HP Top Level Executive On Life After the Split

An anonymous reader shares a ZDNet report: George Brasher is a 26-year HP veteran who has worked in a variety of roles in the company's printer and PC divisions over the years and is now HP Inc's managing director for the UK and Ireland. We began by asking how the first fifteen 'post-split' months had gone. "If you go back to the genesis of the separation, what Meg [Whitman, CEO of HPE and chairwoman of HP Inc] said was that, by splitting into two businesses, we'd be able to have more focus -- and I think that's truly what's happened with HP Inc. What we wanted to get out of it was: could we be more focused on our markets; could we actually accelerate our pace of innovation and get closer to our customers? In general, I'd say the answer is a resounding 'yes'." [...] The second thing is -- and you can see examples around this room [the CWC] -- we're a technology company, and innovation is our lifeblood: if you look at PC and print, we've seen more significant high-quality introductions in the last 15 months than in any previous 15-month period." [...] "The proof is always in the pudding: I look at the Spectre x360, the Elite X3 and other devices -- and it's not just new devices, but also the quality of the new devices; being able to have a partnership with B&O and thinking about a new computing experience. On the print side, it's the same thing: in September we announced our single biggest rollout ever, with a set of 16 A3 multifunction devices starting in a couple of months and rolling out over the course of the year. I don't think that happens unless you have separation, because then you've got a management team and a board, and a group of employees, that are just laser-focused on driving against that."

once upon a time

[phantomfive]

" we're a technology company, and innovation is our lifeblood"

That was true of HP a long time ago.

Re:once upon a time

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

That's kind of what I thought. Once they spun off Agilent (with the old-school HP tech) in 2002, I thought that was the real "split" - everything since then has been commodity PCs and services you could get from dozens of other similar vendors.

Re:

[David_Hart]

HP servers were middle of the road. Compaq servers and workstations were excellent. HP servers and workstations are good today because of that merger.

Re:

[unixisc]

Are you talking about the HP9000 servers? B'cos as far as the Wintel servers went, I don't recall HP being among the top - that used to be IBM, DEC, Compaq and Dell

Re:

[Cacadril]

And now, after the split, could you fix the perennial "the printer is offline" annoyance?

HP printers

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the industry standard for quality hardware have become junk just like the rest of the printers over the past decade.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans won't pay for quality anymore. They gladly buy the cheapest chinese garbage available while lamenting the offshoring of all of their own jobs. You can't fix stupid.

Re:

[unixisc]

Oddly enough, China is not a member of NAFTA. It's their WTO membership that's screwing much of the world

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Americans won't pay for quality anymore.

They won't pay for quality that doesn't matter. Twenty years ago I had a $1000 HP printer that was built like a tank. Today I have a $50 HP printer made out of flimsy plastic. But it prints better than the old one. It is faster, quieter, and has way better resolution. It also has a built in scanner.

Re:HP printers

[chipschap]

And if it's a $50 laser printer, undoubtedly it comes with a "starter" cartridge that will print a handful of pages, but you can buy a regular capacity cartridge for another $100. But don't worry about buying a second $100 cartridge because the printer won't last that long.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[drinkypoo]

So... I don't know, but I suspect overall modern printers are vastly more cost effective than the supposedly high quality laser printers of 30 years ago. Leaving aside their higher resolution (300dpi just doesn't cut it any more...)

HPLJ2300DN plus a postscript dimm and a 128MB DIMM (both dirt cheap now) and bingo, I can have 300 dpi at 17 ppm or 1200 dpi at... less. Duplex, I have two trays, and all I have to do to keep it running is feed it a roller kit now and again.

Re:

[keltor]

The standard Brother that's commonly recommended today comes with a "normal" capacity cartridge and it definitely printed about 1000 pages before it was used up. We bought an XL, which lasted about 2k and we're now on our second XL. I am not having a single issue, this printer replaced my LaserWriter 8500 that I had since 2000.

Re:

[chipschap]

Could you tell us what model this is and about what it costs?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not throwing out your printer every 2 years matters for the environment if nothing else. I bought a HP Deskjet 870CSE inkjet in like 1996 for $799. It was a parallel port printer so around 2002 I had to buy a parallel to USB adapter for it, but then it just kept printing for 11 more years and I printed a whole freakin lot on that printer. The day I tossed that printer was like saying goodbye to dead pet. It hurt. I loved that printer. Now I basically throw out lousy HP printer ever 2-3 years because that'

This is called progress

[ghoul]

20 years back manufacturing was in the dark ages. People really had no idea of how much material is needed to get a target life period. Since they didnt have good statistics, Quality teams or computers to simulate material fatigue they overbuilt evrything. This made stuff last for years and was a good thing if you were one of the few rich people who could afford overbuilt crap but it sucked for most of society who were locked out of having their own printer and had to go to printing shops to print. This wou

Re:

[ChrisMaple]

20 years ago was when dot matrix impact printers were mostly gone from the market because print quality was too poor, and color ink-jet printers had become affordable.

Re:

[bhcompy]

That's not because we won't pay for quality. It's because ink and toner have become the profit drivers. Buying a better printer doesn't make the ink cheaper. It costs less for an inkjet printer than it does for a package of ink.

Re:

[unixisc]

I thought that Brother has had better quality printers than HP. At least, their all in ones have.

Fix your service!

[gmack]

Innovation is secondary. The whole advantage to HP was their service and that has been sacrificed since the HPE split.

We had a server whose RAID controller was throwing an NMI error and the support process was a nightmare. First level tech support never wanted to escalate to second level. When they finally stopped changing motherboards and Raid caches/batteries, the actual server replacement took two weeks because our 3 year old server was "too old" to keep in stock. Our parent company has been complaining about the same level of service reduction.

They guarunteed that the support contracts will not continue beyond this year and that the next servers will not be HP

Re:

[sconeu]

On "The Big Bang Theory", didn't Sheldon once spend 4 hours on hold with HP customer service to complain about their customer service?

Re:

[drinkypoo]

On "The Big Bang Theory", didn't Sheldon once spend 4 hours on hold with HP customer service to complain about their customer service?

It took me over 24 hours (in total) on the phone to HP support as well as two failed "technician" visits to get a replacement for an HP Elitebook with a three-year corporate extended warranty. Never again, HP. Never again.

Shocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Top level exec says things are going great and CEO's moves were right.

Re:

[MountainLogic]

Indeed. Calling the new HP a technology is like calling the Forrest Service a technology because they use the technology known as "Forrest Fires." This puffery by executives really explains why the likes of the new HP are dinosaurs on life support just waiting for their outsourced supplies to cut out the middleman and sell their stuff directly to the customers. Heck these factories can even buy up an idle brand name and use it. Whatever happened to PamAm, Instamatic, Berm-a-shave, Gleem and Zenith [wikipedia.org]?

The Machine....

[xeoron]

What happened? They had said 2 years ago it was hit market last year. We have heard no real updates since.

Not for everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably good only for those at the very top. Individual contributors, not so much. What about those at HPE who were jettisoned off to other companies?

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

I hope at least one of those 16 pretends to support Linux

FTFY

Lame infomercial

[snookiex]

What were you expecting? "We are shit-scared, HP carcass is falling apart and everyone's in panic. If you have a vacant position, even to clean toilets, call me, please".

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

That is what he was saying. We live in a "post truth" world now.

I guess my mind just went dark...

[mr_mischief]

I guess my mind just went dark, because I first read the headline as "HP Top Level Executive On Life Support After the Split".

Good ole Compaq

[n0w0rries]

I remember we had a Compaq Proliant 1600R, and I had one of our level 1 support guys go get it and bring it to my office from the server room across the campus. The guy parks a metal cart with the server on it at the top of a staircase to help a UPS guy at the elevator. Cart rolls down the stairs, launching the server. Stairs are concrete and steel.

He brought the bent up server in and told me what happened. After inspecting it and re-seating everything, we turned it on, and it booted right up.

A short ti

Re:

[rfengr]

Well the old Apollo workstations were built like tanks, and the other computers that were specific for technical computing.