Management Toolkit

Story: HP loses driver, still lacks direction

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To be honest, HP's biggest mistake was spinning off its test equipment business a number of years ago. If you go back just 15 years, this was a core part of the business in manufacturing test equipment for industry. Along came the dot com boom, the test equipment business became Agilent Technologies, and HP bought Ditigal and later Compaq.

The problem is now that the IT business is about desktop computers at the lowest possible cost. They cannot hope to compete with Dell as well as try to compete with IBM and Sun in Enterprise computing. IBM really gave up desktop after O/S2, and have managed to reinvent their core business, they even make microprocessors for other vendors (and probably make decent profit it). HP don't even make decent destop printers anymore, especially when compared to the competition.

Had it kept hold of Agilent (the world's largest manufacturer of oscilloscopes and general test equipment), at things would have been very different and they would be able to engineer themselves out of of their current situation.

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