Everyone in our solar system knows about the pain going on at HP. I would not be surprised if even a few extra terrestrials know about HP’s roller coaster ride of CEOs, acquisitions, write downs, re-orgs, lay offs, and other painful stuff.
The tendency of course is to write off a company with this much trouble. Why work for, work with, sell to, sell with, or even write blog posts about a company that seems to put its business plan in the blender before deciding what to do each morning?
Well, because with this much pain there is enormous opportunity for gain. In the fifteen years we have been helping big technology companies market through their partners we have been involved in many conversations with HP. Most of those conversations have included a significant thread about how HP does things and about how there was no chance the way HP did things was ever going to change.
Well, things are changing now!
On every measure except market capitalization, where even Facebook has a bigger valuation, HPQ is pretty big. Seventy three years of history, over one hundred billion dollars in revenue, and 350,000 employees. Add to this HP’s tens of thousands of business partners that sell their hardware, software, and services all over the world and I would not be surprised if the HP ecosystem was more than a million people strong.
No matter what experts say about the rapid pace of change inside technology companies, every company in every industry avoids change and HP and the technology industry are not immune. Right now, the move to the cloud and BYOD is moving the pieces around the technology industry chess board and presenting a once in a decade opportunity to companies willing to change big.
So all of the planets are lined up and HP is Jupiter.
If I were HP, this is what I would want to do with my influence:
- Make it UNBELIEVABLY EASY to work with HP
- Set a new TRANSPARENCY standard
- Establish HP in the CENTER of the ecosystem
- Make each change FOUNDATIONAL
Clearly these measures build on each other. Each will have an impact on its own. With a little luck the compound impact could change the whole industry.