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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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Now KEN and BARBIE are PERMANENTLY ADDICTED to MIND-ALTERING DRUGS ...
(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 *