HP Wises Up

I won’t even bother linking to an article since it is all over the news. Carly Fiornia (sp?) is ‘resigning’ from HP. Finally. In actuality she is getting canned for running one of the biggest tech companies into the ground. Her focus over the last several years was to expand HP’s dominance in printing to other markets, namely the enterprise. Two things Carly could have done to save her job (or what HP must do to stay alive).

1. Cut the Itanium. I know they co-developed it with Intel but they have already sold off all their designers and dropped it from their workstations. EVERY other company is dropping the Itanium or at least scaling back. Even Intel doesn’t seem that confident of their baby anymore. HP’s chips are all in one basket, that’s not a good idea. Either design a new chip or start using other chips. The whole thing is sinking and you are standing on the front of the hull with your arms outspread. Leonardo won’t be able to save you this time.

2. Bring back Tru64. Or at least merge it’s code into HP-UX like you promised. Tru64 might have been a small niche market but clustering is only going to become more important. Tru64 was probably the best OS to really blow open the blade market. If HP had played their cards right and merged HP-UX and Tru64 it could have become the premier blade OS. They would be in a position to start dominating right now. I mean why did they even merge with Compaq? I’m yet to see them use anything useful from that merger.

I have a feeling HP’s board realized these things and is finally preparing to fix them. I applaud them for taking the bold initiative and I think they are finally taking a step in the right direction.