Weekend Open Forum: A PC industry without HP

[Route44]

Big business has become obsessed with profit margins.
It is not enough to have large market share and make money.

I'm a retired DEC-Compaq-HP employee.
It was easy to see after HP bought Compaq, that HP was NOT the company that Hewlett and Packard built. It was just a big corporation, with a board and CEO that had no passion for
the Tech industry.

This obsession with being IBM will lead HP to become a small player.

They had all the pieces--Tandem fault tolerant, Proliant servers, HP-UX, Compaq PC business, printers, Storage, networking.
Instead of being IBM they should have been a unique multi faceted tech giant.
The board and CEO have blown it.

Thanks for this insight. A few years ago my mother had the opportunity to talk to upper level management for K-Mart prior to Sears buying them out. She asked him what happened to K-Mart for at one time it was a very viable business.

His answer was short and to the point: "The corporate management decided to be like Walmart rather than working within the business model that kept us successful. We were no longer the K-Mart that was originally envisioned but an attempt to be a clone of what makes Walmart successful. We failed."


By the way, a few years ago my mother needed a new PC system and Staples had a very nice HP system for her needs (it has an Asus board with an Intel dual core budget cpu). It has never given her a problem and to this day it does everything she needs it to do.

 

[Timonius]

I've never been impressed with any HP product I've purchased in the past. But then again I'm not really into any brand. I usually build my own computers where I get the best bang for the buck and tend to avoid proprietary foolishness. If only I could build a reasonable laptop from 'scratch'...

That being said, it is sad that HP is 'considering' such a move. I do agree that competition helps keep these companies sharp and their products can be more innovative. But then again reducing the choice of PCs might make it a bit easier for the average consumer.

 

[Lurker101]

Have we lost anything of value? Seriously?

 

[Guest]

Years ago control Data dropped out of the business mainframe market place, they were a massive player right up there and sometimes surpassing IBM for that business.. the market continued without them and they were missed only by those who had( some still have ) their equipment. In the late 80's's Adlib made the best sound cards on the market, surpassing Sound Blaster by quite a distance, again, missed, but the gap was filled in already by the time they left. SGI, the biggest name in computer animation, owned an almost 100% share of the high end movie and TV business. When they went under there WAS a period of turmoil, but only for those using the IRIX system solely. BY the time they went out of business, faster PC's and ported SW like MAYA and softimage were already readily available..

By the time a large company dies out/pulls the plug the market for those said products is usually already filled by another product.

 

[TJGeezer]

Article:
"...surprising, but it also serves as an indication of how much of a commodity the personal computer has become."

Possible alternative readings, just to be snarky:
1. They took a real-world look at the prospects for economic recovery and decided to stay in bed.

2. "They know something we don't know!" (thanks, @xclusiveitalian)

3. The recently announced CEO and board were trained at the College of Corporate Raiders during the age of buying airlines to fire the employees and resell the airplanes.

4. The Wall Street con men have to do something, now that their real estate and substandard loan Ponzi schemes have collapsed. Destroying market confidence in huge corporations can be profitable too, after all. 20% in a day? Score!

5. It was a sound market move either to drop stock prices before taking HP private or because Warren Buffet told a gossip columnist his HP computer sucks and hula hoops would make a better investment. When Buffet speaks, you gotta act on it.

Just sayin'...

 

[Wendig0]

If only I could build a reasonable laptop from 'scratch'...

Do a search for "CLEVO laptops" (many of the big names purchase their barebones systems from them). MSI and Asus also have barebones offerings for consumers. While technically they aren't truly "scratch" built, they're about as close as you can get.

 

[lchu12]

Been using the HP Elitebooks for a while now, and I'm VERY happy with it. As for the consumer series of anything I'm more than disappointed with any one companies product. Also if I was to go for Dell...I think I would be disappointed in the quality.

It is a sad day indeed...

Guess its time to start looking for a replacement brand.

 

[NTAPRO]

Weird this is that I read about this in something that looked like an ad... Didn't know those could be useful...

 

[Guest]

for me am happy that HP go, i have a very bad experience with there products, i manage to have 3 hp laptops and it all go just in time that the warranty period expires but the third one was legitimately on factory defect as confirm at the hp repair office, motherboard defect but what they did is just make it work temporarily, dont change the mother or whatever until I got feed up in keep going to there repair ofc.
good it stop producing laptops5

 

[DeliciousPie]

I will never, ever buy another pre-built desktop, so it doesn't really affect me, but as others have said, less competition is probably not good for any of us.

 

[superty12]

Bloatware is bloatware, no matter how we get there.

 

[ramonsterns]

Reminds me of videogames.

Every MMO wants to be WoW.
Every Shooter wants to be CoD.
Every RTS wants to be Starcraft 2.
Every ODDP wants to be Steam.

Then fail miserably or dilute the genre because nothing else of value is being developed.

 

[mevans336]

"This obsession with being IBM will lead HP to become a small player."

As someone who is in charge of very large client and server purchasing decisions, this is how I view HP. They haven't innovated in a well over a decade and seem to be obsessed with following in IBM's footsteps.

Among all my peers, the only ones who seem to purchase HP are from the West Coast. Coincidence?

 

[3DCGMODELER]

I build my own and friends pc's..
hp is or was ok...
But for doing high end 3d graphics, 3d modeleing, 3d animation, they would never hold up....

you get what u pay for....

 

[Benny26]

Have we lost anything of value? Seriously?

I shall echo those thoughts.

I do have a "all in one" HP printer sitting under my desk, but it aint much cop...I paid £100 for it and it's never taken the paper properly from day one. If i hadn't bought it from a shop 500 mile away from home it would have gone straight back.

 

[Zen]

Well it appears that due to H.P. is dropping out of the P.C. side of the industry, this will make me quite busy down the road. For years I've been offering my Mother my services as her I.T. Manager at her medical practice, which exclusively uses H.P. computers. I've only really been applying my services towards the software and O.S. side of her computers. Due to the fact that her finger is not on the pulse of the Tech industry, she has made some recent statements about maybe upgrading all the H.P.'s with new H.P. computers.

I can see that whenever she chooses to upgrade, more than likely I will have to build them myself. That's a total of 9 primary medical computers, 2 primary servers and 1 dedicated back up server, which is the system I use as a "back door" by remote computing and solving computer issues from my home.

As far as H.P. in general, I've never had that big of a problem with them, other than in most cases they are "proprietary" as hell. Rock solid systems when you buy one and leave it alone, try to add something to them and that's where the problems start. I know in the short term, the computer industry will take a big hit from H.P. giving up the ghost with P.C.'s! But in the long term, I think the industry will find some way to make up for the loss. And trust me, H.P. will never, no matter how hard they would ever try, they will never be close to playing in I.B.M.'s league.

I.B.M. is I.B.M., Dell is Dell, H.P. is H.P. and so forth! I feel kind of bad for the people who either don't know how to build systems, or for those who can't afford to buy another non H.P. system, those people with H.P.'s currently, and who might have problems with their H.P.'s down the road, will be crap out of luck upgrading or finding certified H.P. replacement parts for those systems.

I bet the other computer making company's out there are licking their chops right now, Sony, Dell, Asus, Toshiba and others, licking their chops big time! Their dreaming of the business that will now be coming their way, due to H.P. dropping out and quitting the fight.

 

[aj_the_kidd]

This may come as a shock to some on this forum but branded computers are good enough for most, what may be even more shocking is that not everyone needs a uber powerful computer, that's easy to upgrade, i know, crazy right.

Big companies have figured out that most people will buy completely new computers as opposed to upgrading hardware, now i know this concept is foreign to some, but thats how the real world works.

 

[Guest]

HP has been known for printers and since they bought Compaq, servers. I have not been too impressed with their desktop, laptops. The printers are still the standard however competition is just as good these days. That leaves the Compaq/HP servers. Are they giving that up as well? If so that is a major loss, as I feel they are best servers out there.