OT: Wow HP….

[Coronita]

delete

[Coronita]

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=hpq&ql=1

$21.74/share

Hey, maybe Meg should put HP on an ebay auction.

Abandon ship… Abandon ship… All hands, abandon ship!!!!!!

Brian, on of the few times I will agree with you… HP is totally burnt toast…. $11/share here we come….

[carlsbadworker]

[quote=flu]HP over the past year fit the mold. I can only thing of one company that foobared even greater than HP…. Netflix….. And damn that would have been a pretty short….[/quote]

I disagree when you put Netflix into the same category as HP. What Netflix did wrong in their strategy? They have to increase price and they have to separate DVD and streaming. Maybe they didn’t handle it nicely but it is just short-term pain for long-term gain.

The most crucial difference is that for HP, they have many competitors around to take over their market shares. I don’t think it is the case for Netflix. What are the consumers options?

Redbox? If you have one near you AND you don’t mind the limited selection AND you don’t mind waiting in the line with someone before you procrastinating for half an hour.

Amazon? If you don’t mind their even poorer streaming selection. And the content providers are hating Netflix for $8/month streaming, how much are they going to love Amazon streaming when it is thrown out for free when you sign up prime shipping?

Apple? Do they even offer the Netflix model when you have unlimited streaming for a fixed price?

DISH’s blockbuster? $10/month for 4,000 streaming titles and you have to be a DISH subscriber?

Hulu Plus? Do they even have movies?

Besides, most of the in-home entertainment devices (TV, Blu-ray player, gaming devices) are Netflix ready, making it harder for people to switch to other no-name providers. I think the negative blast on Netflix is overdone. Just like Netflix has been saying that 1/3 of their churned customer returns within a year. I don’t think the customers have any other choices except more expensive cable/satellite TV, VOD, etc at the moment…and they eventually have to come back, if the Netflix can use its increased cash reserve to license more streaming content.

The only stupid thing that Netflix did was to use cash to buy back stock and the other issue with Netflix is its stock price was over-valued. Now it is close to the right pricing and may soon become a very attractive pricing for the long-term investors.

[Coronita]

Can someone explain to me how a person that sinks a company, causing it to lose $40 billion in market cap in 11 months and subsequently fired can walk away with $13million….$2.4 million of which was paid as “pay-for-results”????
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Recently-fired-HP-CEO-departs-apf-72242495.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=

Hurd added $50billion to it’s market cap over 5 years.
Apotheker lost $40billion in 11 months.

What a fvcked up company….

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Recently fired Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker is walking away with more than $13 million in cash and stock as shareholders stew over a rocky reign that saw the technology company’s market value plunge by nearly $40 billion in just 11 months.

The parting package spelled out Thursday in a regulatory filing wasn’t surprising. Most major companies guarantee generous payments to ousted executives as long as they aren’t dumped for unethical or criminal conduct.

Nevertheless, the details of Apotheker’s jackpot probably won’t soothe the hard feelings still lingering over Hewlett-Packard Co.’s decision to hire him in the first place.

Apotheker replaced Mark Hurd, who was ushered out in August 2010 in a scandal triggered by unproven allegations of sexual harassment. Hurd’s severance included a $12.2 million cash payment and $30 million worth of stock that he got by exercising options after his resignation. HP’s stock price more than doubled during Hurd’s five-year stint as CEO, adding about $50 billion to the company’s market value.

HP’s shares fell by 46 percent during Apotheker’s tenure, which ended Sept. 22. The shares closed Thursday at $23.78.

Despite the missteps that got him fired, Apotheker still will get a $2.4 million bonus later this year under HP’s “pay-for-results” plan, according to a company filing Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Apotheker also will receive $7.2 million in severance payments over the next 18 months and the vesting rights to 156,000 shares of restricted stock currently worth about $3.7 million.

The value of Apotheker’s other stock awards will depend on how the company fares in the next few years. Apotheker, who moved from Europe to work at HP’s Palo Calif. headquarters, apparently will be watching how the company does without him from abroad. HP also is paying his relocation expenses to France or Belgium, and will cover up to $300,000 on any loss that he suffers from the sale of his California home.

The second guessing about Apotheker began almost as soon as HP announced his hiring a year ago because his previous employer, business software maker SAP, had dumped him as CEO.

The initial befuddlement quickly turned into outrage as HP repeatedly missed its financial targets under Apotheker. Things reached a boiling point last month after Apotheker announced HP’s plan to kill a computer tablet in its infancy, spend $10 billion to buy business software maker Autonomy and consider selling or spinning off its personal computer division

HP is resting its turnaround hopes on Apotheker’s successor, former eBay Inc. CEO and unsuccessful California gubernatorial candidate, Meg Whitman. HP set Whitman’s salary at $1 annually, but she could earn a bonus of up to $6 million, according to the company’s SEC filing.

Whitman can afford a small salary because she became a billionaire during her time at eBay. She is worth about $1.3 billion, according to Forbes magazine’s latest rankings. Several other of Silicon Valley’s current and past billionaire CEOs, including Google Inc.’s Larry Page and Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs, have insisted on capping their salaries at $1.

HP also will grant Whitman 1.9 million stock options. The exercise price of those options will be set on the day they are issued to her. The value of those options will hinge how much HP’s stock price rises, or falls, during her tenure.

The company also granted 1 million stock options to its executive chairman, Ray Lane, who joined HP’s board when Apotheker was hired. Lane is taking on more active role in steering HP now that Apotheker is gone.

[paramount]

HP Layoff’s – and why IT sucks in the long run as a career choice

(and why it may have been good that this idiot Whitman did not become governor)

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/25/opinion/matloff-hp-layoffs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

(CNN) — Are technology companies ailing?

Hewlett-Packard certainly is. The venerable behemoth announced it will implement a restructuring that includes eliminating 27,000 jobs. HP tried to bring itself around by replacing its CEO last year. That didn’t quite do the trick, so now it’s resorting to the good old-fashioned mass layoff.

One suspects that HP is a little too venerable. It was the first “Stanford spinoff,” fittingly reflected in the presence of Hewlett Hall and Packard Hall in the engineering corner of the Stanford campus. Yet HP hasn’t stayed ahead of the innovation curve, failing for instance to adapt well to the tablet craze.

This could be the end of an era.

Consider two Stanford neighbors of Hewlett and Packard Halls — Gates Hall and the Huang Center. Bill Gates’ company may be losing the innovation war, too. It’s getting pummeled by the tablets as well, and just this week Google’s Chrome Web browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in popularity. By contrast, the Huang Center was funded by Jen-Hsun Huang, whose firm NVIDIA has been revolutionizing the supercomputer field.

But won’t those laid-off HP engineers be snapped up by the booming tech sector? Many will not.

The tech job market is excellent for younger workers, but many of those who are laid off and over 35 will find the market less welcoming. They’re perceived as too expensive. The HP layoff will consist disproportionately of older workers. Indeed, jettisoning the veterans is often the hidden agenda in mass layoffs. It’s no coincidence that many of the U.S. core engineering openings at HP have titles like Recent Graduate, Intern and Post Doc, all aimed at the younger crowd.
The difficulties of older techies have been investigated statistically in studies at American University and the National Research Council, but a very public human face was placed on this recently in an online town hall meeting with President Obama.

The wife of electrical engineer Darin Wedel explained to the president that her husband has never found a permanent job after being laid off by the electronics giant Texas Instruments. Granted, family issues restricted him to the Dallas area, but if the hype regarding a seller’s market for engineers were true, Wedel should have been able to find something in that region, which sadly has not been the case.

A former student of mine was a star at HP for 10 years or so, acquiring patents and promotions. Yet he, too, got caught up in a huge layoff, and could find engineering work only sporadically afterward. Ultimately he left the field.
Those who survive this round of HP layoffs will likely find themselves being asked to not only do their own jobs, but also those of the departed. Engineers are exempt employees, hence no overtime pay, and HP will accrue a net reduction in labor costs.

Another tried and true fix for a sick firm (and for the well ones) is to ship work abroad. A few years ago, HP executive Ann Livermore made it plain: “A basic business tenet is that things go to the areas where there is the best cost of production.” HP’s jobs Web page shows that 48 of the 113 open core engineering positions are outside the United States.

Unlike Livermore’s explicit position on cheap labor, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina said that HP offshores work because the American educational system doesn’t develop good math skills in its students. That claim is a red herring. HP workers, including those being discarded, are among the best in the business, and were whizzes in math when they were in school. Many of our technology leaders, from Hewlett to Huang, are products of the American school system.
The offshored operations often require U.S.-based workers to make periodic site visits. Survivors of the HP layoffs who always wanted to visit Singapore may now get their chance — monthly.

To her credit, HP’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, conceded that layoffs “adversely impact people’s lives.” But she insisted that the action is necessary. Probably so, but the message here is that engineers, like many others, will have to get used to a life of layoffs in a globalized economy.

[an]

[quote=paramount]HP Layoff’s – and why IT sucks in the long run as a career choice

(and why it may have been good that this idiot Whitman did not become governor)[/quote]
Too bad we don’t have more idiots in CA government.

[joec]

The article above really described my case. Left IT back in early 2000 and when I was job hunting back then, I already saw the demand/desire was really dropping. Of course, the tech crash happened too. That said, IT jobs were very commoditized already with a lot of foreign born engineers and offshoring done. This will be true with web 2.0 when something new hits. The good thing with web 2.0 is that it’s a lot cheaper to start companies now and if you’re young, your expenses are low. Then again, facebook has tons of engineers so maybe it’s not so bad really.

I’m sure there were areas which were hot, but when you have worked for a number of years being hammered with projects and lack of time in general, it’s nearly impossible to stay ahead with the latest and greatest technologies on your own time.

Anytime you work for a company, it’s nearly impossible to have the time to just code, do whatever to keep up, worst if you have a family/spouse.

I don’t think some people realize it, but anyone working for someone else could be one layoff away from never finding work again. You could be a rock star now, but after 10 years, the market changes a ton.

I read all the time that there is all this pent up demand for engineers and CS people, but no company really wants to even try to retrain you much. Best shot you have as always is if you know someone at the company, network/beg for the work. As I loss interest in tech in general, just hard to really be motivated to do the grind anymore.

Before leaving tech and my last job, never had trouble finding work, always had above average raises, worked at multiple startups, but sorta glad I left I guess. Pay/benefits and perks were nice though.

Just harder to really do as you get older/family…

[blahblahblah]

HP is simply a gigantic cash pile in the process of being looted by insiders at a frantic pace. Meg Witless is there to supervise the deconstruction and to ensure that the proceeds go to the correct, well-connected parties. As a billionaire, she can be trusted to “do the right thing” by TPTB. For her efforts, she will be richly rewarded (although she hardly needs it), of course. Expect more layoffs, more bad quarters, more outsourcing/offshoring, more bad decisions until nothing remains and the scraps are snapped up for pennies on the dollar by the next corporate shell to be looted in this never-ending game of three-card monty.

I also love it when I hear about these bag-of-human-waste CEOs taking “only $1 a year for a salary.” If a small businessman tries that, he will at a minimum be audited and penalized, and at a maximum imprisoned or killed for payroll tax evasion. But because the CEO crowd are all members in the special elite overlord club, it’s okay when they do it.

F*** HP.

[Coronita]

…Oh my…I forgot about this thread I started.

I guess I was right about this one too..

Rimm, HP, Zynga, Facebook…
Whoa… I’m on a roll.

[paramount]

I’m calling for a HP boycott.

Oh I forgot, I don’t buy their junk anyway.

HP-UX is a dead OS.

[an]

[quote=flu]…Oh my…I forgot about this thread I started.

I guess I was right about this one too..

Rimm, HP, Zynga, Facebook…
Whoa… I’m on a roll.[/quote]
I wouldn’t count HP just yet. I have a gut feeling that once Windows 8 comes out, their fortune might change. With this layoff, they’re also getting their cost more in control as well. So, if top line growth returns/improve, they might be sitting pretty. We’ll know more this time next year if my prediction is correct.

[Coronita]

What a turd…

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hewlett-packard-quarterly-revenue-falls-123741360.html

Whoa…Fraud…

[SK in CV]

[quote=flu]What a turd…

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hewlett-packard-quarterly-revenue-falls-123741360.html

Whoa…Fraud…[/quote]

It’s a shame, they make pretty decent products in sleeping or dying product lines.

Interesting that they’re getting into enterprise consulting. It’s a cut throat business line, and I’m guessing their rates are going to be similar to IBM, Accenture, Deloitte that have been in the business for years. Which means close to double botiques that do better work. Big companies are just monstrosities when they need to shift gears.

[HenryPP]

The question I have is this: Would HP still be collapsing and skirting with single digit stock price if Hurd had never been fired?

I remember Oracle’s Ellison writing that by their decision to fire Hurd, HP’s board had made the second worst personnel decision in corporate history (the first, he said, was when Apple’s board fired Steve Jobs).

Could Hurd have kept HP rolling, or was it inevitable. Normally, I would say that one person cannot save a major corporation with so many problems. The counter-example, of course, is Steve Jobs turning Apple around just weeks before it went tits up (according to the legend, at least). But then again, Steve Jobs WAS Apple, while Hurd was just a very talented spreadsheet guy.

Whattcha think?

[moneymaker]

I don’t think it would have made a big difference in the long run. I think in HP’s case it is a perfect storm of sorts. They are losing PC and printer share, have powerful enemys, and have made some major mistakes for the last couple of years. I personally think now is a great buying opportunity, which is why I bought some today @ $11.50/share.

[Author]

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