CES 2010--the end of HP

CES 2010

Consumer Electronics Show

HP's final hurrah! With no fanfare, nor even any notification, nor even an acknowledgement by an industry HP once hoped to lead, HP silently slipped off the radar by not even being an exhibitor at the CES 2010 in Las Vegas January 6-10, 2010. Instead, they quietly listed their booth number on the huge 2,500 member directory (up 350 from last year) in the hopes that nobody would take the time to hike a quarter of a mile past empty boxes at the back of the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center only to discover a cantankerous old fat woman sitting at a counter with no information at all on why HP was not there. As if to underscore HP's total commitment to customer support, she had a display of refreshments which she dutifully informed all who thirstirly arrived were only for HP executives and not for mere HP customers.

Contrast this with the note above the refreshments at the monstrous Samsung booth which said "refreshments for Samsung customers only, not employees" and you begin to grasp just how easy it was for Samsung to steal corporate customers from a Hewlett Packard which not too long ago had customer loyalty which was second to none, who paid $250,000 per seat just to get Unix, or multi-tasking, or high definition graphics--or just for good old Bob and Dave. As good as the graphics were at the time, and as far sighted and visionary as HP once was, and as huge a lead as they held on this lucrative market, not even they could begin to imagine the awesome display of graphics which swept the entire Las Vegas Convention Center in 2010. This is where it was announced that two fledgling Korean companies, LG and Samsung, beat Sony at their own game--quality graphics displays. It's also when the president of Korea flew to the United Arab Emirates to help Samsung nab a $40 Billion nuclear power plant contract from the French, as our own "president" supported a multi-billion "cash for clunkers" program so hapless Americans could throw away our good old American cars and buy new but inferior Japanese ones.

One of the other previously loyal HP customer who did survive the hike out to HP-la-la-land looked at me and said "but HP does still make stuff, like printers and other monitors, right"? I looked at him to see if he was joking, or serious, and realized that he too had seen the "Product of China" labels all over every single box HP now ships, all the way from laptops to monitors to printers. The Chinese companies took up an entire floor of the Hilton Convention Center, twice the size of the year before, and the odds were good that the REAL manufacturer of HP's products was lurking somewhere in the shadows. No wonder nobody from HP wanted to be there to be shown up by them.

IPAQ was gone while Iphone had a convention on its own.

"Product of China" written all over HP's monitor's, computers, and laptops.

Customer support in India.

Samsung's dream come true:

Hire a woman with no understanding or background in high tech as CEO for a high tech company.

Displace Easter with Martin Luther King Day.

Move customer support to India.

Manufacture everything in China.

Put images of Blacks on all your literature.

Don't even display the ONLY superior product you have, the IPAQ, at CES.

Load every computer you ship with .gif images of Blacks in the Sample Pictures directory.

Alienate your loyal corporate electronics customers by focusing all your energy on consumer electronics

Confuse your loyal employees by mixing corporate electronics with consumer clectronics.

Mixed signals about corporate versus consumer product support.

Carly Fiorina fulfilled all of Samsung's dreams, plus some.

She put HP in the unenviable position of having both the world's most advanced and least promoted consumer product, the IPAQ, and the world's most expensive but least powerful corporate product, the HP Computer Aided Engineering Workstation. Had she not destroyed both HP and Compaq, the Iphone would have never been competitive with the IPAQ, and Samsung would never have been competitive in the high end graphics market. Compaq would now be profitable selling consumer electronics like the IPAQ and laptops, while HP would now be competitive selling CAE workstations whose corporate customers willingly pay more than 20 times as much per simulation clock just to have Unix.

And the 276 million Americans who claim to be Christians might still enjoy Easter vacation without having to wonder why HP thinks celebrating a card carrying member of the Communist Party like MLK is more important than Easter, or what American Blacks have to do with selling or using or developing computers.