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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm just not as knowledgeable as the elite of the hackerati, but I haven't noticed HP doing anything relevant in at least 10 years.

These days everyone I know codes on a Mac. Most bulk order desktops I see are Dells.

I ask seriously, with no intention to troll: what is HP good for these days?

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Enterprise. Basically horribly overpriced clunky systems for back offices of non tech companies. For example CRMs or any custom proprietary stuff, usually involving lots of Java and XML, integrations with other horrible enterprise systems from other players in the field like Oracle, SAP etc.

It's really hard to understand this from HN startup / open source / Go/Rust/NodeJS bubble but most of IT is enterprise and it's the reason why companies like HP, Dell, Oracle, SAP are making billions of dollars even though to average HN poster paying for any of their horrible products seems crazy.

Edit: and as somebody mentioned also selling all sort of server / networking stuff

If you can't understand why enterprises don't just hire a couple engineers to rebuild everything in Go/Rust/NodeJS and save millions of dollars in enterprise software expenses, you probably really are in a bubble.

I can understand it. Just commenting on what I suspect is majority HN view. Lot of people here are from startups or from Silicon Valley etc.

I'd also like to mention massive waste of money in enterprise IT though. I have seen big enterprise companies buy licenses for products from a consultancy company which costs tens of millions per year and it never ends up being used ;)

Rewriting everything in a hipster / HN favorite language is obviously naive but there is a lot of money being wasted now in enterprise IT that could be saved and used more efficiently (like R&D and innovation). Enterprise is area ripe for disruption imho.

There is astronomical waste, yes. But it's hard to put your finger on just what "disruption" would mean in this context.

A lot of what enterprise software does is manage complexity. Massive amounts of complexity from interdependent systems and 30 legacy customers with byzantine business rules and contractual obligations to use this or that data format on this or that protocol. Processes that involve hand-written paper documents that you aren't at liberty to change but you must somehow account for them.

Startups like to write new, shiny things. They like to "move fast and break things". They like to write a single "beautiful RESTful API" for their users. It's a totally different world.

When you work in the enterprise world, things like rules engines and BPMN and enterprise service buses and Java/Spring with its Factories of Factories start making a lot of sense.

I always bristle a bit when I hear "enterprise" used on HN. It's usually a pejorative, and I get the sense many people think it's just a bunch of overpaid consultants scamming a bunch of hapless dupes out of millions because they just don't know any better. Not accusing you of this of course, but there's an awful lot of condescension about the topic in general.

And then I hear things like "Oh you don't need enterprise software because you can use Gmail for your email now"...

To some extent, SaaS is the disruption. Which companies run their own email servers or CRM? Quite a few now use GApps (ugh), SalesForce or similar.

Not any non startup company I have worked at used GApps, only small startups. And bigger companies / corporations will use SalesForce, sure. But they will also be using another 20 other vaguely similar enterprise products. Sometimes different ones per department.

I don't doubt your claim, but what terrifies me about this if it's true is how willing companies are to give up all their data, security, etc for Google and company to mine, sell, etc. I would never do that. I just don't get that. To me it's insane to let others have and manage all your data. Doing god knows what with all that precious clear text data and and then not knowing who has access to it once it's in the "cloud". Just crazy.

Gapps for business are not mined by Google. If you don't trust that Google would honor their contractual obligations, that's a whole other issue.

typically its because in the past they fucked up and it was super expensive. Move fast and break things is anathema to billion dollar enterprise where the mood is mostly "keep the money rolling in".

Hp does a lot of servers, switches, blade systems, and plenty of other Enterprise equipment. As well as all of the different management software that runs them. They are also a major open stack contributor.

Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.

Something tells me that even that will get a little shaky as the public cloud grows, unless they nab a contract with Amazon/Microsoft/Google to provide servers for their cloud services.

The higher end HP Z series workstations are incredibly solid and popular (if a bit pricy) especially among people running heavier engineering software or high end video editing. And everybody I know that needs a portable machine to run AutoCAD on has a Zbook.

But this is about HPE which is the company that sells Servers, networking equipment and enterprise "Solutions", not the company that sells computers and printers.

This article isn't about the laptop and printer manufacturer, it's about a gigantic enterprise software consultancy.

The also still make enterprise hardware (servers, storage, networking).

Yep, HPE still has their MyRooms product that comes to mind. I imagine that is something that still makes money.

Someone above mentioned that they do defense contract. From what I understand, once you get something like that with the government, your pretty much locked in and get vast amounts of revenue repeatedly year after year. The government, can't just switch to another provider, because often times the provider needs to go through some big expensive review process.

For those of us who hate OS X and prefer to work on Linux, the HP Spectre line runs most modern distros just fine out of the box.

Is not MacOs a Unix[1]?

[1]https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-un...

Yes, but:

1. The UI is horrible and not amenable to sufficient customization. Xfce, bspwm, and i3 are all substantially better from a user experience and getting-things-done standpoint.

2. The availability of tooling for basically everything other than graphics design or video editing is significantly worse than for Linux.

The availability of tooling is just fine. You may need to compile from source, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Otherwise there's also MacPorts, Homebrew, and fink for pre-built packages.

The UI thing is entirely subjective.

Totally agree with all of this. Also it's getting more and more closed every day

They are still huge in the server market.

They also create several workstations used quite extensively in the video editing world, along with other power-user oriented industrial uses

HP Z800 workstation is great for me, though not video editing.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you using the horsepower for? Is it in use for day-to-day operations?

build machine that is, my build normally takes 1-4 hours on my PC, on Z800 it can finish in 20 minutes with 12 cores and 48GB DDRs.

My work laptop is a HP and actually not that bad.

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