What went wrong with HP and where is it headed? – Part 4

Whitman’s eBay bought PayPal, the world’s largest online money transaction platform and intelligently integrated it into the online shopping system. To be honest, that could have been possible with a good partnership with Peter Thiel. But intentions were different. However, Ms. Whitman lost the opportunity to make PayPal coupled with eBay an online shopping giant.

There have been plans for electronic money since late 90s and eBay had the biggest of opportunities to realize the dream. They should have entered the market but PayPal remained a meagre online payment system that was soon overtaken by the likes of MasterCard and Visa and many others.

As for electronic money, Google is making progress, slow but steady, with its new venture Google Wallet.

So, will Whitman, with her business acumen, be able to bring HP out of the oblivion. The current step taken in layoffs certainly does not indicate any positive signs. Maybe that is destined to change but the truth is HP has lost over half of its stock value in the last two years. Therefore a new strategy to turn the company to profitability has to come pronto.

Applying the industrial-era century-old management strategies on workforce and the company overall is never going to bear any fruit for a company that was once known to bring new tech to the market. Consumerization of commodities is never a good plan, especially for a company like HP. Instead of focusing on extending and reinforcing supplier chain, the company should bring new products to the market or at least be in the Information-driven era. Tablets are the new PCs and smartphones are the new assistants. Mobile computing is trending and HP should focus on these products rather than less-than-an-inch ultrabooks and slim notebooks.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on May 26 2012. Filed under Business, Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.