

Why Leo Apotheker will be fired from Hewlett Packard (February 2011) - blumentopf
http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fired-from-hewlett-packard/

======
Bud
Wow, did Cringely ever nail this. Right on target with the observation that
Apotheker "has no history in hardware"; six months later, Apotheker has
basically eliminated most of HP's hardware business. PCs, phones and tablets
are gone; only printers (and hopefully HP-41CX calculators!) are left.

Meanwhile, Apotheker has decided to compete in the cloud space. Some company
named Apple has also decided to go big in the cloud, I hear. Gee, I wonder who
will win that battle.

HP better hope that none of the big boys decide to eat their lunch in the
printer market, or they may not survive at all.

~~~
bad_user

         Some company named Apple has also decided to go
         big in the cloud, I hear. Gee, I wonder who will 
         win that battle.
    

There are bigger fish than Apple in "the cloud" that HP would have to worry
about -- Amazon, Google, Rackspace, heck even Microsoft wants a piece.

Giving up WebOS is the stuppidest thing they ever did.

~~~
cube13
>There are bigger fish than Apple in "the cloud" that HP would have to worry
about -- Amazon, Google, Rackspace, heck even Microsoft wants a piece.

Why? At least 3 of the 5 cloud providers you mentioned(Amazon, Apple and MS)
use HP servers as a part of their hardware infrastructure. It's not like HP
isn't making money from them, and I sincerely doubt that market is going
anywhere, considering how many services are moving to cloud-based computing.

~~~
justincormack
The margins on the servers Amazon buys are not that high. They are buying
commodity servers, not the highly redundant high end ones. With just a couple
of SATA drives. No redundant power supplies, raid controllers, hotplug ram and
cpu and all the other high margin stuff that makes the server business really
profitable.

Apple is probably more profitable for them. There was an old story that Apple
designed their computers using a Cray supercomputer, while Seymour Cray
designed his supercomputers on a Mac.

~~~
cube13
> They are buying commodity servers, not the highly redundant high end ones.
> With just a couple of SATA drives. No redundant power supplies, raid
> controllers, hotplug ram and cpu and all the other high margin stuff that
> makes the server business really profitable.

Amazon might not be buying top of the line servers, but they're buying a TON
of them, as well as service contracts for all of them. That equals a LOT of
money for HP.

Apple is buying DL360 G6 and G7
servers([http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/09/apple_maiden_data_ce...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/09/apple_maiden_data_center/)),
which run anywhere between $2000 and $8000 each. Probably the mid-range models
with a decent discount, but again, we're talking a bulk equipment and support
contract.

~~~
akronim
Is it worth having service contracts if you have thousands of machines? I
would have thought it's analogous to car hire companies not having insurance
on their cars (because with enough cars the distribution of accident costs
evens out)

------
jeffreymcmanus
His Meg Whitman theory is nonsense. Not only does she have not a lick of
hardware _or_ software experience (her expertise is in consumer internet,
which is different than both those businesses), if the board is really looking
for somebody to "knock back brewskies with the engineers," Whitman is probably
the last person in the world they'll pick. When she was at eBay she was
fanatical about insulating herself from the engineering organization.

------
justincormack
Clearly they didnt have enough money to buy SAP, hence the purchase of
Autonomy.

If they sell the pc and printer businesses it might be possible I suppose. Or
more likely a merger.

~~~
Mrich30
I wonder whether the integration of SAP and HP would be possible, has there
ever been a successful fusion between a mostly US/mostly european company
(speaking of development)?

~~~
justincormack
Maybe buying (uk based) Autonomy is a trial run? We will see with Microsoft
and Skype (Estonia). I cant think of any big examples, though there was ICL
Fujitsu (uk Japan), Europe does not have a lot of large software companies.

~~~
nikcub
I doubt it was a trial. HP only have a billion dollars in cash left now, and
their stock has tanked to a market cap lower than SAP's.

I think they found out that SAP was too big and too expensive and had no need
for HP so went with Autonomy as a second choice

------
dr_
Doesn't the article actually explain why he won't get fired? It suggests that
in order to survive he needs to increase HPs market share in enterprise
software. Hardware decisions aside, this purchase seems to me to indicate he
is doing just that. SAP may be out of their league - for now.

------
crag
I doubt SAP would want to be sold. HP is in no position for a hostile
takeover.

Their [HP] best bet, IMHO is dump this guy, sell off the consumer pc business
and get back to their core.

How many predicted this would happened when HP merged with Compaq?.

------
suking
Article loses credibility (imo) when it says Hurd was a worse hire than
Fiorina. Hurd practically doubled the stock value for shareholders during his
tenure and was considered an AMAZING CEO. Yeah, he disgraced HP a little with
the sexual harassment issue, but that doesn't mean he wasn't an effective
leader.

~~~
forgotAgain
Hurd was terrible. He was a one trick pony who did nothing but cut, cut, cut.
That might have helped with the stock price and quarterly targets for a couple
of years but it was short term thinking and ruined HP as a high-end consulting
and software company.

~~~
Cushman
Hey, if it works for the Federal government...

