Hey Meg, HP Needs to Bundle Not Balkanize

According to Richard Waters of the Financial Times, Meg Whitman has an easier time figuring out what's wrong rather than what's right. Here are some ideas.

In the discussion he pointed out HP's 23 drop in consumer revenues as opposed to apples 75% revenue increase.

While past mismanagement is an easy explanation, but the problems are deeper than that.

Here are my suggestions.

HP still owns the Printer market, but the products are confused and candidly they are not well thought out in terms of networking. My ancedotes to prove this are two fold. 1. I bought the same machine for my Aunt's house and my home and it caused more troubles since the two machines could not share the same driver and interfered with each other. Secondly the networking of my house has several access points, If i am not on the same access point the printer is not available.

So here are my thoughts.

Don't give up on PALM OS, but let Microsoft be your guide into the Mobile OS world for the time being. The last thing you need to be is in fourth place (following the Jack Welch logic and Microsoft needs Windows 8 to succeed more than you need Palm OS right now). Remember we are at point where HTML5 is going to be the key driver for development and you can look to us PALM OS as an optimization solution and not as a full blown OS.

Bring PALM OS Team to Printing: Use the PALM OS folks to bring the best printer apps to market across everyone elses platform. The IPP standard has never been implemented well and to be able to send something home or the office to print remotely strikes me as a gold mine as we continue to become more nomadic in our Mobility.

The Tablet Printer control: I am now convinced more than ever that we are going to see tablets like TV sets with more than 1 per person. HP made a very interesting printer that has a tablet connected to it. Play that console up as a way to browse and print the web pages. Make the ability to drag and drop printing choices easy.

Now about EDS: Bring EDS into the cloud with a few key verticals. It maybe that is a way to use the team of Palm OS but more importantly it makes EDS a public experience. My experience of EDS is that they are always a behind the scenes player and you need to build some public expertise.

Personally, I would recommend you have some staff join us in Austin.

We are at the cutting edge of HTML5 and M2M and you would benefit from seeing the forest in front of you.

Tags: Related tags: printer, bring