Reply to: Uk's most succesful software firm sold to HP

[minestrone]

[AtW]

Nobody knew why at the time.

New ambitious CEO in a big company wants to make quick impact (probably to get big bonus), result - strategy of acquisitions.

To be fair back then PCs were not as cheap as they are now - the only people who make real money on them are Intel and Microsoft.

[Doggy Styles]

They had the stupid bint Carly Fiorina (sp?) at the helm for a while - she who decided a commodity business like PCs was the way forward
I've come to the conclusion that the people at the very top of large companies have no outstanding talents apart from political nous and some are downright stupid.

That's when I was there, about 10 years ago. Her first big job was buying compaq. Nobody knew why at the time. If I recall correctly, HP already had their own brand of PCs and compaq seemed to be on the downslope.

[minestrone]

I don't know why they never gracefully partitioned off the PC business under a relaunched compaq brand and then sold it off.

They look like a drunk redecorating a house on a whim, chucking stuff out the window and buying in the first thing they can get their hands on.

They are losing a lot of corporate respect just now.

[AtW]

To be fair to HP selling PC business when it is successful will fetch a lot better price than if it was failing utterly.

[Sysman]

HP is the new Sun.

You heard it on here first.

No I didn't.

Hardware-happy HP has swallowed a Sun death pill, dated 19th August 2011 12:52 GMT.

[Sysman]

The point is a genuinely unique British world class business has been sold to a numpty company like HP, which hasn't got a clue.
Can't the blame the founder, he got three-quarters of a billion out of it.

Despite his assurances that he'll stay, he'll probably be out within a year.

I feel sorry for the folks at Autonomy. Just ask anyone who was part of EDS before they got swallowed by HP.

[Sysman]

Non-PC HP Goes Cloudy - Mannerisms

It's those feelthy bankers again:

David Manners replied to comment from greg

Yes indeed, greg, it's amazing how some of these top people can be so totally convinced about courses of action which are so wrong. Maybe it has something to do with the constant flow of M&A suggestions which they get from bankers hoping to profit from a fee for implementing a takeover.

We all told you, but you wouldn't listen
Anyone working with HP during and after their takeover of Compaq was telling them that concentrating on the PC business rather than the enterprise stuff would be HP's downfall.

[AtW]

Can it figure out who is is a sockie and why agents never call you back?

Yes and it can even figure out Nu Liebor voters, I hear auto-ban plug in for BBS will be coming out next quarter.

[Peoplesoft bloke]

If I understand correctly, Autonomy software could even analyse and make sense of the content posted on CUK.

Can it figure out who is is a sockie and why agents never call you back?

[eek]

HP is the new Sun.

You heard it on here first.

No I heard it twice yesterday. It really would be cheaper for Oracle to overbid on Autonomy tho and watch the HP share price really tank.

[AtW]

HP is the new Sun.

You heard it on here first.

[sasguru]

And your contribution has been to start a thread expressing surprise and then call everyone else thick. CUK at it's finest

I didn't call everyone thick, just the thickos.

HTH

[doodab]

And here is a proper contribution.

What HP are really good at is hardware, servers, storage, printers and so on, and although the consumer space is competitive and low margin they have far more chance of upping their game and taking a chunk out of Apple than they do of competing seriously with IBM, Oracle and MS in the enterprise software world. They have ignored the software side for too long and will have a job buying enough good companies to compete seriously because they have left it so late. How do they plan to offer a full stack single vendor solution for anything when HP-UX only runs on Itanium and they don't have an RDBMS?

The logical play for HP to make, if they wanted to expand their software business, was to buy BMC Software. Autonomy doesn't seem to fit anywhere within the rest of their organization and there is zero synergy. What will come next? Red Hat? SAP? PTC? Autodesk? Could be anything and probably will be.

[doodab]

Thanks. In the context of this thread your musings have contributed exactly ZILCH.

And your contribution has been to start a thread expressing surprise and then call everyone else thick. CUK at it's finest