Comment on I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days

homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Revan343@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Lol, I hope they bought it back for less than they originally sold it for

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      • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I believe that’s what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn’t the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I’d book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I’d get less than those 100€ back for it, so I’d write down that difference as a loss.

        With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company’s value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they’ll have paid less for it than they originally got.

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• acockworkorange@mander.xyz ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  He didn’t even do a good job in SAP.

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• poke@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  (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.

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  • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I had an hp laptop with a locked bios and there was a red flathead screw near the ssd that unlocked it.

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  • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    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.

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• Cenzorrll@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  HP and Asus taught me that specs aren’t all that

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• sturger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

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  • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That was particularly grisly. It sure went to shit fast, didn’t it.

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    • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      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

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      • ShawiniganHandshake@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Fires the entire R&D department Changes the company slogan to “Innovate”

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