Does H.P. Need a Dose of Anarchy? | Hacker News Reader

Does H.P. Need a Dose of Anarchy?

nytimes.com

11 pointsmalvosenior2 comments

It depends. If HP is going to stay a commodity provider of regular items, then no. Its current discipline is well suited to that. If you're just making laptops and printers and monitors and whatnot that are generally interchangeable with Dell's or Acer's or whomever's, you need to be as lean as possible and as disciplined as possible.

And that's what HP is: a company whose products you can substitute with those from their competitors pretty easily. But it's not just HP. It's most PC makers. Really, it's just that Apple is creating and defining new markets and distinguishing itself from others by making different things. In my opinion Apple is making better things, but from an objective standard they're at least different - Mac OS X (whether you're a fan or not) is different; the iPhone was very different from PalmOS and Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices that came before it.

But it's really easy to screw that up - and Apple did for many years. Let's face it, the Newton was different too - different in a way that people didn't like. The classic Mac OS had its fans, but not like OS X does.

So, HP can continue to run a lean business providing essentially the same things that other companies provide or it can try to be Apple - to create something new and shoot the moon. But the latter is risky. They risk pouring money into things that are crap. Very few companies succeed in this arena and I personally don't think HP has the vision to pull it off. I'm not saying that they don't have talented people or that I'm any smarter or anything of that sort. It really takes someone special to make markets like you need to in this situation - someone like Steve Jobs.

I'm not saying he's some sort of genius. I'm saying that he's been undisturbed by past failures, willing to get up and say that he's just invented a better sliced bread when it's actually nothing special, willing to have the sort of "I know better" attitude that allows you to ignore all of the naysaying that comes along with doing what hasn't been done before. Because every great thing looks stupid, impossible, unprofitable, etc. until it's been done.

And HP doesn't have the arrogance to make the stupid, impossible, unprofitable a reality.

/I used the word arrogance there. I didn't mean it in a negative sense. I just wanted to portray that it requires a certain chutzpah to believe that you can do something that so many brilliant people haven't thought of or haven't been able to pull off.

That may all be true, but they made a large and significant bet on consumer purchases in their focus on design and heavy television ads focused on celebrities (all notebook ads, BTW). They've been aggressive on multifunction printers in a way that others have not. I submit that they don't engage in a lot of new product risk, but I have admired the hell out of them for their balls to define themselves as a consumer-centric company and succeeding without resorting to price discounts. That's an incredibly difficult thing to do.

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