Another good reason to bring you children up Atheist?

From The Real Stuff White People Like

HP Prayer for Relief against ex CEO

I had never heard of this quaint legal terminology before, found in the civil complaint against former CEO Mark Hurd. The irony suggested by the wording is that the HP board is in desperate straights over the escalating Hurd debacle and has resorted to worshiping the Palo Alto money gods.

Having just paid about 2 million dollars per employee for ArcSight, I don't think the powers that preside over Silicon Valley's indulgences will consider this prayer happily. Rather a reprimand for stupidity is probably in order.

Not only did Hurd fleece the HP board of 25 million to avoid further scandal, he delivered a follow up  scandal within days, seemingly out of sheer spite, as he walked straight into the waiting wallet of Larry Ellison spoiling for a fight against his biggest competitor.

Maybe prayer is the best strategy right now after all.

HP ranks number 10 in Interbrand Global Brand Survey

Kudos to HP, it's global strategy of awe-inspiring bigness seems to be working. It's rated as number 10 on the list of world's most well known brands, pushing Toyota out of the top 10 with a rise in brand value of 12%.

The top 10 is remarkably dominated by tech companies, with IBM, Microsoft, Google, Nokia and Intel all within the top 10.

Source: Interbrand Best Global Brands 2010

HP Acquisition Rampage continues - ArcSight in the sights

HPs seemingly monopoly-like buying spree continues with ArcSight being the next billion dollar purchase.

Obviously because of the embarassing bidding war with Dell over 3PAR that I commented on in an earlier post, HP was keeping a low profile on the ArcSight acquisition. It wasn't even announced on the company intranet, I had to dig it out from the public internet site after reading it in the paper.  Perhaps given that this is "cybersecurity, cyberdefence and cyberwarfare company", it was thought a little cloak and dagger understatement was in order, although it appears from the stock chart, that someone got a whiff of the transaction in late August based on the huge one day jump in stock price prior to the official announcement today. Oh to be part of the Silicon Valley rumor mill...

You have to wonder what the market thinks of these aquisition. HPs share price has fluculated quite substantially for a big tech stock in the last months. Much of this was due to the volatile swings in the overall market since May, but the all knowing stock market is supposed to price in all known pricing factors such as multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

Maybe I should start trading these swings (see my Daily Income for Life blog). Its probable that I would make more money trading HP stock that I will in HP bonuses this year, given how much cash has been flying out the door to the moneyed mansions of Los Gatos, and not to mention the embarassing pay off of Mark Hurd. Oh, sorry Peter, we just spent our employee bonus pool on paying a huge premium for 3PAR, ArcSight, legal bills fighting our ex-CEO and trips to Hawaii for our Sales Team. Because, umm, our executive team gets their bonus based on how much market share we grow, and well this pile of cash is not growing market share unless we buy market share with it right?

Black humor aside, like 3PAR, HPs ArcSight acquisition does make commercial lsense. It gives HP some valuable intellectual property in the area of cyberthreft, cyberwarfare, and cyberespionage. Maybe it could even be used to keep tabs of the expense accounts of future CEOs? I think $1.2 billion is cheap to make sure the next one hired is honest. The HP board has already been through a spying scandal, so

Hang on, a guy in a trench coat and hat has just walked into my cube... later.

Does HPs 3PAR acquisition give a new tilt to the Tech playing field?

HP has 300,000 employees and counting. Add to that another another multi-billion dollar acquisition of 3PAR to fuel the meglomanical expansion of the worlds biggest technology company. Can HP really handle all these ideas and cultures with a corporate version of feature bloat?

Does this remind anyone of IBM in the early 90s?

We've known a while that the best HP Labs can produce is off the wall solutions for manure powered data centers. Could be a boon for Wisconsin and New Zealand, but it certainly doesn't showcase HP Labs.

So it looks like the HP executive suite in Palo Alto has given up on actual innovation, they just go buy it at whatever price they need to pay. If you can afford to blow 25 million on shutting up a dishonest CEO, then you can reward yourself lots of really neat other stuff as well.

What is HP really trying to do here? Even a 'in the trenches' HP salary slave like myself (I nearly slipped and said 'in the firing line', which off course wouldn't be far from the truth given HPs record of downsizing employees of it's acquisitions) can't really figure it out. The media and blogosphere is where I go for accurate commentary on HP, certainly not our intranet or standard sanitized internal corporate announcements.

Surely if it's all about the cloud, IBM is running circles around HP with it's quiet stranglehold on the mainframe market. I agree with the ZDNet article on that topic, that it's big iron that will allow IBM to dominate the corporate cloud computing space.

So, my bets on the new IT landscape.

IBM: Corporate cloud dominance
Apple: Consumer apps, device and media dominance
Google: Analytical dominance and cash machine ohne ende.
Facebook: please, please die a grim death at the hands of government privacy watchdogs before something really, really bad happens with all the data you are collecting.
HP: Services dominance with all that cumbersome cross-selling within the feature-bloat-cloud
Microsoft: Windows and heathcare (it's Bill's passion now anyway)

Oops..even less complimentary commentary about HPs disgraced CEO

From Newsweek, further confirmation that public opinion is flowing strongly against disgraced HP CEO Mark Hurd.