HP shareholders question why company isn't more like Apple - Page 3

Gteat job touting the company line with meaningless replies. These are the kind of answers Sarah Palin gives because she has no original or noteworthy ideas in her head.

Now you know why McCain considered her at one point as a running mate. At least Palin was easy on the eyes.

I would add mdriftmeyer's quote here also, as anantksundaram did, and dtidmore's as well. They are well worth the read, and I can't help but feel our shared experiences were separated only by class schedules (or stops in the Bear Lair).

My fantasy about HP has them re-purchasing Agilent. Ain't gonna happen, so:

1. Throw massive amounts of money into webOS. Make it the software bridge for a wide range of devices. Make it extensible, support it like mad, have a paid model while allowing the open source community to perform tweaks.

2. Build a hardware bridge between true test/monitoring devices and the iPad/iPhone. Reach out to Agilent or Apple if you need to, but you can carve a high-end market for people who want to do atmospheric testing or install control systems at home or garage. Or as a hobby. That market is filled with multiple but different solutions, and the audience has already proven the will spend money for value. Here, webOS is your Rosetta stone and development platform to build this bridge.

3. Combining the PC/Printer business was a good move, but you now have to slash the product line by half. There is just too much of it. In two years time, present your integrated webOS hardware platform that will deliver the tightly-integrated-with-hardware ecosystem that Apple provides. Position it at a level where the hobbyists and test engineers will see the value in the $3K to $5K entry-level systems. Or go bigger, but be bold and show the world what they do not know they need.

Why do extreme liberals bring politics into a thread that has nothing to do with politics?

And since you brought up the topic, FYI, Obama has no original or noteworthy ideas in his head. He's totally clueless and has done great damage to the USA. He is bad for business, he is bad for the economy and he's a total hypocrite, not to mention a liar. I'm not sure if Obama's qualified to shine my shoes.

You know, all this stuff about innovation, vision, etc. is lovely and all, but I think what the shareholders are really asking is:

WHY HASN'T MY HP STOCK RISEN IN VALUE 600% IN THE LAST 6 YEARS?!?!?

Not a liberal (or conservative). Obama is a disingenuous scumbag like Bush with better oratory skills.

I'm amazed at how long the entire rest of the industry is content to let Apple run away with all the money. You'd think at least one other player would by now have tried to follow Apple in the one thing they still do differently than everyone else - vertical integration. The commoditized hardware market that came about thanks to Microsoft and the PC cloner industry worked well in the PC market for the past thirty years, but it was an aberration of unique times and is not a good business model for the future. Apple has decisively proven it is not a good fit for the post PC market and probably not even a good model for the PC market anymore.
It's long past time for a real competitor to Apple to emerge.
HP could be it if they play their cards right. They have good software IP for the post PC market with WebOS if they'd use it. The best move though would be for HP and Microsoft to merge and drop Windows support for third party hardware.

How so? Just because you asserted it?

It doesn't matter. Won't save HP.

You may be right about Apple (and Android) 100% of the time, but this one is a fail. I don't think any serious, fair-minded person remotely thinks there's much of a comparison in terms of intellect there.

(Fwiw, I don't consider myself particularly political one way or the other, except for the fact that I dislike frauds of all stripes).

This is so true. What a mass of wasted talent and money in this sector.

That said, I am happy if competitors can wait until after my kids are done with college! Uncles Steve and Cook were/are their money managers....

Seriously, I didn't come here to hear anyone's opinion on this politician or that. I'd like to hear what people think of HP and how it relates to Apple. Meg Whitman's answers are a tad on the defensive/weak side, but her job to save HP is not an easy one, and I wouldn't call her a failure if it doesn't work out. However, she is right about focusing on HP's strengths, whatever they are. They shouldn't try to be Apple, they should be the best HP and nothing else. Apple's strengths were Steve's strengths--and you can't duplicate that without a Steve Jobs-type leader at HP. But they don't need that. HP should go back to basics and figure out what they are the best at, reclaim that and grow from there. Right now, they do so many things, they're not necessarily the best at anything. HP is, like so many other big tech companies, the great middle-of-the-road average.

Here is an interesting mind experiment:

What do you think would happen if HP were to maximize the quality of their printers and double their price -- and reduce the price of the ink for these printers?

Would like to retake that question in English?

"What would the world be like had HP asserted their right to ownership of the Apple I design? Woz' contract stipulated that any outside work he did while at HP was to be presented to them before he could monetize it externally."

I totally agree! I tried to distill the essence of Steve Jobs into a single word...

The best I could come up with:

Vision, leadership... Maybe someone could coin a new word or redefine "Jobsian".

Mmm... You're calling HP "sinking ship"...

Appears the 1st word is missing a letter -- and the 2nd word has a wrong letter

What about Mike Markkula who had the vision and invested his $ and his time to take an under financed hobbyist startup and make it into a viable company -- which defined "personal computer".

Not to demean Steve Jobs... But there were other visionaries too!

Oh, what a good question!

It is the question that should be asked of the CEOs of the vast majority of large mulinational corporations who still insist on manufacturing and selling cheap and crappy products in their never-ending race to the bottom. When will these corporate zombies ever learn that consumers really will pay premium prices for really good products that actually do what they want them to do, and do it with minimal stuffing around.

That's an interesting point!

HP cancelled WebOS and the TouchPad on Aug 19, 2011.

Many thought the OS and the Device second to iOS and iPad 2.

In addition HP was working on using WebOS to control their printers... and providing a WebOS skin for HP desktop -- especially models with touch screens.

In a way, this put HP about a year ahead of Microsoft (skinning Windows 7 with Metro) and first to market with multituch desktops...

They just pissed away their market advantage -- then didn't have sense enough to correct it in the months that followed...

Sad... just sad! \

Looks like the whole culture around Palo Alto was rife with turned-on visionaries at the time of Apple's founding, EXCEPT at the management level at companies like HP and Xerox.

So it seems they lost the vision race right from the beginning. Apple attracted the Hertzfelds and the Atkinsons and I presume the Applebaums, and the die was cast.

There's a culture divide to this day. I'd go so far as to say, no turn on, no vision, but that's just me.

She has a fivehead.

Your answer:

Thinking out loud here...

What if Oracle bought HP and...

1) either sold the printer division or upscaled the printer quality (profit)

2) increased printer ink sales by reducing the price/profit on printer ink -- and offered ink for competitive printers

3) incorporated top-end HP servers into Oracles offerings

4) Offered a quality WebOS desktop and WebOS tablet thin-client to Oracle services (the desktop WebOS would run on top of Solaris and could run Windows/apps in a VM, as needed).

5) Sold off all other divisions ASAP... with the printer & ink divisions sold in 1-2 years.

Mmm... I wonder who Larry would put in charge of such an acquisition

In Apple Mark II, I don't think there were any other that came close.

I think the discussion and the comparisons here (as well as the HP shareholder's question) are really about Jobs' second coming, not the original.

Yes.

In '99 (was it?) when we were given a choice, I went with Agilent, because it was very apparent that HP was turning into a Marketing engine, rather than remaining an Innovation engine; I did this despite not being a EE, which is at the core of what Agilent was at its birth (I developed and supported OS software on the computer side). The disease at HP had started years earlier, and the Agilent split and resulting necessity to declare loyalties bought it into sharp focus.

I'm sad for HP, but have little emotional attachment to it in its current incarnation. It's no longer Bill and Dave's company.

You are probably correct...

I think what distinguished the Jobs that left Apple and the Jobs that rejoined apple was experience...

Especially the experience of "failure" -- or at least "success" limited because it was before its time.

If there isn't strong visionary leadership at the top, you can hire the best people in the world and nothing will come of it. The tail can never wag the dog and creative people will quickly leave.

Creative people are usually not good corporate animals. They usually don't fit in well and have prima donna characteristics. What Jobs did was unusual. He brought out the best in Apple's creative people while making them produce. It seems to me that Apple, under Jobs, in the last 20 years was more like a advertising agency where the creative people were also engineers.

I cant' understand why the hell hp didn't buy beos and develop it in parallel to their cap windows offerings. Why all that blind fate in microsoft. By now they could have easily had (actually, not just by now, by 7 years or so ago) a their good os to run on their machines, creating a dev community and still running windows crapware and business apps on a virtual machine. And they would still be able to sell their business hp's with windoze, and their cheapo laptops, but be able to also have a distinct line they could tightly manage and control and make decent margin on.


Steve had a vision, and he took small deliberate steps, building one success on top of the other. It's not simply because the products were really good. It's because he paced development, and withstood the urge to release something before it's time, or something that would pander to an immediate need but wouldn't either look great or innovate to some extent, and would simply be an aside (tower mac) hence a simple mac line, a productivity suite and a media suite that pretty much covered most people's needs, a pro line of apps, then a great jukebox app given free to pcs as well (back when the morons at microsoft couldnt come up with a media management app and real jukebox was an alternative...) as a trojan horse to the ipods. After focusing on the ipods and making an impact in the market, next (despite his longtime dream of tablet - which he killed because the tech was premature) was a phone because that was a market they could leverage their flash purchasing power in, their touchscreen and multitouch research and development, their expertise in creating powerful battery efficient small devices and of course mobile os x, a very powerful os, as well as their experience in arm, and of course because phones where a hot property to buy. Next came the ipad where Steve could then say, you already know how to use it. And of course great negotiation skills and forward thinking in terms of drm in music and the app store, amongst other things. He also had the ability to slowly built and ecosystem and to pace releases, as well as provide winning design, marketing and branding, and last but certainly not least a physical presence of stores where apple could control the buying experience and the aesthetics and not any run of the mill pc reseller.


Colossal idiots they way they handled it. They rushed a half baked product to the market, a la the pc market to get some quick $$$ on the wings of apple's ipad success, while they could have waited a bit, developed more, hired dev. talent and targeted a few home made apps to customers, given incentives to devs on their app store, and above all found a few selling points to their device that apple wasn't providing, be that a usb functionality, an hd card slot, something. They could have also approached some provider like amazon say to get behind them. Above all they should have brought some, minimal, effing vision to compete in the market. Webos had a lot going for it with the right backing and clout. Also the hp brand name didn't help at all as they have seized to be known as an innovative company but a run of the mill clone pc maker. Sadly. You can't stick hp to something that's on every crap netbook and $250 notebook and expect it to sell and carve out a niche for a new device that's capturing people's imagination. Create a brand identity solely for the tablet. Hell if they stuck to palm it would have sold more... A sad demise to a very promising mobile os in the hands of idiot execs...



Here, here.

I was shocked, on one hand, at how weak her responses were. They indicated, to me, that there is really no plan to break out of where HP is at now. She only mumbled corp-speak and called it good enough.


HP has nothing that really sets it apart in any category they compete in. There printers are good, not exceptional, but good. The HP name is somewhat tarnished, but not in the dumper. HP is number one or two, as Meg commented, but it's there by being competitive in price, not there by being unique in any way.

This boggles my mind as well. A lot of apple's success has to do -and it's seldom mentioned- with their competitors ineptness, repeat, threepeat and fourpeat ineptness to provide decent competition. Personified by the arch moron that is Steve Balmer with his snide remarks on the iphone, ms's consistent design and marketing ineptness, Japan's and korea's ineptness at basic software development, and the geeks at google content to be making boatloads off ad $$, spreading their selves too thinly on projects and sub projects and ending up pretty much copying iphone os in android. The people who had the talent and some vision to compete, such as palm and rim, simply did no have the clout and those who had the clout such as hp and ms didn't have the vision or the talent, or for that matter the leadership.

Not only can HP not turn into Apple, I think it's going to be a while before anyone comes anywhere near what Apple is doing.

It's been said before, but I think it's true: Steve Jobs' greatest platform was Apple itself. He personally built up and cultivated a culture of innovation and a mania for quality that's fundamentally different from anyone else making consumer products. Sure, you can "empower" the guys in the lab, make some unusual products. Maybe even make a really good one, now and then. But unless you're actually built form the ground up to play the long game, unless you have a hand picked team of proven winners, unless the entire business is designed to put a certain kind of excellence first and you're willing to obsolete your own products, over and over again, to achieve those ends, then you're just another corporation watching the bottom line. You'll be timid, you'll allow interdepartmental conflicts to interfere with design choices, you'll try to hedge your bets, you'll react instead of lead. You'll talk about "opportunities" and "synergies" "leveraging assets" instead of products.

Apple is about products. The business infrastructure is there to support products that actually excite the people making them. Pretty much everybody else, HP included, are a business that happens to make products. They look to business strategies first, then figure out how to make stuff that can make the strategy work.

At this point, I wouldn't look to any incumbent to become Apple-like. That's going to have to come from a disruptive startup. Whether any such entity can actually grow to the point that they can control the industry like Apple does is another question. That's the most amazing thing about the current Apple-- that they simply continued to do the things that they did when they were small and marginalized, and somehow it turned them into the biggest player on the planet.

I would take that even further and say Apple is about the experience.

Yep, good design is how it works, so Himself said.

Good point, I would just say the the experience is the product.

Which is maybe all that needs to be said to summarize my earlier post. Unless you're completely focused on the experience for your customers, you don't get to "be like Apple."

The challenge is how to make it more Bill and Dave's company again.

If Meg hasn't done so already, I suggest she crack open Steve Job's biography and read how Bill and Dave fostered Apple.

I hear her *maybe* coming close to doing that walkthrough that Jobs did when he came to Apple, cutting whole departments. Sigh, if someone would only do that as Governor (and eat the riots and thuggery)...

Exactly. If I were a shareholder, I'd ask Meg, "Why should I buy anything from HP?" Her answer would be generic-corporate-mission-statementy. They set their bar as low as Dell, and that's who they are out to beat. They aren't in a race with Apple, or they would have a totally different mission statement, and they wouldn't have given up so quickly on webOS. But here's a hardware company who, under Apotheker, was ready to drop their entire PC hardware business. Tell me their leadership has a clue as to what their strengths are.

Because that's all this nasty dingbat is capable of.

I recall reading an interview Wired magazine did with her sometime around 2000, when eBay (which she was running after its founding) took off. I would read some of her blather, attempt to digest it, then read it again. It was incomprehensible corporate gobbledygook. She droned on and on for pages and said absolutely nothing.

She rode eBay thru the Internet bubble then departed wealthy, a classic example of a well-connected rich idiot being in the right place at the right time. She's like a Winkelveii, only not as pretty.

Then she proceeded to lose the California gubernatorial election to aged Governor Moonbeam, after having outspent him by some obscene margin. That colossal failure alone should have been enough to warn any sane board of directors off from hiring this fool, but HP's board of directors is a corporate funny farm so I'm not surprised they hired a fellow inmate to run their asylum.

Nothing will change at HP until the entire board is replaced by people who are at least marginally competent.

First, I'll answer the questions which have nothing to do with the topic.

You can't draw or play tennis because you don't have the skill set to do those things. You do however have a choice as to whether or not to attempt to have a career as an artist, scientist, or tennis player. From the sounds of it though I would highly suggest finding something else.

As for Obama, I could tell you, but something tells me you wouldn't like the answer.

Now as for HP, they are a company who at one time employed managers, engineers, etc. who loved the business they were in. Every day brought new challenges and opportunities. Now it is run by accountants. More accurately. cost cutters who agonize where the next cost savings can come from rather than what can we do to make a better product. They are publicly committed in winning the race to the bottom.

Unlike your ability to draw nothing more than stick figures, HP's business plan is a choice. Bring in people with business skills, who also love and understand technology and HP could turn it around.

Now, get back to doing your math homework! There still may be hope for you as a physicist.

I know my mom sure wants to pop open her iMac and replace boards. Apple sure is doomed because of this "innovation"

Exactly...the brainwashed masses are so enamored by Republicans and Democrats they are blind to the possibility of a third party or not belonging to the Republocrat Propaganda machine.