that people were not prepared to pay more for the cars and dipping body shells would put the price f the cars up! I though then, as has been prove over time, that people are willing to pay a bit more for something that works well. People are prepared to pay a little bit more for a car that doesn't rust after 4 years. These days most european cars have key body panels galvanised to prevent early rusting.
So I think that people are prepared to pay $400 more for a laptop that isn't made of poor plastic, that does't squeak or fall to bits after a year. A laptop that comes out of the box with usable software already on it. a few years ago I bought a Dell, for work. I had to spend a day getting rid of trial software that was pre-installed and work out what I actually needed and wanted to run on the thing! My mother bought a desktop HP a few years ago too, I had to sift through the dross on the desktop and tell her what she would need to spend more money on to get what she thought she had bought!
I think Apple's sucsess is applaudable and is s a real vindication to the company's values and dedication to quality, usability.
It is sad that the likes of HP are struggling, yet if they had built better stuff in the first place, this would probably not have happened.
I think is interesting th Apple computers continue to see growth in their sales during an world-wide economic downturn.
I think it is because Apple laptops and mobile devices, represent a 'bit of nice' during otherwise troubled times. These products are expessive but they are obtainable, people can strecch to the prices and clearly are. Despitre the high ticket price, people are still buying Mac's iPhones and no iPad's over other sometimes much cheaper (but Cr*p) products.
I think companies like HP, Dell and others are surprised. But then big companies do not always understand their customers. Also, rather than develop their own idea's they will often sin ply buy into a company to fill a gap; I am thinking like when Dell bought Alienware.
20 years, as an engineering student I visited a Ford factory in Liverpool, England. At a time, were the cars they made here would often be visibly rusting after only 4 years. I looked round and could see some of the reasons why. The sheet metal was sometimes starting to rust before they pressed it into body panels and built into car shells. Once built they simply spray painted the body shells, no rust prevention treatment. I asked the question "why don't you do something about rust prevention?", I was told, that people were not prepared to pay more for the cars and dipping body shells would put the price f the cars up! I though then, as has been prove over time, that people are willing to pay a bit more for something that works well. People are prepared to pay a little bit more for a car that doesn't rust after 4 years. These days most european cars have key body panels galvanised to prevent early rusting.
So I think that people are prepared to pay $400 more for a laptop that isn't made of poor plastic, that does't squeak or fall to bits after a year. A laptop that comes out of the box with usable software already on it. a few years ago I bought a Dell, for work. I had to spend a day getting rid of trial software that was pre-installed and work out what I actually needed and wanted to run on the thing! My mother bought a desktop HP a few years ago too, I had to sift through the dross on the desktop and tell her what she would need to spend more money on to get what she thought she had bought!
I think Apple's sucsess is applaudable and is s a real vindication to the company's values and dedication to quality, usability.
It is sad that the likes of HP are struggling, yet if they had built better stuff in the first place, this would probably not have happened.
Motorola was threatening to go all patent troll on the other Android partners. Google had to buy Motorola to keep that from happening.
Printers - I hope the status quo remains
As someone who has used HP's small business printers for 25 years, I hope that they do not spin off that division to a company who is only looking to strip out perceived value.
No other printer company makes small business printers that are a patch on the HP line. We are currently using Officejet Pro 8000's and Business InkJet 1200D's. The running cost of these is unbelievably low, with the black cartridges lasting over 2,000 pages. They are totally reliable and much better than the laser printers we have used in the past.
We also have Xerox Wax Phasers for brochure work and the running cost of these is around 5 times or more per page than the HP's. Over the years we have been talked into buying Canon where we currently have a Pixma Pro 9500 for A3+ prints and Epson R series for photo work. The Canon has an unbelievable appetite for ink carts and the Epson R's were constantly blocking heads.
Other than as an end user, I have no connection with HP.
As someone who has used HP's small business printers for 25 years, I hope that they do not spin off that division to a company who is only looking to strip out perceived value.
No other printer company makes small business printers that are a patch on the HP line. We are currently using Officejet Pro 8000's and Business InkJet 1200D's. The running cost of these is unbelievably low, with the black cartridges lasting over 2,000 pages. They are totally reliable and much better than the laser printers we have used in the past.
We also have Xerox Wax Phasers for brochure work and the running cost of these is around 5 times or more per page than the HP's. Over the years we have been talked into buying Canon where we currently have a Pixma Pro 9500 for A3+ prints and Epson R series for photo work. The Canon has an unbelievable appetite for ink carts and the Epson R's were constantly blocking heads.
Other than as an end user, I have no connection with HP.
I actually didn't think anyone was going to answer that...
I was using that for sarcasm, but thanks for the answer... Figures it would be about patents... HAHA
I'm not sure their purchase of Autonomy is that great, either. I had an offer to go work for them once, but (and I'm glad I did this), I googled some employee stories first.
I found loads of really, really negative things about them. I found lots of employees saying that working there was like working in a sweatshop (their words), and that they were constantly bullied by their superiors (a few stories namechecked the guy that interviewed me as a total douche!).
Anyway, he also wrote that he was given complex image processing tasks to do on tight schedules with no training and, as mentioned, a bullying supervisor (and apparently he even got called up to the CEO, who was likewise very unsupportive). Anyway, I'm reproducing a lot of it here rather than giving a link, because the company actually sued him to take it down.
Apparently, when he was first shown the product, one of the demonstrators said that Autonomy would buy both Apple and Microsoft!
I don't think this is going to save HP.
Apple would need to change massively; firstly it would have to comitt to 5 year support cycles along with at least 3 year paid-for support then there is the issue of backwards compatibility, providing rapid development tools to quickly push out in house written applications then there is the issue at the back end with servers with automation that hooks into Microsoft Office etc. Quite honestly given the amount of crap that Microsoft has to deal with and the stagnation that enterprise demands have on Microsoft I'd sooner Apple steer well clear of the enterprise - I like the fast paced, nimble and innovative Apple so I don't want to see Apple being hamstrung but the demands of enterprise customers who refuse to maintain their software or upgrade their hardware (because a private jet is oh-so-more-important than re-investing back into the company again).
I just don't know why it's that hard to design a good looking laptop. Is Johnny Ives the only person on this planet that can do this? I mean, corporations have billions of dollars, they can even buy an entire art design school to help with the design. Same goes for tablets and phones. But it's good that they are getting out of the PC market in a "post PC era". I would've focused on tablets if I were them, since they do own a kickass OS and produces the tablets themselves. If they spent a whole year improving everything they can on the Touchpad, I think it can go places, but unfortunately that's out of the picture. Would love to see Google or Microsoft purchase it and make something out of it for future tablets.
Nope. Jonathan Ive is one in a billion talent. Entire art/design schools can't match him.
Your printer will continue to be stubborn and intermittently non-functional, just like normal.
What I'm wondering, and what I'm not reading anywhere in the media yet is what this means for Microsoft?
Not only in terms of real business losses, but the broader effects of the largest PC manufacturer just pulling out of the race can't be good news for MS.
Not only in terms of real business losses, but the broader effects of the largest PC manufacturer just pulling out of the race can't be good news for MS.
This really is enormous news. HP is the number one manufacturer of PC's. Granted, the PC era is winding down to eventually play second fiddle. Sme may say it already has. But this is still huge news. Even if they spin it off into another company, as Motorola did with Motorola Mobile, this has a huge impact on the PC landscape.
What about printers, too?
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I completely agree. This is a major lack of confidence in Windows as a platform by the largest PC manufacturer in the world. I understand that they may still soldier on as a spin-off, but it will never be the same.
I think we are starting to see companies understand that Apple has the hearts and minds of consumers who are willing to spend money on their computing experiences. Those are obviously the most valuable customer. Bottom feeding the scraps, as HP, Dell, and others do is simply not a very profitable business. It's certainly not a growth business.
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At that price, it might be worth snapping one up to keep in the box. It will be an interesting footnote in the annals of touch computing.
What about printers, too?
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I completely agree. This is a major lack of confidence in Windows as a platform by the largest PC manufacturer in the world. I understand that they may still soldier on as a spin-off, but it will never be the same.
I think we are starting to see companies understand that Apple has the hearts and minds of consumers who are willing to spend money on their computing experiences. Those are obviously the most valuable customer. Bottom feeding the scraps, as HP, Dell, and others do is simply not a very profitable business. It's certainly not a growth business.
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So any predictions for when Woot.com puts the TouchPad on sale for $149 plus $5 shipping?
At that price, it might be worth snapping one up to keep in the box. It will be an interesting footnote in the annals of touch computing.
A nice writeup and all that, but it seems to be pure speculation without actual knowledge or checking out their offerings before posting.
HP has quite a large set of enterprise software offerings:
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software/enterprise-software.html#tab=3
Pretty much everything from managing servers, storage, playbook automation and networking in large datacenters, to monitoring, load testing, automated testing. There are apparently virtualization and cloud offerings as well. I can vouch for at least some of their datacenter automation products being quite good, no idea on some of the others.
WebOS and enterprise is just, well, silly, meaning they don't really mix. They *could*, of course, if HP kept the mobile market and tablets - I suppose they could be writing mini-apps for monitoring and interacting with their enterprise offerings. Dropping mobile and tablets, effectively leaves WebOS as a software (and possibly services) offering in the line of Android, available for licensing. Or possibly licensing it to whatever new PSG offering may happen, or for something silly like the next gen printers, which seems a waste. I'd expect them to either remain silly and try to get big $ for WebOS licensing, or get smart and make it very low cost to license, and perhaps retain their App store, but - who knows?
On the Google/Motorola side I am even more confused. Palm tried to license their OS while competing against those who licensed it and failed. Apple tried to license their OS while competing against those who licensed it and failed. Google is now going to produce hardware running their OS and license it to others whom they will compete against. I guess the "advantage" that Google has here is that unlike Palm and Apple, Google is giving away the software instead of extracting a licensing fee from those competitors/partners [sarcasm
All of these major moves this week are hard to get my head wrapped around. I understand what Apple does.... they build product and they sell product. Apple is focused on their customers (which is probably why iAd is so difficult for them -- since customers don't like ads). Being focused on your customer sometimes makes your partners and competitors very upset (AT&T dropping cheaper text messaging plans). But it makes sense since Apple's customers are who provide the revenue. Apple makes hundreds of dollars of direct revenue per user (per device sold). Even if Google made $10 per user per year, how many years of use can you get out of a device to make that a viable business? They have already invested over $10B in Android development (maybe as much as $20B if you count things like litigation with Oracle).
Maybe HP has decided that the customers who make them money are the enterprise customers and the PC business has become a distraction. Maybe this will be good for them like it was for IBM, but IBM already had lots of software products and servers to sell to the enterprise in addition to building solutions around them at an hourly rate. HP has the servers to sell and the solutions to build, but I don't think they have a whole lot of enterprise software products.
See above link - HP has tons of enterprise software offerings. I can tell you from experience that individual enterprise software deals can easily start at contracts in the millions of dollars for some software, or easily a few hundred thousand for the smaller ones. With the PCs effectively becoming commodities, there likely isn't nearly enough profit in them - how many PCs or laptops would need to be sold to equal the margin on a single enterprise software deal? High end PCs and laptops possible being the exception, of course, somewhere that Apple is doing well enough in, likely in part of having very simplified offerings vs the wider range of other companies. Servers - you can fit 48 1U servers in a rack, each costing several thousand dollars minimum on up to 10k or more for some higher end 2-5U sized systems, or for a blade chassis and blades, and many datacenters having hundreds of racks. All of those machines require enterprise class storage and networking, and the margins there are pretty significant.
Your edit2 - entirely wrong. I haven't looked at that other company much, what I did see was mostly CMS and data mining. It won't be HPs first software acquisition, maybe you've heard of WinRunner, LoadRunner, among others?
WebOS - this part is just strange, and short of offering licensing and servicing fees (for enhancements), which may or may not make it anywhere compared to Android - I'm not sure what they could do with it if mobile and PCs are being divested. I was sort of hoping that maybe TouchPad 2 would be decent and priced sanely so I could have played with WebOS.
Jonathan Ive not Johnny Ives
There's no 'h' if you shorten 'Jonathan' to 'Jonny' or 'Jony'. And there's no 's' at the end of 'Ive'.
Sorry - it's a bugbear of mine. My name is Jonathan.
There's no 'h' if you shorten 'Jonathan' to 'Jonny' or 'Jony'. And there's no 's' at the end of 'Ive'.
Sorry - it's a bugbear of mine. My name is Jonathan.
re hp quiting hardware
oh cmon hp - you made a good 25" hd monitor for me - dont quit so easily
although i never got the reverse polish notation calculators that were the rage in my college days
"dazed and confused..." - led zeppelin
oh cmon hp - you made a good 25" hd monitor for me - dont quit so easily
although i never got the reverse polish notation calculators that were the rage in my college days
"dazed and confused..." - led zeppelin
No. In Apple's original corporate agreement, Jobs had a job description of "electrical engineer". He obviously has some skill in the field, even if not a degree.
Excellent post. You bring up good points and they are quite true. The consumer wants to buy a product that will last and not fall apart in a year or so. It seems that Dell, Sony, HP, etc, don't see this at all, much like General Motors didn't see what they were doing wrong until it was too late.