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How Hewlett Packard destroyed its empire by listening to consultants

PaulHoule 11mo ago
I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal. The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it. Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here. The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc. HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive. Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call? [1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs? [2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing [3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared
- gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
  Jensen... It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!

I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal. The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it. Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here. The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc. HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive. Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call? [1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs? [2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing [3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared

gsf_emergency_6 11mo ago
Jensen... It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!