back to article HP's Whitman rues 'biggest failure' at eBay Japan

HP supremo Meg Whitman has admitted that one of her biggest mis-steps in business (to date) was eBay's failure to make its mark in Japan during the 1990s. The tat bazaar had only 30 employees and revenues of around $US4 million when Whitman arrived in 1998. At that time, Japan was the second largest internet market in the …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. psychonaut

    how to turn hp around

    Stop selling shit. You used to make good kit. Now you dont. Seems fairly straightfoward. And please ffs try and write a printer driver that is less than 300 fucking meg

    1. Cookieninja
      Joke

      Re: how to turn hp around

      If you want smaller printer drivers switch OS to Linux, most drivers there are an incredible 0kb due to not being written. You won't be able to print anything mind.

      Seriously, though ... reading the text and unticking check boxes before clicking next goes a long way towards reducing "driver" install sizes.

      1. Martin
        FAIL

        Re: how to turn hp around

        "If you want smaller printer drivers switch OS to Linux, most drivers there are an incredible 0kb due to not being written. You won't be able to print anything mind."

        If you're going to slag off Linux (even as a joke), at least pick on something it doesn't do well. HP printers are brilliantly supported by Linux - just run "hp-setup" and follow the instructions. It'll find your printer, set it up and print perfectly to it, whether it's a direct connection, a network printer or even a wireless one.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: how to turn hp around

      Worth remembering that a large part of HP "not directly connected with computers, storage, and imaging" (*) and some (all?) of their semiconductor business was spun off as Agilent in the late 90s. A lot of what people may associate with HP's glory days is now probably a part of that company.

      This happens a lot with "name" companies, for example Motorola was formally split in 2011, but they'd already spun off large chunks of their business or effectively split more than once before that (e.g. splitting off their semiconductor business as Freescale in the mid-noughties). The subsequent "Motorola" in such cases was the parent company that retained the name, but whether it remained in spirit the "same" entity that started in the late 1920s is a matter of opinion, especially if the parts most closely associated with that had been spun off.

      (*) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

      1. Tom 13

        Re: a large part of HP ... was spun off as Agilent in the late 90s.

        Thank-you!

        That was the bit of tech news I somehow missed/failed to include in my analysis. It all makes a good bit more sense now. You're quite right that most of the bits of what I liked about HP went with Agilent. While the company I was working for was working with folks from their computer tech division, the focus was actually on how it was going to interact with one of the laboratory measurement devices (integrator for chromatography).

  2. Hans 1
    Joke

    >And please ffs try and write a printer driver that is less than 300 fucking meg

    Seriously ? My HP printer ppd driver file is just a few k's. Ohhh.... silly me, it's the window cleaners moaning again.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Pick a printer at random from HP's site, look for a Mavericks driver - 122meg.

      http://h20566.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdDetails/?sp4ts.oid=4346264&spf_p.tpst=swdMain&spf_p.prp_swdMain=wsrp-navigationalState%3Didx%253D%257CswItem%253Dly_126028_2%257CswEnvOID%253D4159%257CitemLocale%253D%257CswLang%253D%257Cmode%253D%257Caction%253DdriverDocument&javax.portlet.begCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken&javax.portlet.endCacheTok=com.vignette.cachetoken

      *yawn*

      1. TheOtherHobbes

        That's 2MB of driver and 120MB of happy smiling crapware.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Yes, that's kind of the point

  3. Dinky Carter

    Japanese internet uses are incredibly wary of foreign websites, fearing viruses and god-knows-what. The Japanese rival to eBay is Yahoo.jp. But unlike any other worldwide Yahoo site, Yahoo.jp requires a separate account, keeping the hairy overseas barbarians at bay. The Japanese rival to Facebook, Mixi (which has been around a lot longer) requires users to have a Japanese registered mobile phone, again apparently to ward off gaijin.

    Also, Japanese usage of the internet for such things as paying bills, updating driving licences, and even e-commerce, is very low. Everything is still done with paper communication and paper money. When I was with J-Com (a broadband provider) any change of my user preferences required me to send them a letter.

    However, this has changed somewhat in the last couple of years, as many Japanese have joined Facebook, Google and others. As I said before somewhere on The Reg, I think this all started when Apple bludgeoned their way into the Japanese market, with Google following in their wake. Apple succeeded where others failed because they didn't bend over backwards to make their offering conform totally to what the Japanese operators dictated- they simply said "this is the iPhone, you can sell it but we're not going to make it look like a Japanese phone." A rare case where Apple's bloody mindedness has had a positive effect.

  4. Roo
    Windows

    "I had a sense that the technology underpinning eBay was perhaps not going to help us scale where we needed to."

    I am curious as to how she "sensed" that the system wasn't fit for purpose, could it be that the devs + admins were telling her that the system wasn't fit for purpose, or is she stealing the credit with the benefit of hindsight having ignored the advice of her minions ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Super intuition

      Shame that super intuition didn't say don't waste $144m taking on Jerry Brown. Economists would call her a rent seeker.

  5. agricola
    Thumb Down

    Sell your HP Stock

    From one of the world's premiere technology companies--medical equipment; all forms of engineering instrumentation; the world's best industrial research organization; chip manufacturing--...

    Wow! Carly Fiorina REALLY turned HP into...nothing.

    And, Meg Whitman has all the credentials to finalize this transition.

    Great going, GIRLS.

    AND: GREAT GOING, H-P BOARD WHO JUST HAD TO SHOW THE WORLD WHAT DIVERSITY CAN DO.

    OK. You've showed us. We're now believers, every one. Won't ever happen on my watch.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like