Leading like Mad Leo: HP's Whitman rolls out Apotheker's PC plan

Betting the farm

It isn't only the recent senior management at HP that have made huge "bets" with the whole company as the stake. The decision to go with PA-Risc was described at the time as "betting the farm" when both Bill and Dave were still on the scene even if no long actively at the tiller.

"Not all these gambles paid off"

Running for understatement of the year?

Huge bets are OK for the right reasons

HP has increasingly made bigger and bigger bets on huge shifts in their strategy, the latest of which is the shunting off of their PC and printer business. I personally don't believe all the Gartner hype about PCs disappearing completely, but HP sure seems to. I know the role of PCs will be severely diminished, but there's still money to be made producing a solid product that doesn't fall apart. I posted previously in another HP article that they really need to just dump the whole consumer garbage dump overboard and focus on higher-end higher-margin machines. No one wants the garbage HP Pavilion line of laptops or the $49 disposable printers.

I guess the big thing that bothers me most is that all these shifts are being driven by the stock market and people clamoring for constant growth. But why couldn't she just hive off each division, let them do their own thing, and roll up all their profits to the top level?

I smell a rat here...

...either that or the management at HP has run out of ideas and need something "significant" to make it appear they are actually doing something. There has never been a sniff that hiving off the PC/Printer business was ever a part of the "plan" - if a plan ever existed.

I suppose this will result in sizeable bonuses for those at the trough, as usual. So it's not all bad news :-)

HP was doomed when they spun off Agilent

Agilent & the testing/measurement culture that it brought, was the heart & soul of HP. When they lost that, they turned from a nerdy, creative, can do company with an intense focus on details to a consumer brand shooting for low cost, low margin businesses.

This old HP commercial pretty much reflects that lost soul (they were once proud of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo0Sk6jPW1k

The old HP would have been out in front of the mobile revolution, not ducking and hiding in a corner like the current version. And it would have owned the internet of things.

Simplest explanation

The captain goes down with the ship and Whitman has decided not to let enterprise take PC and Printers down with it.

Not the same Mad Leo strategy

Leo wanted to SELL a dwindling PC business, whereas Meg first combined PCs and printers, made the business healthy again and is now spinning it off.

Interesting that back in 1980 HP's 06 Desktop Computer division was consumed by the 02 Computer Systems group. 35 years on and having failed to become world dominant in desktop computer technology the company are letting go of an architecture which if managed better decades ago would have been the big hoocha in the computer world.

HP sold its prize asset years ago - the employee workforce that made the company rich by being the best in the business. No juggling of corporate structure will ever replace that sad mistake.