Hewlett Packard: More Misfires
February 25, 2015
I am no financial whiz kid. I read “Hewlett Packard Shares Take a Beating on Poor Sales.” Even I was able to figure out that “HP’s corporate business struggled in the first quarter, dragging down overall revenue.”
What’s the fix? Splitting the company, getting a windfall, and retiring? Chasing Autonomy’s founder with more enthusiasm? Promising big revenue from a future German deal?
My hunch is that HP is struggling with three issues for which there is no silver bullet solution. First, the company just looks as if it is going through management motions without generating the payoffs MBAs are so darned confident that are a natural consequence of their thinking.
Second, HP is a big company with considerable friction. Good ideas are difficult to pursue with alacrity. Compared to other behemoths like GE, HP looks sluggish. A corporate couch potato perhaps?
Third, the notion that nifty new technologies are in HP’s bag of tricks is silly. When I run a query for Autonomy, for example, I see numerous appeals for consultants to tackle projects. You can track this yourself on my Overflight page for Autonomy.
For my CyberOSINT monograph, I asked one of the law librarians assisting me with research to send the draft to HP’s designated contact point for comments and suggestions. Guess what? No one responded. No easy fix when people designated as a contact point do not respond to an inquiry. Nuff said. (Notice that I don’t think the value of the dollar is a root issue.)
Stephen E Arnold, February 25, 2015
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