HP a Marketing Marvel
November 5, 2010
I found “HP’s Move on IBM” thought provoking for two reasons. First, the news angle that HP was going to put a mixed martial art choke hold on IBM was a surprise. IBM is an acquisition-focused services firm. The goal of IBM, in my opinion, is to sell high margin services. The notion of IBM building a product that sells like an iPad is not on my radar. Even in search, IBM defaulted to open source, not its own basket of information retrieval novelties.
The second reason was the phrase “Instant-On Enterprise.” True I worked for Halliburton and a couple of other not-so-interesting companies in my career. One thing I learned during that tenure is that not too much within an established organization is instant on or off for that matter. I suppose there are some executives who want the world to work just like a Google search, but the reality is that most procurements take time. Change is resisted, often in ways that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would find exemplary. Once an engineers gets certified for some enterprise solution, that engineer thinks, “Keep job.” Once someone figures out how to run a trade show, forget the notion of learning a new trick. A trail ride horse knows where the barn, hay and water are. Ever try to get the trail ride horse to go someplace else, you—you digital Hopalong Cassidy? Yep, instant on.
Get that horse trained to do another trick, Hopalong. Stuck. Get help from Cisco.
Here’s a passage from the article that I marked as significant:
It is convincingly packaged, but comes with problematic timing. It is, HP officials have acknowledged, the product of strategic work by Mark Hurd, who was fired by HP’s board in August after some head-scratching indiscretions with a good-looking contract employee. Apotheker, a former head of enterprise software company SAP, is now ultimately responsible for the grand configuration of Hurd’s acquisition.
Okay.
I think HP can mosquito bite IBM. HP is not a predator that will keep IBM’s high margin consultants awake at night. Perhaps after Mr. Apotheker surfaces? Perhaps after the instant guy settles in at Oracle and gets a new idea? Perhaps when the HP way instantly clicks on? I keep in the back of my mind that HP once owned AltaVista.com and let those engineers drift down the river of time to the Google.
Stephen E Arnold, November 5, 2010
Freebie
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