Re: Fraud
HP would have had an amazing future with someone more competent than Hurd (before or since). They had business units and products in every level of the DC hardware stack from compute to networking and storage (including security). They had end-user compute (mobile devices and tablets through Palm) as well as existing desktops and thin clients.
They had the software stack - everything for DC operations, monitoring, automatic deployment, the beginnings of a credible Openstack deployment in Helion and they probably could have acquired SuSe instead of MicroFocus snapping it up and had the foundations of their own operating system and container support.
Finally, they had a huge consultancy arm in the forms of the existing HPTS and the former EDS, which could have been a massive driver of all of these technologies & solutions when it came to helping partners and customers deploy them.
They could have been the foundation for customers to build their own clouds or a convenient on/off ramp for to public cloud (a la VMware). They could have been the customer one-stop-shop for hardware that Apple dreams of, except without the horrible walled-proprietary garden and awful repair/upgrade paths.
They held all of the pieces (both hardware and software) in a way no other company has done before or since. They could have trailblazed in all of these areas, or at the very least been a big player. Instead they let it all slip through their fingers through lack of vision and poor management.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
