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August 19, 2011

HP in trouble..

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 7:23 am

HP is certainly not going to die any time soon, but it seems that a large number of people(some of which are investors) did not like what they heard from HP yesterday sending their stock down about 21% to levels not seen in what seems more than five years.

Myself I don’t agree with their strategy either in trying to get rid of their PC business as well as kill WebOS – a market that is growing faster than anything else right now and most people seem to think is the future (mobile computing stuff). Speaking of mobile, I was surprised last year when looking at their site that the iPAQ was still around – I recall that as being a popular device about a decade ago though haven’t heard the brand mentioned in many years. I wonder if HP will keep that stuff around or kill it with WebOS.

Then there is the acquisition of this Atonomy software company for $10B, never heard of the company myself, looked briefly at their web site and am not familiar with the space. I saw, or read yesterday that Atonomy is on track for $1B in revenues this year.

I’d of course prefer HP invest $10B in WebOS that would be a much better strategy in, as previously mentioned, a much faster growing market.

It is nice to see investors punishing the stock today, after writing about WebOS yesterday I saw that HP had indeed replaced roughly half of it’s board members as well as the CEO since the acquisition of Palm last year.

Another interesting flip flop that the CEO of HP did is indeed on the consumer products, saw earlier on CNBC this morning one of the anchors of the show dug up a quote from earlier this year where the current CEO of HP said the consumer unit of the company gave HP “an immense competitive advantage” (his exact words). Now, barely six months later they can’t wait to get rid of it.

I know really nothing about their consumer PC stuff – I wouldn’t ever buy one of their laptops (prefer Toshiba now that IBM Thinkpads are gone), desktops are pretty generic no matter where you go, printers..whatever. PCs aren’t going away any time soon.

Unfortunately – it seems like in general more signs of short term thinking a problem that plagues both our public an private sectors, and only seems to be getting worse as time goes on. HP’s previous CEO was known for gutting the company of R&D and cutting costs..

To me it sounds like too much of a knee jerk reaction. As a local reporter here put it

What a waste.

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