HP shareholders question why company isn't more like Apple

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  • Reply 101 of 129
    tyler82tyler82 Posts: 1,100member
    Your answer:



  • Reply 102 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jmgregory1 View Post


    Look, it wouldn't be an easy job to turn around a company like HP, even if it were Steve Jobs himself running the ship. Changing corporate culture that is so ingrained after decades of doing things one way may be close to impossible to do. As much as people, including Apotheker, talk(ed) about HP needing to go the route of IBM, IBM may have become more profitable, but they're not the highly respected [tech] company they once were either.



    I agree with others that have said that Meg is not going to be at HP for very long - she's already trying to set the stage that HP has nothing new in the pipeline (because they haven't invested in R&D), so the only way they can improve their financials is to cut staff. Which of course will not make HP a healthy work environment, which will drive the creatives further away from HP (not that there were or are any creatives there now). And the board, well I wouldn't blame them exclusively either - they're part of the problem, but it's much deeper than that.



    I don't have an answer for what they could do to improve things. I think all old-school tech companies and even some of the newer ones are scratching their collective heads on what they can come up with for new product that will take some of the limelight away from Apple. When you think about it, it is going to take some brilliant thinkers to create the next "thing" that will take off as a worldwide phenomenon like the iPod, iPhone and iPad have.



    HP had a chance with development of their own OS, but now has given that up. That means they are stuck working with MS, making their pc's nothing special compared to any other pc that uses MS. This forces them to compete on price and race towards the bottom.



    They have a big chunk of the laser and inkjet market, but here too, there are issues revolving around the transition to digital. I'm just not sure there is any going back to people printing out all the photos they once did.



    What else is there for them to lead the market on?



    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



  • Reply 103 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum View Post


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



    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.
  • Reply 104 of 129
    scottyoscottyo Posts: 45member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jasenj1 View Post


    HP died when they spun off Agilent. The heart and soul of HP went to Agilent. I wish the names had been reversed. HP staying the test & measurement company with some other name becoming the PC & printer company.



    - Jasen.



    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.
  • Reply 105 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by anantksundaram View Post


    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.



    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.



  • Reply 106 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ascii View Post


    here's no procedure for creativity.



    The only real thing you can do to enhance creativity is hire people who really care about what they're working on. But that means people who want to make things, not money. And like most CEOs I suspect Meg is an expert at making money, and couldn't build something to save her life, so it sets the wrong tone from the top down. How about promoting from within.



    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.
  • Reply 107 of 129
    myapplelovemyapplelove Posts: 1,515member
    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.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by umrk_lab View Post


    Well Steve indicated the recipe, which is pretty simple (to understand, I mean ...) : design and manufacture insanely great products, and the consumers will open their purse ...



    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.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Aizmov View Post


    After the way HP handled it's Palm acquisition I have no faith in them. They had something good and with some work could be made into something great and they squandered it.



    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...





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post


    Talent. Talent. Talent.



    Meg was turned down for work at Apple.



    HP stopped being considered innovative around 1994.



    Sun Engineers I used to eat lunch with wanted to work at NeXT and later Apple.



    It starts at the top. You cannot create a Steve Jobs. You cannot create a Jony Ivy.



    Very few companies have natural leaders. Lots of narcissism, but very little leadership.



    Imagination and a high aesthetic for taste and how to shape it is not taught. You discover it or your do not. Lots of friends come from various engineering, liberal arts and business backgrounds.



    All talented to do tasks, when a solid vision is in place. Creating that vision is an entirely different ball of wax. It either surfaces as a child and grows from there as you get older or it does not.



    Meg couldn't lead a creative, highly driven engineering vision to fruition due to having none of these qualities in her.



    Odd, weird and unique were all qualities described of Steve as he grew up and developed Apple, then NeXT, PIXAR and back at Apple.



    There are tons of degrees in the Valley. Not so much when it comes to personalities that stand out in a crowd.



    Steven P. Jobs is an original. It's not something you see more than once or twice in a life time.



    Here, here.
  • Reply 108 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton View Post


    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.



    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.



    Quote:

    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.



    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.
  • Reply 109 of 129
    myapplelovemyapplelove Posts: 1,515member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by X38 View Post


    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.



    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.
  • Reply 110 of 129
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    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.
  • Reply 111 of 129
    solipsismxsolipsismx Posts: 19,566member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by addabox View Post


    Apple is about products. The business infrastructure is there to support products that actually excite the people making them.



    I would take that even further and say Apple is about the experience.
  • Reply 112 of 129
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SolipsismX View Post


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



    Yep, good design is how it works, so Himself said.
  • Reply 113 of 129
    addaboxaddabox Posts: 12,665member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by SolipsismX View Post


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



    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."
  • Reply 114 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by scottyo View Post


    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.



    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)...
  • Reply 115 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Macky the Macky View Post


    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.



    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.
  • Reply 116 of 129
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Macky the Macky View Post


    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.



    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.
  • Reply 117 of 129
    razorpitrazorpit Posts: 1,796member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Drax7 View Post


    Why can't I draw like Picasso?

    Why can't I do physics like Einstein ?

    Why can't I play tennis more like Nadal?

    Why cant Obama be more like Clinton?



    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.
  • Reply 118 of 129
    bullheadbullhead Posts: 493member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacTac View Post


    HPs Z1 all in one allows easy and full access to all the components. If HP can bring similar innovation to the rest of its products it could improve its sales. It will never be another Apple as long as it uses Windows but it could improve.



    I hope Apple takes a look at the Z1 and realize that there are people using OSX that would like to have easy to open Macs.



    I know my mom sure wants to pop open her iMac and replace boards. Apple sure is doomed because of this "innovation"
  • Reply 119 of 129
    bullheadbullhead Posts: 493member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bedouin View Post


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



    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.
  • Reply 120 of 129
    stelligentstelligent Posts: 2,680member
    Shareholder: "Why isn't HP more like Apple?"



    Meg Whitman: "I am Republican."
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