A Newly Headless Chicken Doesn’t Flop Around This Much
August 30th, 2011 - 1:30 pm
HP also might — or might not be! — spinning off its PC business. Or perhaps selling it to another company. Or not. HP might — or might not! — sell webOS to an interested party, unless it just kills it off. Whatevs.
This is a company in serious and rapid decline.
I saw the headline, and I thought it was an article about yet another Romney flip-flop. Seriously, I did. “Headless chicken” Mitt, flip-flopping around.
I’ll say it again, they’ve been in terminal funk since they bought Compaq (which was already in decline thanks to being underpriced by Dell and the DEC albatross they bought). HPQ is simply not the house of innovation it was in Hewlett and Packard’s garage.
AAPL fans take note; this is where you could easily be headed post Steve Jobs. If your executive board starts showing this level of indecision it is shareholder lawsuit time!
Interestingly, HP is the ticker of an independent oil driller in Tulsa, OK. I found them once quite by accident while researching you-know-who.
I don’t have e link handy, but check Gruber’s DF today for the warning signs to look for in the age After Jobs.
What makes it so fascinating is, the author says you’ll be able to read the tea leaves in Apple’s advertising — right there for anyone to see. Highly recommended.
Just so long as Best Buy doesn’t ask me to refund the $400 they refunded me after HP killed the TouchPad. BTW, I still do like my TouchPad.
At least these HP executives don’t have to worry about zombies attacking them. Zombies only want brains.
I have visions of dozens of people sitting in an empty room with a dart board and a magic 8 ball. I believe HP calls this a “board of directors”.
HP has been on the highway to hell ever since they hired Carly Fiorina, probably to fulfill some “diversity” quota for female executives. Not only did Carly make the mistake of buying Compaq (another dying company), but she was very big on outsourcing. That’s right – give what’s left of your business and technical acumen away to foreign companies, while putting loyal and highly skilled Americans out of work.
After that, she had the gall to run for public office. Carly Fiorina is a disgrace.
As usual, HP can’t decide what they want to be. It’s my impression they have been trying to be too many things, and the company has no focus and direction.
They have some very good technologies, in my opinion the 3Par acquisition would have potentially had them really competing with EMC in the SAN storage world, as opposed to the half-assed way they have been going about selling enterprise class storage; yes, I’m a Storage Administrator.
As a former VMS Systems Administrator, all three conpanies that had that operating system (Digital, Compaq, and now HP) managed to have the best clustering O/S on the planet in that it has always been active/active since clustering was added back in the mid-1980s, and had no earthly idea on how to get applications ported to it, market it, and sell it.
Flopping chicken = poultry in motion.
That… was bad.
Stephen, do you think the flip-flop might have something to do with the fact that those HP tablets are now gone from BestBuy’s shelves? Yeah, I know, $99 is hard to resist.
More seriously I was thinking that a stronger motivation might come from Amazon’s upcoming entry into the tablet market, with a price “hundreds less” than an iPad. Assuming that means $299 or so, things could get interesting, since Amazon already has a huge investment in books, music, and movies, and has been selling all of them as downloads for a while.