MicroHP — the New IT Giant? 112
storagedude writes "Although it may have gone unnoticed by most IT industry watchers, this week's announcement from Microsoft and HP that the two have combined on integrated appliances for corporate business intelligence and email could be the start of a closer relationship between the two IT giants as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle. From the article: 'Combine Microsoft and HP — call it MicroHP — and what do you have? A full Windows-plus-Linux scale-out hardware and software lineup, with an exceptionally strong position both in SaaS/public cloud and data centers, and a huge presence on the business desktop. This would allow such a combined entity to produce well-tuned appliances for such hot areas as BI/analytics — as Microsoft and HP have just done.'"
MicroHP? (Score:5, Funny)
I think HPoSoft would be a better name, pronounced "hipposoft".
Re: (Score:2)
I think MicroHP is totally insulting and rude to this low-level player anyway. The right term to use is HP-challenged.
Mashup (Score:3)
MSHP = Mash Up?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm thinking Mishap
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
M
S
HP
Like
M
S
NBC
Re: (Score:2)
MicroPackard... the jokes will write themselves.
Re: (Score:1)
I think HPoSoft would be a better name, pronounced "hipposoft".
I would say HypoSoft (as in hypocrite) is a better fit.
what? (Score:1)
Windows and linux? and MS is involved. In other news Satan has said these last few months have been fucking freezing.
Don't forget the WebOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus Microsoft would get a Phone OS.
The main reason I hope this happens is that then maybe a greedy MicroHP would stop making drivers for other Operating systems besides windows. The worst software on my mac for the past decade has always been, bar none, HP scanner software. it's like toenail fungus. it gets into your system and spreads from user to user. Then it curses you for trying to run multiple instances of itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me about it. and then they stop supporting your scanner for no reason at all!
Do yourself a favour. Uninstall the software and get a copy of Vuescan [hamrick.com]
I know I sound like a shill to others, but you know how much HP's Mac software sucks.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Do yourself a favour....
... and don't buy a Mac
Re: (Score:2)
Do yourself a favour - toss the HP kit in the skip.
Re: (Score:2)
I have an HP Laser Printer and an HP Scanner with TMA that I use with Linux more than with Windows. FUD, much?
Re: (Score:2)
Seconded. I have an HP laserjet (1020--firmware is uploaded by the driver) that I have plugged into my file server running Gentoo. I have never directly plugged this printer into Windows and it works just fine, even as a home network printer. It behaves well over the network with pretty much every other box in the house.
The trick is to research what hardware in your price range will work with the OS
Re: (Score:2)
The trick is to research what hardware in your price range will work with the OS of your choice, which I suspect the OP probably didn't do.
Or just to know something before you buy something. I knew that my printer would work because it speaks PCL and even if it didn't it would work anyway because of the pxlmono driver, which ALSO works with it. The scanner I bought for five bucks at the flea and got it home to find out the latest Windows drivers are for Vista. Note that this is a totally arbitrary distinction by HP to force you to buy a new scanner if you move to Windows 7, since the scanner speaks the very same protocol that virtually all oth
Re: (Score:2)
Which was effectively the point I was trying to make, but thank you for reiterating it. :)
Not all sub-$100 printers are supported (yet) by, for example, foomatic et al, so what I was implying was that it's a good idea to research which hardware will work best for your price range.
Re: (Score:1)
I've been dumbfounded by how a renowned company like HP, and a company in the printer business, can make such an unbelievable piece of *#(&*@%(*&@@ software that their scanpro or what not is. It's like using a Model-T, with careful nudges, and coaxing, and a few crash/reboots later, I am able to scan my expenses. And before that, HP was great for hiding it's drivers, so while I had an ancient but reliable LaserJet III, I could only get it working under
Re: (Score:2)
Its global warming, the hotter it gets up here, the colder it gets down there.
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds like MicroHyPe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)
Author seems to be missing something... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure HP isn't interested [hp.com] at all [hp.com] in the Linux on Intel [hp.com]. :-/
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
An Itanium link? I didn't know they were still making those.
Better known as the Itanic. So mod me troll!
Re: (Score:2)
They care about the 'commodity' stuff, and HP and IBM trade back and fourth for '#1' in that space, and even if margins are low on the systems (but still no where near as slim as many x86 vendors), they make gobs in services and such.
Calling HP the 'new' giant is odd given they are not particularly any more giant than they were a month ago, or a year ago.
R&D at Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure google would love a merger: two top heavy companies doing everything they can to kill R&D
Do you have even the faintest notion of what Microsoft spends on R&D?
Microsoft's $8.7 billion in R&D expenses for the 2010 fiscal year represented 14 percent of the company's $62.5 billion in annual revenue. That was down slightly from the previous year, when the R&D expenses of $9 billion represented about 15 percent of its revenue, roughly in line with its traditional ratio.
Microsoft's annual R&D spending dips for first time in five years [techflash.com]
Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding took the top position for innovation spending, having boosted its R&D spend 11.6% to $9.1 billion, replacing Toyota Motor, which cut spending nearly 20% and fell to fourth place.
In fact, healthcare companies took 5 of the top 10 spots on the list and 7 of the top 20.
Microsoft (#2), Nokia (#3) and Pfizer (#5) rounded out the top five. Corporate R&D spending declined during 2009 downturn, finds Booz & Company global innovation 1000 study [zawya.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Like most research it's incremental. They do a lot in base computer science, publish a ton of papers, and seem to win a lot of awards for their research. You can read about all you want here:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:R&D at Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
-LINQ
-Singularity (a managed-code operating system, designed for high reliability)
-Photosynth
-Work on robotics
-Work on application acceleration with FPGA's
-The F# programming language
Whether or not you like Microsoft, or qualify these as "breakthroughs," MSR does more public R&D than just about anyone else in the industry with the possible exception of IBM.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, Microsoft spends tons of money on research. But you picked really bad examples, because what you chose isn't really research that was done at Microsoft, much of it is the result of research in academia that was then turned into a demo/product at Microsoft. A lot of it is also based on quite old technologies.
Re: (Score:2)
much of it is the result of research in academia
The whole point of MSR is that it does the "academia" kind of research. Go to Google Scholar and search for "Microsoft Research", and see what (and how many) papers come out.
Re: (Score:1)
-LINQ
And has this changed the computing environment any? Does anyone use it?
-Singularity (a managed-code operating system, designed for high reliability)
Does anyone use it? Doesn't look like it.
-Work on robotics
I don't see any Microsoft robots out there. In fact, I don't see many robots at all; most advances in robotics seem to come from the Japanese, and maybe from iRobot and their Roomba.
-Work on application acceleration with FPGA's
And we can see the results where? I see a lot more application accele
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see any Microsoft robots out there. In fact, I don't see many robots at all; most advances in robotics seem to come from the Japanese, and maybe from iRobot and their Roomba.
Microsoft Robotics Studio. It's excellent.
Re: (Score:1)
I honestly thought those were pretty good examples of things that came out of MS R&D. Instead of just posting flamebait, look at the products they actually come out with..
CRM 2011, now a real competitor to Salesforce at 10% the cost
BI Tools. Tighter integration of SSRS and Excel, Powerpivot, all great products that continue to rule the practical business use case
XBox, which isn't the HTPC they originally were shooting for, but you can find one in almost every home and dorm room, and 5 years into the pr
Re: (Score:1)
Kinect? Actually, no, they bought the idea for the dual camera from a college kid - they were originally thinking about some type of table-display-control thing which was very unwieldy.
Another thing is .NET, a knock-off of Java and ObjC.
Actually, they haven't innovated according to the dictionary definition (http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/microsoft.html) but they have been able to commercialize some other people's ideas and called it innovation.
They also have a good custom software division if you could
Re: (Score:2)
they were originally thinking about some type of table-display-control thing which was very unwieldy>
I believe this [youtube.com] is the future you were talking about...
Re: (Score:2)
If you think MSR doesn't do any innovative research, I suggest you look at some of Simon Peyton Jones' publications. He's done some amazing things with the Glasgow Haskell Compiler at MSR in Cambridge. My favourite stuff is the use of monads to represent software transactional memory, but the implicit concurrency stuff is also pretty shiny. He was made a Fellow of the ACM for a good reason.
Re: (Score:2)
My favourite stuff is the use of monads to represent software transactional memory, but the implicit concurrency stuff is also pretty shiny.
The natives are easily impressed by shiny glass beads.
Re: (Score:1)
Kinect? Actually, no, they bought the idea for the dual camera from a college kid...
...they have been able to commercialize some other people's ideas and called it innovation....
Wow I didn't know it was so easy to build out a dual camera motion sensing system for a console!
There a big difference in this industry between having a good idea, and actually implementing it for the masses. Good ideas are a dime-a-dozen
Re: (Score:3)
Clippy
"I see you are trying to release a floppy. Can I help?"
Clippy was straightened out and used; however, he is now known as Climpy.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure I parsed your sentence correctly, but Apple was not the most successful, innovative IT company. They were successful and arguably innovative, but as a consumer electronics company, not as an IT company. Sure, they have mac pros and also call them tower servers, but it's not even a blip on the radar relative to the major players in the field or any one of their iTunes, iPhone, iPod, iPad revenue streams. Retiring their only rackmount offering was the first step, fully expect Apple to give up
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Even though I abhor Microsoft for many reasons, I like Microsoft Research.
It's too bad, though, that a lot of the spirit of MSR never leaves the division.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you kidding? If you're a CS graduate looking for a corporate R&D job, Microsoft is one of the few places left, and they actually still have some freedom and time to do research.
The company you should be complaining about is Apple: they closed their search lab 15 years ago, don't publish, and don't do research; Apple just puts other people's technologies into shiny boxes and makes a killing with it.
Which goes to show that tons of spending on R&D is neither necessary nor sufficient for making goo
HP made a similar deal with Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
a couple years back, to sell an appliance running Oracle's DB and data warehousing software on HP server hardware. That was supposed to be a big deal for both companies, until Oracle acquired HP's archrival Sun a few months later. Then Mark Hurd was kicked out of HP and joined Oracle, with Ellison dissing HP's board for its incompetence in letting Hurd go. It might be possible to still buy this Oracle-HP appliance, but I doubt that either company is pushing it very hard.
In other words, this is the kind of short term marketing alliance that happens all the time in the tech world, usually with lots of hoopla and smiling CEOs making speeches about a new era of this or that. Most of them don't amount to much. In the case of HP and Microsoft, there is perhaps a fit with HP lacking enterprise database software and Microsoft struggling in the business intelligence space. But wait until either one makes an acquisition or another big deal, for example Microsoft with Dell to sell BI appliances, then we'll stop hearing from the two companies about how excellent this one is.
But wait... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
HP seems really fond of what I call "irrelevance campaigns". They keep having them with a myriad of vendors and, despite any concrete 'excellence' in any one area they're focusing on, push them hard for a short period of time then drop them like they're hot. Sometimes it's the result of a purchase/merger, new product, or some other such thing, but the result is almost always the same:
* HP branded Citrix XenServer (preinstalled)
* HP 'mini' netbooks (good deal while they lasted, but then they hiked the price
Linux != all *nixes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux != all *nixes (Score:5, Informative)
That's why it's called 'HP-SUX' even by people who work there.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
That's what I've always seen it called.
Re: (Score:2)
WHile HP-UX isn't going anywhere (HP-UX 11iV4 and 11iV5 are planned), it hasn't really been HP's biggest area of sales growth. While they expect to keep HP-UX on Integrity for a while, the company's main server strategy has switched to Linux on Intel, Linux on Integrity (Itanium) and Windows on Intel.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Linux on Intel, Linux on Integrity (Itanium)
Itanium is Intel
So this means... (Score:1)
"unnoticed by most industry watchers" for a reason (Score:4)
Neither company has done much worth watching recently - so there's no reason to think that their combining forces is likely to produce anything particularly noteworthy.
Re: (Score:1)
Business majors need to recite this every morning without fail: synergy never happens, synergy never happens, synergy never happens...
Synergies happen (Score:2)
Business majors need to recite this every morning without fail: synergy never happens, synergy never happens, synergy never happens...
I dunno, it seems to have happened a lot with Google's acquisitions. OTOH, rather than just mouth some platitudes about synergy and expecting it to magically happen as they downsize, when Google buys someone with a product service where they expect to acheive some kind of synergies, they seem to throw a bunch of technical resources into integrating the product or service with Google's existing offerings to acheive synergies.
Synergies happen only if you take the step beyond recognizing the potential for syne
IBM and Oracle? (Score:1)
.... as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle.
Shouldn't that be "... the increasing irrelevance of IBM and Oracle?"
Re: (Score:3)
I admittedly haven't seen much new Sun gear in places even before the takeover, and have heard some complaints about service problems after the Oracle acquisition. Oracle software, however, still has a very large presence with no sign of slowing. Oracle DB software is still deployed even in a whole lot of places where PostgreSQL or MySQL would be perfectly sufficient.
IBM I don't see as losing any clout in the enterprise space. The only mainframe game to speak of (legacy is a large reason for it, but thos
The first product of this historic collaboraton: (Score:2, Funny)
A revolutionary new printer that prints only BSODs.
They should merge as "Windows, Inc." (Score:2)
If they merge you get a complete company. They could put Windows on top of Unix on top of HP hardware and make something that can compete with the Mac. They could do real mobile versions of Office and have something that can compete with iPad. Put all their phone stuff together, you might get to something that matches the 2007 iPhone.
The kit era is over. The build whatever PC you want as long as it runs Windows era is over. Most users today are not nerds, most buyers are not I-T. You need to make complete,
"Corporate Business Intelligence" (Score:1)
'Combine Microsoft and HP and what do you have? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
That said, I do hear that they do at least treat their business customers slightly better than their consumer customers... so perhaps they can at least get their shoddy crap replaced in a reasonable amount of time.
Any feedback on the actual appliances? (Score:1)
As someone from Microsoft who works closely with a team at HP building the actual appliances mentioned discussed here, I'd love more feedback on the HP Business Decision Appliance (HPBDA) mentioned here. The appliance is designed to support 80-150 concurrent PowerPivot users (doing what we call Self-Service BI) in a 1U server (24 cores/96GB memory) with all the storage required inside the appliance. The appliance is configured to provide backup storage initially. The HPBDA from cardboard box to producti
Re: (Score:2)
All I know is that HP is my LAST choice. Every time I deal with them I become angry. When I make purchasing decisions, which has been the case at several of my places of employment, HP is not in the running for anything. When they shipped me a laptop with a GPU die bonding problem and I had to spend over 24 hours on the phone in total to get it replaced, even though I managed to get confirmation from a tech lead that it was their fault, I knew that it was over. When you have to abuse your customers to profi
Re: (Score:2)
Britt
Feedback -- sure, why not. But, it has to be in the form of questions.
1 - does your powerpivot appliance work with IBM ISAS appliances?
2 - does your powerpivot appliance work with IBM BCU?
3 - how does your appliance interoperate with Ab Initio? McSource? COGNOS? (8.4 and 10). If a customer has, say 6000 or more ETL jobs running with Ab Initio, and wants to start adding powerpivot functionality, is your appliance represented by a new GUI box to simply drag-and-drop in that environment?
4 - your appliance
Good bye HP (Score:2)
A partneship with MS can only lead to one outcome... I won't miss HP a lot, except for not finding ink for my printer anymore.
Trends (Score:1)
Intel wants to buy McAfee, HP and Microsoft cooperates. Is this hardware + software cooperation a trend? Is this because growth seems to happen on all other arenas than the traditional PC?
In the mid 90's Microsoft and Intel relied on each other to drive one another's sales, a symbiosis they formalized for a while, but "parted as friends" in the late 90's if I recall correctly.