This has all the ingredients of a nice little scandal... auditors failing to audit, investment bankers not doing their job, faked numbers! Could be fun all over again...
The total cockup of the Palm acquisition was evidence enough for me that HP really has no idea what it is doing. I hope they can figure it out, I LIKE HP.
I'm still beyond pissed at what they did to Palm. Fortunately, there are good people still doing things with webOS, and you can still get good phones off the back of a truck, so to speak.
I never got to mess around with webOS, but read great things. I was hoping Amazon would grab it for their Kindles instead of stickng with Android, but alas.
Even if that particular deal was screwed up, it doesn't excuse them for 'cockups' before that. Not sure who is in charge of M&A, but they're not doing a very good job of it. Companies like Google buy hundreds of other smaller companies every year, and seemingly have a very high success rate at integrating them into the 'Google' family. Even the Motorola purchase, at $12.5 billion has gone over relatively well. They might be taking a loss every year because of it, but Google is aggressively cutting costs and streamlining operations. And adding 20,000 employees is a big deal.
Yeah, having TWO huge acquisitions blow up in your face is pretty bad. To be honest, I think HP is in a pretty tough spot strategically. Computer hardware is a tough, low margin business where they don't have any real advantage (vs, say, Apple), they don't have any cool gadgets (mobile) and building a software business is quite tough (as evidenced by all the write downs for their acquisitions). I don't feel jealous of Whitman.
HP wasted a decade just sitting on its ass not really do anything and when they finally did do something they were always an also ran who cost too much. They should be trying copy everything they can about Samsung's business model but instead they seem trapped in the old ways of doing business so they look more like failing Sharp or Sanyo than successful Samsung.
