HP 'innovation' reeks of self-interest
Embedded in the news that Hewlett-Packard plans to cut 24,600 jobs from its roster in an effort to make its EDS acquisition work, was this interesting tidbit from its call with analysts, as ZDNet captured:
One of the things HP says it wants to offer with its portfolio of offerings--across the board in hardware, software and now services--is flexibility in meeting the customer's demand. CIOs today are dealing with...big issues (like) needing to flip that spending ratio to less on maintenance and more on innovation...And there are choices on how to do it: buy it from HP or let HP do it for you, executives said.
Very cheeky. Though HP makes quite a bit of money from software, its real business going forward is hardware and services. In HP's mind, this means "innovation," and the more of that innovation bought from HP, the better.
In the mind of the CTO and CIO, however, innovation may actually mean open source.
I agree that enterprises should spend less money on licensing and more on tailoring software to specific enterprise needs. Where perhaps I disagree with HP, however, is on the most efficient route to get there. Open source is tailor-made for this sort of value proposition, but HP has traditionally paid more lip service to open source (beyond Linux) than it has actually done anything.
If HP is truly interested in enterprise innovation, let it commit its significant resources to deploying services and hardware around open-source software. No more licensing waste with ever-increasing maintenance fees born of lock-in to a proprietary platform. Just pure value to the customer.
How about that, HP?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
At BMC we solved this issue by moving our open source related materials away from any proprietary partner programs and out onto SourceForge.net (which we see as a truly open forum to host our efforts in). Perhaps HP should consider pushing their open source out into accepted community forums instead of hiding them behind closed doors.
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whurley
Chief Architect, Open Source Strategy
Office of the CTO
BMC Software
"How about that, HP?"
This, from a fan boy of perhaps the most proprietary consumer of open source software ever. When your favorite, Apple Computer, Inc., eats your jaw-flapping dog food, let me know. So far, they have taken open source code (BSD, KHTML, and CUPS, to name just three) and have built ultra-proprietary platforms and services around them, and charge a premium for the privilege. It hardly seems appropriate for you to point the finger at HP for not being open enough when your personal tastes run so proprietary at the expense of open source projects like those mentioned.
Am I shooting the messenger here? You bet! I might have tolerated hearing this from another source, but this just stinks of hypocrisy coming from you.
- by Leslie Satenstein September 21, 2008 4:58 PM PDT
- Although HP used to be competitive in the printer field, they have lost that competitiveness to others. So, if they think that they can be competitive by cutting 24,500 jobs from EDS, I would say good luck.
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(7 Comments)Competition will absorb the 24,000 employees and use the latter's skills and experiences to beat HP at it's game. HP currently has too many highly paid directors, and not enough highly skilled economists. That means that innovation will not get seed money to explore and bring that innovation to market.
I am sorry to be negative. It's just that 40 years of IT experience shows me that this is a repeat type of process that will turn out the same as the predecessors.