[Info-vax] Hewlett hits profit target

[Christopher]

> > On Feb 25, 11:31 am, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> >> In article <f291fbc0-1697-4b74-b728-167e5fa11... at j12g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>,
> >>         Christopher <nadiasver... at gmail.com> writes:
>
> >> > On Feb 24, 2:00 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> >> >> Christopher wrote:
> >> >> >  HP-UX would get ported just like OpenVMS got ported.
>
> >> >> That is the big $1 million question.  What does HP-UX have that Linux
> >> >> can't have ? What if they ported the unique HP-UX features to Linux ?
>
> >> >> Then, they wouldn't have to port HP-UX when IA64 is put out of its
> >> >> misery and HP would be what it wants to be: a hardware company.
> >> > HP doesn't want to be a hardware company.  
>
> >> Say what???  They are spoken about int he trade as "The Biggest PC
> >> Company".  Their other core business is printers and ink.  Sure sounds
> >> like the majority of their business is hardware.
> > I should say, they don't want to _only_ or even _primarily_ be a
> > hardware company.  From a gross revenue, hardware probably is a big
> > number.  But I'm not talking about gross revenue. I am talking about
> > profit margins.
>
> Ask Gartner what HP's core business is.  PC hardware, Printers and Ink.
> 2% of $1B shows up better in the bottom line than 5% of $1M.  And that's
> all the analysts see.

I'm not talking about what Gartner thinks HP's core business is.  I'm
not in the financial field, and I don't have a lot of respect for most
of those people.  Nor am I an HP zealot.  I'm just telling you what
reality is right now, as presented by my job and reports we get about
sales.

> So, were you part of the EDS acquisition?

No. I was part of an earlier acquisition.  We were decent sized, but
nothing like EDS.

> >> >                                                       Internally,
> >> > software has gotten a lot of attention b/c it is one of the most
> >> > profitable divisions in HP.
>
> >> Maybe, but that sounds unlikely.  In any event, the industry is not
> >> going to make decisions about what direction to move based on secret,
> >> internal info at HP.  It is going to decide based on what is public
> >> knowledge and that is that HP is "A PC Company".
> > I think you have a very narrow perspective.  There is a huge part of
> > HP that has nothing to do with PCs.  Granted, the average consumer
> > will think PCs and Printers.  In my part of the world I hear very
> > little about that side of things.  All of the deals that get made for
> > the stuff I work on are pretty big and are about servers, automation,
> > and support.  Primarily Windows,
>
> Not an HP product.  Builds Microsoft's bottomline.

Most stores will tell you, you don't make money selling computers.
Margins are too thin.  The money is in service contracts, and also has
been.  Sure, HP contributes to MS and IBM and Redhat, but they are as
much allies as competitors.  MS servers need a lot of maintenance and
monitoring, which is a huge market in large companies.  In addition,
no matter what OS is on the system, it needs provisioning and
teardown.  This is not a consume market.  It's 100% enterprise, and
it's a big deal.  When you have tens or hundreds of thousands of
servers managing them is significant.

> >            There doesn't appear to be any customer demand to make the
> > stuff I work on deal with OpenVMS.  
>
> So, you work for a company that writes software for everybody else's OS
> except their own.  Oh, and they sell ink, too.

Interestingly, yes.  I speculate that it is either because there is no
customer demand because few customers actually use OpenVMS, or because
OpenVMS already does what our software would do so well that they
don't need to buy our stuff.

-={C}=-