Skip to main content

Hewlett Packard woes

I am marveled at how incredibly blind to the consequences of actions CEOs can be. I know it's impossible to predict certain things (Qwickster's spin off backlash was to be expected but the size surprised me) but some things are really easy to see coming.

When Hewlett Packard decided to spin off it's PC business (see post here) and kill it's webOS tablet, it seems it somehow failed to realized that the PC business is synergistic with it's printer business. This strikes of such obviousness that even Homer Simpson would get it. When people buy a computer from HP they are more likely to buy a printer form HP than say Canon which makes excellent printers but not PCs. Then of course the retailers that sell HP computer are more likely to want to sell HP printers too. So with no HP PCs to sell would they give the same priority to HP printers? Of course not.

Now HP realizes this consequence. And are rethinking dropping the PC division. Honestly this feels like amateur hour at MBA cocktail bar. How could they not see that sometimes divisions in a company are there not to drive profit in that division but in a sister division? I mean really! Nobody paid attention to McDonald's?

McDonald's before being the established behemoth it is today, had a really interesting business model, I don't know where I got this but I heard this in college. McDonald's would buy multiple properties in an intersection where there was nothing. Then it would build a Mickey D's sell it to a franchise owner and just wait while the value of the land around it went up in value. Then they would sell it at a handsome profit. The actual burger shop was not generating the huge profits the land transactions were but you couldn't have one without the other.

But HP seemed to wanted to do just that. Get rid of its mildly profitable HP PC business but keep it's profitable Printer business intact. Yet one affects the other. It's kind of obvious. But I guess this is what happens when you tunnel vision into profits and don't see the big picture of the whole company.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Multiple Assignments in Ruby

In this Rails project I'm running I need to set a whole bunch of individual variables to 'disabled' at once depending on the group the current user belongs to. We can use multiple assignment in this case but with a caveat. Multiple assignments are a quick way of setting a lot of variables at once. h, k = 1,2  => [1,2] h => 1 k => 2 but   h, k = 1      => 1 h => 1 k => nil In that case we can do this: h = k = 1   => 1 h => 1 h => 1  Beware this sets them to the same object. So if you change one you change both. h = k = [] h << 1 h => [1] k => [1] While we're at it here is how to reverse two variables: h = 1 k = 2 h,k = k,h h => 2 k => 1
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Tech Books

Best Tech Books for Programming Language Learning I'm a bit of a polyglot no only in human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese) but also with programming languages. I found that the best way to get a deep understanding of the programming field, I needed to be broad. I got introduced to Bruce Tate's 7 languages in 7 weeks series right when I was starting to learn Ruby and found the cross-language trends to be very useful in knowing what to learn for the future.  So here is a list of Programming Books that I found good for learning a language. These are the must have books in my opinion to "get" or "grok" the language. Most of these books I have not finished but they're so good I can recommend them for other language learners and polyglots. All these books should accelerate your learning dramatically.  Poignant Guide to Ruby Ruby: POODR and _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby .  Okay, so _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the reason I fell in love with ...
Post a Comment
Read more