14 Sep
2002
14 Sep
'02
10:29 p.m.
HP used to make the best stuff. But if they
still made stuff that way, they would be out of
business.
No!
If HP still made good quality stuff, they would still be a market
leader in fields other than inkjet cartridges. I don't begrudge
them the inkjet business, but they've let everything else slide,
and they've suffered the consequences. Now that their products
are no better than anyone else's, yet are still generally more
expensive than competing products, customers have no particular
reason to favor HP. Thus their market share continues to decline.
In the last few years, they decided that rather than stick with their
core compentencies, they would try to make money in the cutthroat
PC market. They combined their money-losing PC business with that
of Compaq. Apparently if you want to lose money on every unit and
make it up in volume, you need to have *really* high volume. Of
course, the result of the merger is that they will wind up with
lower volume, as they continue to lose business to Dell and other
clone vendors.
I'd love to see them prove me wrong, but I think I'm more likely to
see pigs fly. Just a simple matter of applying sufficient thrust. :-)