PC Makers In Desperate Need of a Reboot

nmpost writes in with a story about how hard it is to be a successful PC company in today's world. "Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times. Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback. Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP's market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far. HP might have been unchallenged for the ignominious title as technology's most troubled company if not for one its biggest rivals, Dell Inc. Like HP, Dell missed the trends that have turned selling PCs into one of technology's least profitable and slowest growing niches. As a result, Dell's market value has also plummeted by 60 percent, to about $20 billion, since the iPhone's release."

HP's computers

[majortom1981]

Hp just has to make the rest of its PC's like its z series workstation.s we use the z series workstations at work and they rock. All hp has to do is make their home pc's like ther do their business pc's Also they need to advertise their switches more.

Re:fire the board.

[Em Adespoton]

It's all in how you phrase your responses; I almost always have karma overload, and yet I do the odd bit of trolling, and tend to disagree with people when I actually disagree.

There's a difference between bowing to the popular view and alienating those who hold the view.

You make a lot of very good points, but waste them by making a lot of unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts. When you then make a few bad poitns and make unsubstantiated accusations in the same posts, people flag you as a troll, and will treat you as such even when you say something valid using the same tone.

People don't like being called idiots, and they don't like those they admire being called idiots. If you instead follow the socratic method, ask more questions, question people's logic instead of their humanity, you'll find you get +5 instead of -1.

Has someone written a "How to have karma without being a whore" FAQ? If not, they should.

Re:fire the board.

[Quiet_Desperation]

Ah, yes, Carly "I never met a well compensated, high tax revenue generating engineering position I didn't want to ship overseas" Fiorina.

How is the old bat doing? That senate run didn't work out so well, did it? Wonder if she spent any of her $20 million severance package on it.

As bad as she was at HP, many any gods or goddesses that exist NEVER forgive her for the destruction of Bell Labs/Lucent. She was part of the team that brought about the end of pure research at Bell: research that once led to transistor, the silicon microprocessor, fiber optics, communication satellites, Unix and C++. Oh, and it was a Bell antenna allowed humanity first heard the echos of the Big Bang.. Bell Labs was a key component in the USA's post WWII tech boom.

So, basically, fuck that cunt.

Re:Depressing times

[jedidiah]

Nope. Most people are buying Android.

This is why Apple is throwing lawsuits at Samsung. They've seen the writing on the wall and realize that they can't live off of camp followers and platform partisans.

apt-get is what you get when you jailbreak an iDevice.

Brought to you by offshoring

[sdinfoserv]

In the 90's & early 2000's HP (Carli specifically) was busy throwing 10's of thousands of professional jobs overseas, killing off American jobs in the process. The Corporate bean counters thought, ya, cheaper over there, we save dollars and make more profit... WIN! What the bean-o's miss is that every single job sent is one less customer, and more importantly, one less person who understands the process and can bring innovation into the company. We are now reaping the benefit of that short sighted greed. Ultimately, unless the US realizes the value of on premise intellectualism, this country will continue to devolve to 3rd world status - full of monkeys just smart enough to run the machines, but to dumb to complain or revolt.

Re:Commodity PCs are boring.

[jbolden]

Microsoft has a program for no crapware where they also tune the OS called Micosoft signature: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/html/pbPage.MicrosoftSignature [microsoftstore.com]

Re:The PC is Dying

[Dunbal]

I agree. Anyone who is a "PC enthusiast" has long been a builder of his/her own systems and was never a customer of Dell and HP anyway. Asus and Gigabyte, maybe, but not the mass-market junk fed to the ones who don't know any better. Shame about Dell though, they used to be really really good in the late 80's/early 90's. And shame about Compaq, being bought out by HP which should have stuck to making calculators and laser printers.

Re:fire the board.

[Streetlight]

Bill and Dave's company became Agilent Technologies, a designer and manufacturer of first class scientific instrumentation and test equipment. They're making money: profit margin ~ 14%, return on equity ~ 22.5%, dividend ~ 1%. The dividend is not great, but the other figures look ok. They're not really dependent on consumer retail sales like HP, so they're part of a different part of the economy.

Re:The market has changed

[R3d M3rcury]

I think there is still quite a market for the general purpose PC...you know, getting real work done.

The problem is that comparatively few people do "real work."

In the mid-90s, everyone wanted to check out this thing called "The Internet." But the only way to do it was to buy a PC. So they did. Then the spouse bought one. Then we bought them for the kids. Because that was the only way to get on "The Internet."

Today? Not so much.

I can watch YouTube from my TV. I can look at maps on my phone. I can Skype from my tablet. So there's no real need for that big clumsy PC in the corner. Unless I want to do "real work."

So I can go back to having one PC in the house--y'know, for the times somebody needs to do real work in the house. Other than that, I can get by quite easily with a tablet--maybe with a Bluetooth keyboard for long and rambling posts about technology.

The point being is that, in the typical home, there won't be a PC for each person. That means less PCs sold.

Re:The PC is Dying

[the_humeister]

Since I use Povray [povray.org] for image rendering, I decided to install Debian 7 on the two ARM devices I have at my disposal (Samsumg Galaxy S II and Barnes & Noble Nook Color), compiled Povray 3.6 (3.7 is a bit difficult to compile even though it's multithreaded, but 3.6 is good enough to see what the processor can do) and see what the real results are:

    Debian 7.0(armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a9 -march=armv7 -mthumb
        -mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
    Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
    Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 30 seconds (90 seconds)
    Render Time: 1 hours 20 minutes 38 seconds (4838 seconds)
    Total Time: 1 hours 22 minutes 12 seconds (4932 seconds)

    Debian 6.0 (armel), gcc 4.4, -mfloat-abi=softfp -mcpu=cortex-a9
    Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 4 seconds (4 seconds)
    Photon Time: 0 hours 1 minutes 43 seconds (103 seconds)
    Render Time: 1 hours 49 minutes 59 seconds (6599 seconds)
    Total Time: 1 hours 51 minutes 46 seconds (6706 seconds)

OMAP 3621 @ 1.2 GHz (B&N Nook Color)
Debian 7.0 (armhf), gcc 4.6, -mhard-float -mcpu=cortex-a8
-mfpu=neon -funsafe-math-optimizations
Parse Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 9 seconds (9 seconds)
Photon Time: 0 hours 6 minutes 14 seconds (374 seconds)
Render Time: 5 hours 57 minutes 9 seconds (21429 seconds)
Total Time: 6 hours 3 minutes 32 seconds (21812 seconds)

Here are some results compared to other processors I have:
Ordered by pps:
Core i5 2400S (2.5 GHz): 235.177 pps ; 94.07 pps/GHz
Athlon II x4 (2.8 GHz): 179.82 pps ; 64.22 pps/GHz
Celeron 220 (1.2 GHz): 81.15 pps ; 67.62 pps/GHz
Pentium 4m (1.5 GHz): 36.24 pps ; 24.16 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 29.90 pps ; 24.91 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=hard)
Atom N270 (1.6 GHz): 28.96 pps ; 18.10 pps/GHz
Exynos 4210 (1.2 GHz): 21.99 pps ; 18.32 pps/GHz (-mfloat-abi=softfp)
PowerPC 750 (700 MHz): 20.47 pps ; 29.25 pps/GHz
Pentium !!! (450 MHz): 12.43 pps ; 27.62 pps/GHz
OMAP 3621 (1.2 GHz): 6.76 pps ; 5.63 pps/GHz

Exynos is Cortex A9 and OMAP 3621 is Cortex A8. Cortex A9 is about on par with a Pentium 4. Cortex A8 can't even beat a a 14 year old Pentium !!! Currently there's only one Cortex A15 product that's available, but I don't have it.

Re:"PC Makers"

[SethJohnson]

What is the resolution on that Dell laptop? Tell me about the throughput on the Dell thunderbolt port. How is the resolution on that Dell Inspirion all-in-one (iMac equivalent) [dell.com]? 1600x900? At twenty inches? Ouch!

Not really the same parts as Dell.

Seth

Re:Step one

[MetricT]

I have an MBA, but in my defense I also have several years of grad work in theoretical physics and over a decade as senior sysadmin at a large academic compute cluster, so I hope I have enough street cred when I say this.

Don't confuse the body of knowledge, with the kind of people who are attracted to it. Economics, finance, org behavior, strategy are all legitimate domains of knowledge, and can be just as interesting and thought-provoking as theoretical physics.

I got the MBA because a) I like the math-ier parts of business and b) ageism exists in technology, so it's best to add another leg to your stool while you can.

A MBA degree is like a can of car wax. Put wax on a Ferrari, you'll have a shiny race car. Put it on a turd, and at the end you'll still just have a turd. What you take out of a MBA program is largely what you bring into it, and a lot of people don't bring much other than a desire for a promotion with a six-figure salary.

Re:Step one

[saihung]

MBAs are so bad, as a lot, that we attorneys make fun of them. That can't be a good sign. And considering what they're supposedly trained to do, I've seen an MBA member of a negotiating team single-handedly destroy the entire negotiation through dogged use of the meaningless jargon that was apparently his main curriculum.

From what I can tell, the worst thing about MBA training is that it teaches you to bravely march into any situation, including technical fields and cultural contexts about which you know nothing, and try to take charge. To administrate, if you will. That's a disaster.