PC and printers in one company, enterprise products and services in the other.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting ( http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/hewlett-packard-plans-to-break-in-two-1412530028-lMyQjAxMTE0OTAzNTEwNjUzWj?tesla=y ) that HP will break up into two separate companies. According to the report, the company appears ready to split into separate "Consumer" and "Enterprise" companies, with PCs and printers ending up in one company and corporate hardware and services operations going to the other. The Journal says HP plans to announce the move "as early as Monday."
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/report-hp-plans-to-split-into-two-companies/
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HP Plans to Split into Two Companies.
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(Score: 5, Funny) by Dunbal on Monday October 06 2014, @01:19PM
How about HP and say, Compaq.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 06 2014, @02:09PM
DEC and Packard Bell.
I'd buy a DEC server. I always kinda liked Vaxen and although it was a bit before my time I liked the PDP-8 which is what the early 80s home computers should have been, and the -11 which is what late 80s home computers should have been. DECs business model was horrifically out of date and messed up which doomed them.
My dad had a Packard Bell 286 back in the old days and after his upgrade it became mine. Typical hand me downs in a technological family... A strange machine more clone-y than a tandy clone but not as clone-y as a real clone, if that makes any sense. Strange as it probably sounds I'm about 99% sure it was sold by Sears, you know the legacy big box from the last century that's going out of business now because there's not enough middle class left to sell to, at least not when there's like 10 competitors all trying to sell to the shrinking middle class. Maybe once Sears, JCPennys, Kmart, and a couple others go out of business, Target might yet survive, maybe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @03:03PM
I think Packard Bell deliberately chose their company name to sound like Hewlett Packard. My God PB boxes were bad. HP boxes were rather 'meh' but at least not crap at least they were able to remove that proprietary driver/hardware flavor Compaq had. PB was pretty much everywhere. I know they sold at pretty much all big box stores including Sears. Think I saw a few at the occasional KMart or Walmart.
last century that's going out of business now because there's not enough middle class left to sell to
Those companies are too busy playing redemption games to figure out what their customers want. JCPenny tried to get rid of it and it burned them badly. The only way to get rid of something like that is very slowly. I havent stepped foot in a best buy in a year because I rarely buy cell phones or TVs and even then I just get it overnighted from the carrier. I went to BB for software and music. Which they are quickly no longer carrying much of. I used to go at least once a week. I will tomorrow as I want a particular movie coming out on 'dvd day' and someone gave me a gift card. Sears/KMarts are just sad. They usually very dirty and mismanaged. The local KMart I goto has a few goods that are cheaper than the grocery store and even walmart. Target is doing ok because they have clean bright stores and crap that does not look like it is from the late 90s on the shelves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @04:18PM
How about H and P.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday October 06 2014, @07:03PM
Or cut horizontally, and (with some interpretation) you get UD and MI.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:53AM
How about we just split the first two words that describe HP's computers down the middle and get:
Utter
and
Shite.
I do actually like their printers, except for that the ink's cost is absurdly high. Maybe they should spin off their printer division...
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:01AM
Actually, that would be more like UD and ΠΙ.
The second one sounds quite geeky—I might buy something from a company named after π.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday October 06 2014, @01:19PM
So HP buys EDS in 2008, and six years later they spin it off as an enterprise consulting company? Sounds like this is just bankers and insiders giving themselves a windfall payday. Both mergers/acquisitions and spinoffs usually result in windfall payouts to certain people. I am starting to wonder if what a corporation actually does even matters any longer. The only money anyone seems to make is in buying and selling corporations and pieces of corporations in an endless churn that makes money for banks, managers, and insiders. Come back in a few years and someone else will have bought HP's enterprise consulting business.
(As an aside, why does the WSJ bother having a paywall? The Internet echo chamber automatically spreads any substantive news they report, so who needs to subscribe to a paywall? Between The Consumerist and Ars, I never miss anything important the WSJ reports.)
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dunbal on Monday October 06 2014, @01:57PM
When a public corporation is a slave to its stock price, and when its stock price is overvalued beyond any reason or reality, then of course what a corporation actually does and its financial statements have no connection to reality. But in a way this is a good thing - equity should be sucked out of corporations as fast as possible because corporations are highly inefficient. They are the death throes of a business model that is only still surviving due to placement in the market, branding, or some sort of oligopoly/monopoly situation. These fat unresponsive and highly inefficient corporations should be killed off as soon as possible to make room for fresh new innovators and people who actually want to make a better product instead of meeting or beating analyst expectations and hanging on to market share.
My wife has worked in large (Fortune 100) corporations at a quite senior level. You would not believe the mediocrity, the nepotism and the bullshit that happens there. There are people with huge responsibilities that have not one single clue what they are doing but no one cares. How can a company like say Microsoft screw up its OS releases time and time again and STILL remain the market leader? Because there's nothing better (I hear all the linux fans getting ready for a fight) IN THE MIND OF THE AVERAGE CONSUMER (there, linux fans). The alternatives suck even worse. And believe me if anyone comes up with a better OS Microsoft will either buy the company right away or sue it into the ground. Same thing with soft drinks. Diapers. Computers. Whatever. Once you reach a certain size you exclude everyone else from being able to get through the doorway - even though you are not progressing because you're stuck in the damned doorway too. So no one gets through, and innovation stops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @02:10PM
Big corporations are inefficient, but they want to get their IT needs met from other big corporations. They'll be in business five years from now, although possibly as a division of some other big corporation. If you're doing tens or hundreds of millions in sales, you can't put the CEO or CFO in a position to explain to the board that the OLTP database software they've been using in their consulting gigs for JP Morgan Chase, Proctor & Gamble, etc is in trouble after the chief architect quit for another startup.
(Score: 1) by RedGreen on Monday October 06 2014, @03:57PM
"And believe me if anyone comes up with a better OS Microsoft will either buy the company right away or sue it into the ground."
Apple with OS X is far better than anything they have come up with, now I am not a big fan of Apple the company or their over priced hardware but with very little work if you choose your hardware carefully it runs on a standard PC just fine...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 06 2014, @04:08PM
Oh, I'd believe it. It's hardly surprising, when you think about it: The people most likely to be in management positions at major corporations are sociopaths. For sociopaths, the rules for that kind of job are easy enough to learn:
- The primary goal is always to maximize the amount of money flowing from the company to your personal accounts. A secondary goal is to maximize the amount of company money you personally control, because that can be traded for all sorts of quid pro quos from vendors or shunted to your personal accounts via a number of creative embezzlement plays that will almost definitely go unpunished.
- Company revenue matters only insofar as it generates cash that you can control.
- Employees who do actual work are completely replaceable.
- If something goes wrong, find a politically unpopular peer or subordinate to blame it on.
- If something goes right, find a way to take credit for it (for example, elbow your way into planning meetings and make the announcement of what other people have done).
- Feign loyalty to your superiors, but backstab at any opportunity.
- All threats to your position, including successful and loyal subordinates, must be eliminated.
One of my favorite stories from the book The Peter Principle was of a Los Angeles based TV network that had a really interesting and rather brilliant strategy for dealing with these sorts of people: The creative types who did most of the actual work convinced upper management to move to a nice new Head Office building in New York. The result was that the sociopaths and idiots in upper management spent all their time running around the Head Office conferring and battling and backstabbing, while everyone back in Los Angeles happily did their work and basically ignored everything that came from the Head Office.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:41AM
I think one solution is for more people to go independent and own your own business. With very few exceptions almost everyone I know that makes over 6 digits a year (from their business) owns their own business. I know people that own their own businesses and they net nearly 8 digits a year (I know, I've helped with their bookkeeping/inventory systems). Working for someone else limits you to about six figures if you are educated.
Often the biggest challenge to something like this is regulations that require licenses. Sometimes these licenses make sense (ie: for safety and sanitary purposes you don't want any Joe Blow becoming a plumber or an electrician) but often times they are intended to limit competition into new markets. But if you like something and (here is key) you are good at it you can make a lot of money doing it. I know at least one person that lives in a multi million dollar home and he is an independent DJ (though he has trucks full of equipment and one speaker costs like a thousand dollars). He did it for a long time and ... here is key, he's good at it. Very good. And if you are good at something that people want you will get referrals and people will hire you and you can charge good money and make good money. Heck, if you are good at math you can be a math tutor and rich parents who want their children educated will pay you $20-$30 an hour to tutor math after school. Yes it's not a career but it's enough to help pay the bills while looking for employment. Get a(n accredited) degree in math and I guarantee you parents will beg you to tutor their child if you advertise your services online (I don't care what race you are). Even if you get an AS you can help people with algebra, trust me, there is demand. Heck, I know one person that is a retired math professor (he used to teach at various Universities like UCLA) that now owns his own math tutoring center and he tutors people with very advanced math. He makes good money doing it. But here is key ... you have to be good at it. If you are good at something your skills will automatically advertise themselves.
I used to be an assistant swim instructor at a swimming pool and I really did everything I could to help students learn to swim. After classes parents would come up to me and ask me if I gave private lessons (they had their own swimming pools) and offered me good money to help teach their students to swim (I turned them down though. I told them the lifeguards gave private lessons but they told me they weren't interested). My passion in ensuring that my students learned to swim and participated in the exercises advertised itself.
Yes, when it comes to big businesses there is a lot of nepotism and even racism involved. People complain that businesses don't want to hire them so how can they get experience? True but if you are passionate about something you can get good at certain things and make good money even independently. You can make yourself good at things like math, foreign languages, etc... Yes it takes effort and a lot of discipline but if you are good at what you do, if you are so good at it that you can equivocally show that you are obviously much better than the next guy, you can find work, I guarantee it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:45AM
errr... I misspelled unequivocally *
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Monday October 06 2014, @02:54PM
I suspect HP is going exactly the same way IBM did. Hardware is a commodity, low margin business. There are limited opportunities to innovate. Services (especially enterprise services) are far more lucrative and a much better place to focus the company.
This isn't HP buying EDS and then spinning it back off because it was a bad investment. This is far more likely HP buying EDS, and realizing they'd rather be EDS than the "old" HP, with its legacy of PC's and printers and other "drag on growth" items, so they decided to keep the new and jettison the old. They'll probably keep all the IP they have from their PC and especially printer business, because, woo! patent lawsuits!
I suspect the company that keeps the HP name will be the enterprise company, made up mostly of EDS, the HP high-end big-iron hardware, the remains of HP's abortive pre-EDS services group, and maybe enterprise software. They'll sell off the PC and printers to the highest bidders, just as IBM did selling off to Lenovo and deciding they'd rather be IBM Global Services than IBM the Hardware Manufacturer.
They're not selling off EDS. They're selling off their former core business, which has gone from "loss leader" to simply "loss."
(Score: 1) by BananaPhone on Monday October 06 2014, @03:14PM
Spinning off the "EDS group" is akin to karma-laundering for the EDS group.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Monday October 06 2014, @08:15PM
I was going to make a smarmy comment about how printer ink is hardly a low margin business, but I don't think it may be so smarmy after all. Isn't HP's printer division absurdly profitable? (I can see them ditching their PC division, however.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @01:19PM
(Score: 2) by LaminatorX on Monday October 06 2014, @01:22PM
As long as it's not, "Packard Bell."
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday October 06 2014, @02:12PM
What about "Packard Convertible"?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday October 06 2014, @02:16PM
In the old days, HP made and sold market leading EE tools. Generators and scopes and meters and tools. Expensive stuff but very capable and technologically leading the pack. Had an excellent reputation as a marketing trademark among the EE people.
They split that into Agilent a decade or two ago, and about a year ago split Agilent again into "bs" keeping the name Agilent and a new company (don't remember name) which will keep on making great EE tools, I suppose.
Its interesting that as a business they insist on branching out from their market leadership position where they're very good at what they do, and continually repetitively throw the EE market under the bus in favor of business sectors they're not very good at.
I'd be interested to hear if HP actually does anything anymore other than market brand names and sign Chinese manufacturing Foxconn contracts. If they don't actually do anything but market Chinese stuff then its not really very interesting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @03:16PM
Back when HP stuff was built like tanks for longevity. Today, they would be considered too over-engineered and over-priced to compete with (semi-)disposable products from China.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Monday October 06 2014, @03:22PM
keysight. that's what you are thinking of.
read a long thread on eevblog about the poor chap who bought an oled handheld dmm, tried to update its flash code and bricked it. hp said that this nearly $500 meter was 'not fixable' and he had to rebuy it. after much email and public embarassment, hp finally replaced his unit, but did not repair the old one.
$500 dmm meter by hp. disposable, by their own definition.
THIS is why hp no longer matters for test gear (to many of us). I will buy old hp and agilent and the ones that can be repaired by us mortals (like old tek and fluke) - those are great. modern plastic stuff from china does not warrant the hp pricetag; might as well buy rigol scopes for the same features, quality and 1/10 the price.
a hunter on linked in asked if I wanted to change jobs to go to HP for software work. 10 yrs ago, maybe. 20, definitely. today, no way. HP is a farce and I'd only take a job there if I was totally out of money and there was nothing else left to choose from.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 06 2014, @03:39PM
"go to HP for software work"
I've heard stories about IBM along the same lines of if I wanted to teach people in India how to do my job, I'd have already moved to India.
I've nothing personally against Indians or teachers or teachers living in India, but its just something conceptually HR people seem not to understand very well, that at that time I'd rather do my job, than spend my time teaching people on the other side of the planet to do it.
GE is the same way from talking to people who suffered there in the past. "Oh you have a CS degree and like to code, cool you can herd cats as a project manager of our Indian outsourcing team, no direct reports or authority but you can take all the responsibility". And the HR people get all confused when you nope them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @02:39PM
I need to know, what is going to happen to HP-UX?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @02:54PM
Or OpenVMS, rdb...
I'm fairly certain that the VESA bus has been discontinued though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @09:52PM
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:26AM
HP-UX will outlive us all. HP-UX will be at your funeral.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 06 2014, @11:19PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell [wikipedia.org] founded 1929
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard [wikipedia.org] founded 1939