New CEO Leo Apotheker finally talks about HP's future but says nothing about the enterprise. Instead, he says HP will out-cool Apple. Word up. On the one hand, you've got to admire HP CEO Leo Apotheker's brashness in calling out Apple, a company whose market cap is more than three times that of HP, whose revenue is rapidly approximating that of HP, whose brand recognition and image are far stronger than those of HP, and whose "coolness" factor is light years beyond that of HP.
But if vision without execution is hallucination (thank you, Thomas Edison), then brashness without strategic clarity is silliness.
Heck, it's terrific for Apotheker to aspire for HP to burnish its image as a front-edge innovator of marvelous new devices and whiz-bang gadgetry, but is that what HP's customers and prospects and partners want and need to hear about at this time from HP's relatively new and so-far uncommunicative CEO?
We can imagine, at least in part, how this all came about. Apotheker, who not only presides over the world's largest IT company but also likes to present himself as a multilingual man of the world, chose to do an interview last week with the BBC in the midst of the rarified air of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
In such a setting, Apotheker might well have decided he had nothing to lose by speaking with wild abandon about his aspirations for HP. After all, this wasn't some gritty tech-industry event where he'd be expected to discuss networking and servers and predictive analytics—this was Davos, and the BBC, and a platform from which HP's new CEO could seek to transcend the muck of business technology and instead appeal to the elusive appetites and whimsy of the congnoscenti.
That is why, I think, he chose not to speak about the very real and very serious competitive challenges HP faces from a resurgent IBM and a high-flying Oracle, both of which have HP very directly in their crosshairs (that's just a metaphor, folks): he wanted to share a broad vision of where he thinks HP should be.
And that is why I also think he made a serious blunder.
Here's the comment that I think will come back to haunt Apotheker, via this excerpt from a news story onhexus.net:
Talking to the BBC following the World Economic Forum, Mr Apotheker reflected on what he thinks the company needs to do to transform its image from a boring printer and PC manufacturer to one that can wow a generation raised on Apple's iDevices.
"What's happening is probably the biggest revolution in the history of IT," he told the Beeb. "The internet is going totally mobile, the bandwidth is there...so many technologies are converging, and HP is the one company that can put it all together. We want to be the leader in this."
"I hope one day people will say 'this is as cool as HP'," he added, "not 'as cool as Apple' ". (End of excerpt.)
I've always loved the ambition embodied in Robert Browning's line, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" But the problem with this blatant grasp-exceeding gambit by Apotheker is that it's the very first substantive point he's made publicly about the direction in which he wants to take the company.
What about HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy? Not a peep.
Or HP's booming networking business? Silence.
How about IBM's contention that HP's lost its way in enterprise systems due to sustained lack of investment? Not a word.
Or Larry Ellison's repeated and very public contentions that at the increasingly important high end of the systems market, HP's offerings are slow, expensive, and brittle, and that Oracle's going to go aggressively after HP's customers? Nothing.
(For extensive analysis of those challenges from IBM and Oracle as well as other related perspectives, be sure to check out our "Recommended Reading" list at the end of this column.)
For six months, HP's terrific people, in the absence of CEO-level articulation of who the company is and where it is going, have done a standup job of delivering strong financial results and continuing to represent the company proudly and effectively.
But after two months with no CEO and four months of almost total silence from Apotheker, I would think HP's 300,000 employees and its similar number of business customers around the world want to hear at least a broad sense of Apotheker's vision for the company's enterprise business on questions like these:
**With the HP-Oracle alliance falling apart, what is HP doing to fill the gaps left by the soon-to-be-gone Oracle software?
**What's HP's short-term cloud strategy and its long-term cloud strategy?
**What's HP's enterprise mobility strategy?
**Apotheker told the BBC that he feels HP stock is undervalued. Why does he think that?
**Growth rates for PCs, where HP is massively invested, are under attack from smartphones and tablets, where HP has next to no presence. What does Apotheker plan to do about making HP a viable player in enterprise mobility?
Well. Apotheker might not like those questions, and he might not like the fact that his business customers and prospects and partners are all wondering about what the future holds in those and other critical areas, but he has chosen during his four-month tenure as CEO to say nothing about any of those topics.
And now that he has made some public comments, what's the subject? His desire to out-cool Apple.
The business world does not have a clear sense of HP's intentions, and has not had one for the past few months. In the meantime, every competitor from IBM to Oracle to Dell to Cisco to EMC and others has been using that uncertainty, that vacuum, to hammer away at HP's enterprise customer base.
But now, HP's sales team can tell all those CIOs not to worry about all their questions about HP's plan for the cloud and virtualization and data-center and mobility stuff—after all, the HP salespeople can tell those CIOs that in several years, HP's gonna be cooler than Apple.
Hey—the boss says so.
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