There’s an interesting article at Fortune on the goings-on at Hewlett-Packard. If you hadn’t been aware of it the company is splitting into two components.
What I think the staunch HP-istas are missing is that if HP had remained an engineering-dominated company after Dave Packard retired, it would have fared worse than it did. Its sales would have dwindled and it would have been acquired by Digital Equipment or Compaq rather than the other way around.
The reason it transformed itself into a marketing dominated company is that it had to to survive.
I doubt that the new Hewlett Enterprise will be successful in establishing a solid presence in the cloud computing market. I think that market’s already mature. If you hadn’t noticed Jeff Bezos just became the wealthiest man in America, largely on the basis of Amazon Web Services not Internet retailing.
Not being in the computer field, but surrounded by those who are in it in some fashion, I think there are complaints that it was not just the acquisition of Compaq, but the purposeful destruction of the HP culture at the same time which people lament. Why did it need to destroy its innovative research division?
Steve
Phrased another way, why did the company need to have somebody other than engineers running the show? Because it couldn’t survive if they did. The issue goes back before Carly Fiorina’s time.