So it seems that HP has a new CEO, Léo Apotheker, and what everyone’s griping about how they didn’t know about him before. I think what’s wrong is a little more precise than that.
HP is perhaps the single company to continually fly a waxing flag in the tech sky for the past decades. IBM’s ride has been too bumpy and most successful competitors, including Microsoft and Apple, are too young. (Recall that Steve Jobs used to work at HP himself.) HP has within it the seed to create great customer products. It’s been delivering decent quality recently, and the trademark is unsoiled (remarkable in itself), but it could go much farther, especially with the recent Palm acquisition.
They’ve always held their own fort in the server and corporate markets, and they’re no worse off now than they’ve been. They mostly deliver hardware, so they aren’t even that concerned with the “cloud” boom and general attack from software. You can’t compile a printer.
What HP needs is someone to let the enterprise business stay the course and kick its customer offerings into the next gear. What HP got was a german manager from a stiff-as-a-plank, pay-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-to-conform-to-our-system backoffice enterprise company. Call me crazy, but I don’t see the potential for the great customer revolution in the hands of someone who peddled systems in which the Oracle databases weren’t the priciest component to unsuspecting government agencies.
Apotheker doesn’t need to personally do everything the company does. But a CEO sets the tone and the expectations for what’s next for the company. Maybe he’s the most fun-loving guy of all the suits at HP, and maybe he sees the value in going for broke where they should. I would still have preferred Jon Rubinstein to have gotten ops instead.
I believe Woz was the one who worked for HP.
By Jon · 2010.10.01 19:40
Wikipedia says “Jobs attended Cupertino Junior High School and Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, and frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.”
So yes, both of them worked for HP.
By Jesper · 2010.10.01 20:54
On the other hand, the corporate side is enormously important to HP – lest we forget, Palm was small fry compared to eating up EDS – and they are going serious guns against Oracle and IBM.
It’s not as sexy as the consumer space, but there’s a lot of money there.
By JulesLt · 2010.10.01 22:40
Sure. I said “stay the course”, and “the course” is from what I can tell them doing very well against Oracle and IBM. HP is a very big company. They don’t have to choose between doing either well, but if they’re going to be doing something new for them, they do have to focus.
By Jesper · 2010.10.01 22:44