Rubénerd!

When we went through the latest family move, I wrote a ton of posts but didn't finish any of them. Here's one from March.

Michael Dell on Apple in 1997:

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Dell on HP's plan to stop manufacturing PCs, which they've since reversed:

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP? ~ Michael Dell

Dell announcing they wouldn't be selling netbooks, ironically not shortly after that remark about HP:

Dell is [no] longer interested in selling Netbooks--that category of 10-inch class laptops that saw mild success for a couple of years but is now facing a serious existential crisis.

HP on Dell's decision to go private, rather than shutting the company down and giving the money back to the shareholders:

Dell has a very tough road ahead. The company faces an extended period of uncertainty and transition that will not be good for its customers. And with a significant debt load, Dell's ability to invest in new products and services will be extremely limited. Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell's customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity.

And now we've come full circle.

Photo by Eustress on Wikimedia Commons.

I read this last week but forgot to mention it! Wayne Rash writing for Fierce Mobile IT:

HP is launching an enterprise mobility platform that will let wireless carriers provide app stores tailored for enterprise users. [..]

The Enterprise Mobility Platform includes the Enterprise Mobile App Store that lets enterprises create, certify, distribute and manage mobile versions of company apps. The apps would be hosted at the carrier site and the HP app store would provide a portal for employee use.

Sounds like a great idea for simplifying distribution and updating clients, as many of their competitors have realised. Frankly I'm surprised it took them this long!

The writers at the Brand New blog received followup from HP:

In 2008, HP asked marketing agency Moving Brands to propose new ideas for various elements of HP’s brand identity, including fonts, graphics, and logos.

HP is one of the world’s most valuable brands and has no plans to adopt the new logo proposed by Moving Brands. HP did implement some of the other design elements shown in the case study.

Old news, but I discussed HP's potential new logo at length in December last year, and I figured I should follow up on it. "Last year"... that phrase still sounds funny.

I'm relieved they're not changing their logo. HP may have lost the plot a bit in the consumer space of late, but I still hold out hope for them.

Hot off the heels of hiring their next CEO in as many years, HP have updated their logo again, three years after I blogged about their last logo change. Eventually they'll update and restore their consumer business too!

HP, number 3? #Rhyme

When I first read on The Twitters that HP were updating their logo, initially I was unfased. Or is it "un-phased"? I've been obsessing over too much Star Trek again recently. In any event, I expected the updated version of their logo to be an evolutionary step once more, just as their removal of the rectangle in 2008 was.

Turns out, while the logo is being heralded as an evolutionary change, to me it's anything but. In place of their original, timeless H and P letters... wait, hold the phone. H and P... HP... Hewlett Packard! And here I was thinking they just used lowercase H and lowercase P because they looked like the inverse of each other! Now that's smart!

Sarcasm aside though, what I loved about their old logo was the clever use of the letters which double-mirrored each other. You know when you dip something in chocolate, and then you dip something in chocolate again? This is what HP did with their old logo. Double everything is good. Well, almost double everything.

Degrees of separation

Their latest logo retains the classic HP 13 degree sweep, which even seems to be asserted more now in mockups of their business documents, letterheads and such. That much I can appreciate, some may scoff at trivial things like this, but the fact the angle of these lines has been a part of their corporate brand for so long and they've been able to keep it in the current design is hat-tip worthy. If I were wearing a hat.

In place of the letters however are four lines of two differing lengths, which if you're short sighted like me resemble HP if I put them on my screen and proceed to walk 20 metres away. Up close though, for some reason I keep seeing an elephant raising an arm to ask a question. Or leg, or whatever it is elephants have.

Why change a timeless logo like this that has its roots in 1941? HP is facing unprecedented challenges of late; their consumer businesses are struggling, arguably their largest acquisitions haven't gone over so well, they've gone through more CEOs than I have all time favourite anime characters, to not even speak of their mixed performance in the enterprise. The company needed a distraction, and they got one in this new logo.

Like mustard mixed with custard, branding is a funny thing. It's easy to dismiss, but sometimes a change of clothes can transform a person. Will a refresh of this logo refresh HP's fortunes? Will they start making the 16C again? I'd be happy if they did that. For now, let's just wait and see.

Thanks to the always fascinating Brand New for the graphic and information.

I'm appalled at the suggestion that the HP Envy is an Apple hardware knockoff. For one thing, the optical drive is on the wrong side, and the power button looks entirely different. It also doesn't run Android, at least not without an emulator.

I once admired HP greatly, and I have a bullet proof solution to their problems!

With the removal of Leo Apotheker and appointment of Meg Whitman as the new CEO of HP, the company continues it's seller soap opera run in the industry. Michael Dell continues to gloat from the sidelines, and the rest of the industry moves on. Nothing new to see here, move on, buy more popcorn!

Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung

First, it's hardly surprising Meg reversed some of Leo's decisions. Leo was the former CEO of SAP, the enterprise automation company based out of Germany, so it was to be expected he'd want to mould HP into such a business. Ew, mold. Commodity computers with low profit margins and consumer tablets were probably seen as a distraction from "pulling an IBM" and turning HP into an IT services company. Problem is, HP is neither SAP or IBM, and there was little evidence to suggest HP could move in that direction, at least from any of the people I know who've worked there.

Meg's decision to reverse the decision to stop selling PCs may have nothing to do with dollars and cents business though, she may just want to differentiate herself from the previous guy, and assuage nervous shareholders that her different management style will get results. Will anyone bite? You've got to think they've spooked some potential customers!

Certainly it's hard to see them having many fans at this point. This is most tragic, given that they seem intent on moving off WebOS to Windows 8 on their tablets. Say what you will about iOS and Android, but at least they don't need loud fans to run cool enough!

Ruben Media Consulting Pte. Ltd. Sdn. Bhd. GmbH

Of course, while we're talking about distractions, I'm thinking HP are missing out on the biggest and most lucrative diversification card they could play at any time if they wanted to: a reality show. Put all the mudslinging, back stabbing and managerial impasses on television for the world to see! It would be like The Apprentice, but real and unscripted! Disagreements and their revolving door CEOs would be an asset instead of a liability! Think of the ratings, and the advertising revenue!

I'll be willing to work with HP on this project if they're willing to fly me out to California, and pay me a salary with benefits. Leo got millions for less than a year's work, all I'd ask for is a high six figure salary... that's reasonable isn't it?

Footnotes

I'm sure HP did this on purpose to make my previous post on the subject look stupid. I mean, I make myself look stupid enough without any external help, but this was just icing on the cake. Mmm, cake.

• Thursday 01st September 2011: Were we all Punk’d by HP?
• Monday 22nd August 2011: Foresight versus hindsight at Dell

I also have no idea why all my HP posts now have to have Xzibit on them. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

So HP are doing another run of TouchPad hardware. Was this all an elaborate marketing stunt?

I was on a roll when I made these graphics

In macroeconomic terms, dumping refers to when a company floods a new market with products at unprofitable prices in order to establish a presence. Foreign companies flush with cash are able to sustain this long enough to drive local businesses bankrupt, and are then able to own the market and set the prices. Most free market economists consider dumping to be the only valid reason for protectionism, unless they're Libertarian.

While it's tempting to think HP have done this with the TouchPad, it fails on three counts. No wait, four counts, I'm not Discovery News!

1. Despite the firesale of devices, TouchPads still only count for a tiny fraction of the tablet market. Granted people who own Palm devices give the brand exposure, but there simply isn't enough of them for it to be considered a "flooding".

2. While it would be a masterful stroke of genius to let people think a product is dying only to have it brought back with artificially increased marketshare, we've seen no evidence that HP's marketing departments are savvy enough to have created the concept and pulled it off.

3. There's also no evidence to suggest HP's revolving door executives are creative or forward thinking enough to have instigated such a plan. Mr Apotheker was the former CEO of SAP, so we know where he stands on consumer devices.

4. I've read reports the reason why they're manufacturing more devices is due to their hardware suppliers having quotas or obligations to fill, or they have excess inventory. I'm not entirely sure that makes sense either, but it seems more likely than HP suddenly learning how to do marketing.

In Soviet Tablets, web OS-s you

While I'm all for looking deeper into the meaning behind corporate decisions and doublespeak, in this case I really am willing to believe HP retired Palm hardware due to a lack of sales. I've lamented this many times here given my belief webOS was the best mobile OS ever developed.

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP? ~ Michael Dell

The same way you were ready to say goodbye to Apple? That company that has enough cash to buy yours now? Don't get too comfortable Mr Dell.

When I went to bed last night, HP were still making computers and webOS devices. A lot can happen in one night!

Then rhymes with "Gwen"

See what I did there?

I don't know exactly when this started, but lately I've prefaced most of my blog posts with rambling bouts of nostalgia punctured with lame attempts at humour, then signed off with a submissive "but I digress" before launching into the meat of the matter. This post will be no different.

My first experience with HP was a year before I got my first iMac DV in the late 1990s. The 200MHz Pentium MMX machine we'd built at Funan Centre was starting to show its age (though ironically it's outlasted ever other machine I've ever built and still runs even now!) and we were on the lookout for something new. Out of the blue at COMEX in Singapore, HP were having a sale on the Brio BAx line of business desktops, and we snagged one.

Compared to the ugly, overly plastic boxes the Pavilion desktops came in, the Brio line looked rather smart with its simple lines and slight curves at the front. The machine had a blazingly fast 450MHz Pentium III (or "Pentium !!!" if you took their marketing seriously), a 8.4GB Seagate hard drive and 128MiB of PC133 memory. Because it was technically a business machine it only had onboard graphics, but it was all someone like me needed, particularly when I spent most of my time in an editor hacking away at my latest favourite programming language and only briefly stopping for some SimCity 3000.

Cooler still was what came with it. It happened to be the first computer I owned that came with a CD burner, and a gigantically massive 17" display instead of the crusty 14.5 I'd been using as a loaner from our original 486 machine from 1991! It was also a fateful machine in that it was the first one I tried Red Hat Linux on back in the day, but that's for another post :).

The only other piece of HP hardware I had from that time was a so-called "handheld PC" Given I was still a kid, my dad didn't trust that I wouldn't drop a laptop, so he bought me this little HP 620LX Windows CE 2.0 device for my birthday one year. For family trips overseas where we'd be away from my beloved desktop, this little machine let me keep programming and tinkering :). As of today, aside from a vertical cyan coloured stripe across one side of the screen, it still works!

Today rhymes with "away"

So now we finally come back to the present. Hewlett Packard, one of the original icons of technoligical innovation and progress, has had a troubled recent history. Carly Fiorina's acquisition of Compaq gave them the server hardware and expertise they wanted, but also a legacy of race to to the bottom hardware.

In trying to be Dell, they only hastened the demise of their personal computer unit. Their "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign was embarrassing, couldn't shake off their reputation for being a business company, and fell on deaf ears as creative professionals and those really looking for Something Different fled to Apple.

On the mobile side, their acquisition of the troubled Palm didn't reverse their fortunes either. webOS, in my opinion the finest mobile operating system on the market today, was doomed from the start by slow hardware, face-palmingly poor marketing and a strategic position that none of us understood. It wasn't much cheaper than the also vertically integrated iPhone, didn't offer the breadth of devices of Android, and was only sold in a few select markets.

While for my own personal reasons I'm disappointed in the latter, from a business perspective it makes sense for HP to do this. Junky desktops and laptops simply aren't profitable anymore, and their webOS devices always seemed like an odd fit for an enterprise company who's only other consumer focused devices were high end calculators.

I'll be interested to see where they go from here. I suggest they do some Invent-ing.

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to mirror their site with httrack. I'm a sucker for nostalgia, not that you'd know.

Open up your eyes and look around
It's just an illusion - illusion - illusion.
Could it be that it's just an illusion putting me back in all this confusion?
Could it be that it's just an illusion now?
Could it be that it's just an illusion putting me back in all this confusion?
Could it be that it's just an illusion now?
Could it be a picture in my mind? Never sure exactly what I'll find.

Sorry I couldn't resist, it's 80s music.

Anyway I had a point to this post, and it was regarding some photos I saw from HP today, that company that bought Palm and makes awesome calculators. Check that, used to make awesome calculators... one of my missions in life is to have a real HP-16C, not just use xcalc with the rpn option. Not to diss xcalc with the rpn option, that's still my primary calculation tool, has plety of retro awesomeness and does what I want it to.

But I digress

Isn't it amazing what some tapering can do to make a product look slimmer than it actually is? The laptop in the left of the photo above is from HP's press release of their new laptops, and the photo on the right is from their online store. Granted they're not exactly the same model, but every machine in this series employs the same half-height tapering, and by taking a photo of it from above, half the bulk of the case is hidden from view!

Apple and other manufacturers have long since played this visual trick with their laptops and phones, now it seems HP is realising the potential of doing so! I've seen people at uni with EliteBooks, they're absolute monsters, so anything to make them look less messive is probably a good thing... for sales ;).

Whatever the case (see what I did there?) my next portable machine will hopefully be the smallest thing I can get my hands on... that isn't a netbook. An X series ThinkPad or an 11 inch MacBook Air would be schweet.