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Comment by spitfire | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That was incompetent. Talk about ignoring your OODA loop. Who is the new guy running HP these days?

Had HP been smart they would have stayed in the tablet business and aggressively integrated it with their software stack. Letting customers buy HP from end to end, sort of like Apple.

They've just handed Apple a much easier path into the enterprise market - which they don't seem to be wasting.

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Apotheker is the CEO, and he strikes me as the wrong CEO for this company. This decision is bad, and I am not surprised it is being made during his tenure. He is a guy who is good with cost savings, but lacks in vision.

I think he agrees with you. The solution he has come up with is to turn HP into a company he is the right CEO for. No hardware, more ERP type software. Shades of SAP which is where he was before HP.

Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.

Another CEO did the same thing. Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple. Jobs brought in his own team and basically just kept the Apple name. Seems to be working so far.

On the other hand, Jobs had founded the corp, had an almost mythical aura and the previous executive team had spent a decade fucking up Apple.

Oh, and he refocused the company on its original core business, where Apotheker is moving HP away from its historical roots.

HP no longer has historical roots, it spun them off into Agilent some time ago.

yeah, that seems to be the common analysis of the move: the founder's vision was abandoned a while ago, they're just setting fire to the remnants junking the yard.

The difference is when Jobs started NeXT it was a new iteration of the Apple idea, so when he brought that team in it was a new heart for the old body, with the same DNA. There's literally no available comparison to that situation, and nothing remotely to do with HPs situation today.

I thought Ruby was running WebOS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Rubinstein

Of course, he might have been constrained by the CEO.

Nah, he got 'repositioned' a month or so ago.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110711006653/en/HP-D...

Either way they are all doing a terrible job. How long have they had webOS? Like a year and a half? How many products have they managed to ship out in that time? Like 2? Guess you can't buy your way out of incompetence.

He's awful. He got quietly shuffled out of SAP after 18 months as CEO. If you're trying to innovate in a technology company, he's definitely not the person to do so.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but that's only a small piece of the pie.

Because the person buying the software isn't the person using the software.

This one line sums up all the issues of the Enterprise and Health care information technology and everything that is broken about it.

Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste your time.

I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.

And the person writing the software never uses it either. The definitive recipe for shitty enterprise apps the world over.

And hardly anyone ever sees it in action, so it's harder and costlier to attract talented developers.

"The question is what software do they have to sell?"

A few years ago, under Mark Hurd, they bought EDS and Mercury for that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Interactive

Never heard of their software? Be glad.

Apotheker has a vision. His specialty is to steer companies away from the consumer market and to make them enterprise oriented. I have to believe that this was the game plan when he was hired.

This sounds reasonable, and I also think it is better for HP to just sell their hardware to enterprises and add software to create complete appliances, instead of competing with Apple in the consumer market. However, was this really the best exit he could get for Palm in the span of one year? Also, why did they buy Palm? To compete in the enterprise mobile market (which surely will be large) But then, why not sell the Touchpad to enterprises and integrate it with the software from the start? Could be an unbeatable combination. Well, let's see what happens in the next months. I know that some executives from SAP/SAP Business Objects followed him but I haven't seen any big announcement of software offerings.

I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market. Anything they sell to enterprise is just a bonus - their model remains to sell devices with a three year support lifecycle and no concern for legacy systems and backward compatibility.

I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market.

Announced about a month ago...

http://www.apple.com/business/vpp/

Ofcourse apple will want to enter enterprise. They want to fuel their future growth somehow and enterprise is much more willing to give apple a shot than before. Microsoft should be worried about this which has traditionally had a stronghold on enterprise.

I've reviewed the iOS Volume Purchase Program in some detail recently. It's not "enterprise" in any sense that I would use that word. To me, enterprise solutions means tightly coupled service and support, and negotiable terms/pricing. iOS VPP is a take it or leave it proposition.

I don't blame Apple for ignoring enterprise customers: they're usually a huge pain in the ass to deal with, and rarely have a clear idea of what they actually want. They engage suppliers just to have "a neck to choke" when things inevitably fall apart.

The iOS VPP is for purchasing apps that are most likely not made by Apple. How could they provide support or negotiate pricing for something made by someone else?

That's my point: it's not a traditional "enterprise" market. Neither price (what you pay to Apple) nor terms are negotiable. There is a certain amount of "support" involved, via the App Store approval/appeal process and transaction dispute handling, etc.

That's not enterprise that's just them saying you can create your own walled-garden inside our walled-garden and we'll show you how.

They aren't trying to run your enterprise for you, which is what a lot of ERP systems claim to do.

Steve Jobs got burnt badly by the enterprise market with NeXT. Look up enterprise object framework sometime.

Apple is clearly going after the enterprise market on their terms, and their terms alone.

Exactly. Apple can't go after the enterprise market in the way Microsoft or Oracle do without sacrificing the soul of the company. It's the converse of the reason that Microsoft does so poorly in the new consumer electronics markets.

I've had my hands on one of these tablets. It could not connect to WPA Enterprise, so I sort of have a feeling they weren't really thinking about business adoption to begin with.

HP recently did a lunch-and-learn for the IT staff at my university. They had marketing material that heavily pitched WebOS as the basis of enterprise-ready products.

Apple never had a well-developed enterprise strategy, but after killing the xserve and xserve raid and integrating their server software with their consumer OS at least they have a coherent one: they don't care about it.

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