Comments on: Fiorina's fuzzy vision

CNET News.com's Michael Kanellos says departing Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina had a vision. It just changed every few months.

[jay lueckel]

interesting article on fiona

it seems to me that hp has let their printers slip - epson has
captured the high ground on the digital photography scene for
home (amateur or entry professional). i've got my second (both
under $100 - and they outperform the hps i've got. the r200 is
great - prints beautifully, resists water, has separate color print
cartridges - these are all things consumers want. what
happened to hp in this area?

maybe she missed the entertainment aspect of the pc - she
should have read mcluhan -

they put out new models all the time judging from the bestbuy
and circuit city circulars in my sunday paper, but i dont think
they are moving while epson and even canon are.

jay lueckel
[e-mail]

[landlines]

Model Proliferation: A sign of mismanagement

Under Carly's reign, there has been an unprecedented explosion of printer models introduced by HP. It is amazing to discover how few people at HP can actually explain the difference between two or even three, four or five members of the same product family.

This is a sign that Product Management has almost completely broken down at HP. Model proliferation costs the company tens of millions in extra costs and huge resource redundancies in each product line.

The next HP CEO can have a major financial impact by simply fixing this one problem. Doing away with model proliferation may even buy time for HP to come up with a new, coherent corporate theme (or to re-adopt the old Hewlett-Packard one).

[Stating]

re: Model Proliferation: A sign of mismanagement

Boy, you are right about this one. Carly must have though that selling technology was like selling cars.

Something else you will notice is that HP effectively drops support for a given model after about a year. They don't rev the drivers anymore. If there's a bug, that too bad.

There's also way too many models of laptops and IPAQs. And what are they doing with the pricing of the IPAQs? They are much more expensive than Dell Axims but I don't see any reason why.

Keith
www.techcando.com

[raylopez]

Model Proliferation is legally good

I once heard there is an advantage to having lots of models from a lawyer: there's something called the (let me Google this first) Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) that basically says you cannot sell something for different prices (like one price for the consumer and one for Walmart) unless you are selling different models. So some OEM sell slightly different (but essentially the same) models to avoid the RPA. In fact, I read once where a tire company (being sued in FL right now) has a model that is "for Walmart only" and has minor differences in tread, etc from the 'retail' model. Don't know if this applies to HP however, since they seem to sell directly to stores.

Sidebar reference is in error

FYI: The sidebar references HP as the dysfunctional organization
- in reality, it is correctly identified as Lucent Technologies in
the body - that Fiorina came from....