| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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The Ultimate Business Machine - ArchivesList of Categories : Database * Technology * Commentary * Singapore * Travel * Fri 24 Jun 2005 Perfect Enough?Category : Commentary/PerfectEnough.txt We know that Mac users love their Macs, while PC users... Well, how much do PC users care about the PC? Perhaps, this is in direct proportion (and response) to the care that had gone into building it.
I've finished reading "Perfect Enough - Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard" but there's this part I'd like to quote. It's the part where the McKinsey experts (!) were taking the HP directors through the merits buying Compaq :
Sam Ginn voiced his doubts about moving deeper into personal computers. "We've never made much money at it," he said. "Our returns are lousy and so are theirs." The McKinsey experts retorted that HP and Compaq had much less at stake than most people realized. Together, the two companies rang up $20 billion a year in revenue selling personal computers. But they didn't make the hardware or software; they didn't even assemble the machines. Intel, Microsoft, and contract manufacturers such as Flextronics handled such chores. The PC business consisted mostly of brand-name sizzle and some legal agreements in a file cabinet (italics added). If the two companies could coax out a few marketing efficiencies and post even a slim profit, that would translate into a decent return on invested capital.
You see those shiny HP and Compaq laptops in the computer superstores. Not a scrap of soul in them. They weren't built primarily to be used by people. They were built "to post a slim profit".
As the afternoon played out, Dick Hackborn became one of the most vocal proponents of the deal. He had been arguing for years that industry standards almost always won out over proprietary architectures in the computer business. As a result, he believed, Hewlett-Packard ought to seize command of the standardized - and increasingly popular - Windows NT server market and rely less on its customized Unix machines. An HP-Compaq combination would finally get the company pointed in the right direction.
Windows is "open" and Unix is proprietary. Why are big corporate guys so smart? DEC, Tandem, Compaq, even the IBM PC - they're all gone. And we're still using Macs. For whom does the death knell toll? |
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