Wow, did Cringely ever nail this. Right on target with the observation that Apotheker "has no history in hardware"; six months later, Apotheker has basically eliminated most of HP's hardware business. PCs, phones and tablets are gone; only printers (and hopefully HP-41CX calculators!) are left.
Meanwhile, Apotheker has decided to compete in the cloud space. Some company named Apple has also decided to go big in the cloud, I hear. Gee, I wonder who will win that battle.
HP better hope that none of the big boys decide to eat their lunch in the printer market, or they may not survive at all.
It really wasn't stupid for their business moves. Software was not their market, and they don't have the market share to compete with Android and iOS.
I loved the webOS platform. I'm still using my pre +, but that doesn't make it a right more for HP. I do wish they would have open sourced it. I would like to see it as a desktop os someday.
I do think this guy messed up in handling the marketing of webs, but that is more him trusting advisors. The CEO doesn't do everything, but is responsible for it.
>There are bigger fish than Apple in "the cloud" that HP would have to worry about -- Amazon, Google, Rackspace, heck even Microsoft wants a piece.
Why? At least 3 of the 5 cloud providers you mentioned(Amazon, Apple and MS) use HP servers as a part of their hardware infrastructure. It's not like HP isn't making money from them, and I sincerely doubt that market is going anywhere, considering how many services are moving to cloud-based computing.
The margins on the servers Amazon buys are not that high. They are buying commodity servers, not the highly redundant high end ones. With just a couple of SATA drives. No redundant power supplies, raid controllers, hotplug ram and cpu and all the other high margin stuff that makes the server business really profitable.
Apple is probably more profitable for them. There was an old story that Apple designed their computers using a Cray supercomputer, while Seymour Cray designed his supercomputers on a Mac.
> They are buying commodity servers, not the highly redundant high end ones. With just a couple of SATA drives. No redundant power supplies, raid controllers, hotplug ram and cpu and all the other high margin stuff that makes the server business really profitable.
Amazon might not be buying top of the line servers, but they're buying a TON of them, as well as service contracts for all of them. That equals a LOT of money for HP.
Apple is buying DL360 G6 and G7 servers(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/09/apple_maiden_data_ce...), which run anywhere between $2000 and $8000 each. Probably the mid-range models with a decent discount, but again, we're talking a bulk equipment and support contract.
Is it worth having service contracts if you have thousands of machines? I would have thought it's analogous to car hire companies not having insurance on their cars (because with enough cars the distribution of accident costs evens out)
Meanwhile, Apotheker has decided to compete in the cloud space. Some company named Apple has also decided to go big in the cloud, I hear. Gee, I wonder who will win that battle.
HP better hope that none of the big boys decide to eat their lunch in the printer market, or they may not survive at all.