HP writes down a whopping $8bn from EDS gobble

My POV on HP - my Forrester blog from this week

I am sure you’ve all consumed the numerous stories about HP over the last 18 months: CEOs being fired and hired in an almost show-business fashion; a board not paying enough attention; business strategy speculation (is the PC business in or out? – imagine this, for a while, the PC business unit actually ran ads arguing against their CEO’s plan!); multiple tablet announcements, and withdrawals; plus a long list of failed, mistimed, or simply stupid acquisitions. Clearly, many journalists, who are not technology market experts, now see HP as being run incompetently.

Even those working for the satirical magazine The Onion feel that HP is ripe for a satirical video, which really makes fun of HP’s latest cloud announcement. There has certainly been a plethora of announcements from HP on cloud computing in recent years – I get all the press releases and often the briefings. I know that these are announcements made by different business units within HP and I am able to keep them in context because I know the company so well. It shouldn’t happen that they are so uncoordinated, but I’m used to it (it is the same with their partner program announcements). But other people do not know how the corporation works; certainly not the journalists.

So when a satirical magazine, not at all focused on technology but more oriented toward making fun of brands or famous people, decides to poke fun at HP because of a technology press release, I see that as a sign that the market perception of HP is seriously damaged. What are the points made in The Onion’s video? That HP has not innovated for many years; that it just uses the “cloud” word to try to sound interesting; and that it (HP) does not really know what it’s doing.

The problem is that many other observers have adopted that point of view as well. Pretty soon, HP will be generally considered to be a badly run company.

Reality becomes perception!

Isn’t anybody in marketing seeing this? After all, they are responsible for the perception – or correcting one that may have got awry. As I said above, the only marketing that comes across is at the business unit level: usually “InsideOut” content about HP products and services. In March, HP appointed a corporate-wide CMO and it sounded as if the cacophony of HP marketing efforts were (I assumed) being centralized, or at least, going to be better coordinated. But I visited HP in Palo Alto last week and it is clear to me that few, if any, strategic brand marketing decisions are being made. There even seems to be an underlying excuse for non-activity: “We are waiting” was a common apathetic sentiment. There were also other organizational speculations galore, but I won’t go there.

What do you think? Shouldn’t HP marketing step up to the plate and protect the brand values? Do you agree that these are now damaged or even already down the tubes? I do. Could a marketing campaign even save HP now from the perception - or from being broken up? Well, IBM’s eBusiness campaign in the late 1990s did save that company; changing the outside image as well as driving radical change internally. Dassault Systems, with the Collaborative Tribe campaign a few years ago, was able to transform itself both externally and internally too.

As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics. Always keeping you informed! Peter

Sad times

I can tell you, and i'm sure many can back it up, that morale throughout HP is at its lowest of all time.

If managers aren't desperately looking for people to fire, in order to get their rating up, then they've fallen into a coasting mode and barely do anything, just waiting for the axe to fall, as they've seen happen to all their friends and co-workers for the past two years. Thats just the managers, the troops on the ground are beyond caring now.

A completely fucked company, rotting from within.

Shit company

I went on the call to all of the ES division with Meg and Nefkens before. By the sounds of it we are in for more totalitarian cost saving measures, more 'not enough bonus pot this year even though you have worked all the hours god sends to get the job done' and more redundancies than the 27000 already announced.

The shareholders deserve everything they get as they let Hurd get away with running EDS into the ground.

Those of us left over are waiting eagerly to be spun off from this printer ink company, as at least then we will get some competent management.

"Shouldn’t HP marketing step up to the plate and protect the brand values?"

Of course they should.

So long as it is based on protecting the brand values by delivering good value well designed+made product (and/or well designed+delivered services).

Now, what are the odds on that?

Or, is "protecting the brand values" just a shortform for yet more pointless paper shuffling or online equivalent, such as the disastrous restyling and reorg of the HP IT Resource Center website.

EDS - HP

I've previously bought HP as I thought the products weren't that bad; generally they are competitively priced and the quality has been more than OK.

But in the last few years, that has changed dramatically. We've seen some really shoddy products, support that rates "dreadful" at best and very questionable consultancy advice on key issues.

But now, I have had the dubious pleasure of dealing with EDS. **** my old stump, what an absolute shower of *****. Drones manning their "helpdesk" that have barely sufficient knowledge even to create a ticket to be passed onto second or third level support. Truly shocking methods of managing systems that appear to have been developed a decade ago. Nothing is aimed at supporting the customer in any way, shape or form.

If anyone ever tells me that their company is using EDS for services, I will run faster than Usain Bolt in the opposite direction. Anyone who freely chooses EDS, deserves everything that will happen to them; and if I had my way, I would sack any twerp that chose to buy into their service as they have to be certifiably insane to consider it in the first place. I believe that I could achieve more by employing a group of kids from the local primary school; at least they might have some basic PC knowledge.

Blowing $8B out the door

At lunch today, with my direct boss (the CIO) and the CEO/owner in attendance, this subject came up.

I posed this question to the CEO/owner:

If you, as the majority stockholder of our company, saw that your (non-stockholding) CEO inflicted this level of financial pain to the companies' net worth; what would you do about it?

Her reply was:

I'd do a "Ballmer" and make damn sure his ass was in the chair as it sailed out of the top (fifth) floor window. I would make sure that his employment contact had a clause in it that would allow me to get rid of him without severance pay or benefit in the event of such a serious clusterfuck.

Then she said:

Now, you know why I run this company, as opposed to just hiring some fuckwit to do it for me.

HP Grunt

Like many others I just keep my head down, do the best job I can and take the money home. Any sense of Loyalty or Job Satisfaction went out of the window long ago when all the corporate messages started to be about what you can do for the company and not what the company can do for you. Most of the people I work with are looking for that killer opportunity so they can apply for VR (sorry "Expression of Wish")