SAP’s annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP’s smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn’t have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.
HP’s board has done a lot of messed up stuff. I wouldn’t touch HP gear with a stick.
During this same period, he became laser-focused on acquiring Autonomy for $10.3 billion—a software company that fit his transformation vision perfectly. Everything else, including breakthrough mobile technology, felt like a distraction from this software-focused strategy. That Autonomy acquisition later required more than an $8 billion write-down,
Apotheker wrote down 9.2 billion in 11 months and that’s just the stuff the article mentions. I can’t achieve that level of failure in a lifetime.
Autonomy was hot garbage while HP owned it. Zero improvements to the product stack. I think the original owners bought it back and pushed out an upgrade that made it 10x better.
(This is only tangentially related, sorry for the notification. I just want to complain. I hope you understand)
I bought a used, old HP laptop with a fairly capable AMD apu for some power and cost efficient gaming. Problem is that even though modern games can theoretically run on it at playable frame rates at very low settings, HP does not allow you to change how much RAM is dedicated to the GPU in BIOS. They have a setting, but its locked behind a BIOS only they have access to. Its quite frustrating that I have capable hardware but cannot use it to its full extent because of this software lockout. Knowing that they lock their consumer BIOS’ down like this is absolutely keeping me from buying HP basically ever again, because I really want to make the most of my hardware and keep it all alive as long as possible to reduce waste, and they won’t let me.
Up until that point hp had a stellar engineering reputation. They could have milked that for many more years, but it takes real talent to destroy that so quickly and completely
HP’s board has done a lot of messed up stuff. I wouldn’t touch HP gear with a stick.
Apotheker wrote down 9.2 billion in 11 months and that’s just the stuff the article mentions. I can’t achieve that level of failure in a lifetime.
Autonomy was hot garbage while HP owned it. Zero improvements to the product stack. I think the original owners bought it back and pushed out an upgrade that made it 10x better.
Lol, I hope they bought it back for less than they originally sold it for
(This is only tangentially related, sorry for the notification. I just want to complain. I hope you understand)
I bought a used, old HP laptop with a fairly capable AMD apu for some power and cost efficient gaming. Problem is that even though modern games can theoretically run on it at playable frame rates at very low settings, HP does not allow you to change how much RAM is dedicated to the GPU in BIOS. They have a setting, but its locked behind a BIOS only they have access to. Its quite frustrating that I have capable hardware but cannot use it to its full extent because of this software lockout. Knowing that they lock their consumer BIOS’ down like this is absolutely keeping me from buying HP basically ever again, because I really want to make the most of my hardware and keep it all alive as long as possible to reduce waste, and they won’t let me.
This is VERY HP and does not surprise me at all. If they don’t know why they’re going down, it’s not because everyone didn’t tell them.
The regular HP printer threads are another example.
I had an hp laptop with a locked bios and there was a red flathead screw near the ssd that unlocked it.
I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.
That was particularly grisly. It sure went to shit fast, didn’t it.
Up until that point hp had a stellar engineering reputation. They could have milked that for many more years, but it takes real talent to destroy that so quickly and completely
HP and Asus taught me that specs aren’t all that important sometimes.
He didn’t even do a good job in SAP.