HP new CEO to keep PC group!
bill190
Posts: 769
Finally some common sense in the corporate world...
In a Switch, H.P. Chief Will Keep the PC Group
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/technology/hp-chief-says-pc-division-will-remain.html
In a Switch, H.P. Chief Will Keep the PC Group
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/technology/hp-chief-says-pc-division-will-remain.html
Comments
It was probably premature to cut the PC stuff now, but it certainly is going to come to end.
The expanding capabilities of portable devices will eat the PC's lunch at some point within the next decade.
OBC
Nevermind.
So what does one do with a "PC group" these days?
There will always be a need for the hardware on which people and businesses do computer related things - whatever that may be. And businesses will always need a way to input information like full size keyboards as well as to display information on full size screens. Someone needs to make this equipment.
Go around and ask businesses if they plan to have all their employees switch to tiny keyboards and tiny screens. Might ask lawyers if they are going to write contracts on their cell phones! Or your doctor if he is going to look at that X-Ray on a tiny screen handheld device.
Many business people I know have cell phones and handheld devices. But their work is done on a full size PC. Easier to input information (in proper English) and easier to read documents.
Bulky, boxy, PC's are what will become extinct. The former CEO was wise enough to see that. I suspect for HP to remain in the game it will have to become much more invested in the the future of portable devices, etc.
OBC
I don't think the Home Computer is going anywhere anytime soon.
My droid has as much power as my PC did not too long ago.
If I could walk into my house, drop my droid on the desk and have it wirelessly auto connect to my keyboard/mouse and video, it would already replace 80% of what I do with my PC. At the moment my devices have to "sync" with each other to stay current with my email, etc. This will change as portable devices become more powerful. As for where my backups are stored, I tend to already use cloud services with encryption where necessary.
OBC
.
And I wonder why I really need 64bit Quad processing (which I have) while 32bit color is adequate and consists of a true 24 bits of color and 8 bits of transparency.
And of course, 64 bit processing does provide for more RAM, but how much ram does the average user need. Linux provides a SWAP partition to substitute for extra RAM.
Also, I have no need for Tbytes of storage. I have a hard enough time backing up a 250gbyte image of a hard disk. Try defragmentation of a Tbyte of storage.
Oracle, which has taken one of HP's unwanted executives, has pretty much lead the server market in cost and speed. Desktop computers have pretty much peaked in terms of useful technical development. So the footrace is about the best value, not the leading edge. Orace also now owns Sun and Java. This is the market that HP should have won.
I am trying to acquire a PandaBoard for my next desktop computer. www.pandaboard.org
It can comfortably sit on the backside of my monitor and is powered by a 5V 3amp wall wart.
The simple fact that HP and others are predominantly using OEM manufacturers for desktops put them in the awkward position of having these OEM makers producing their own branded product of equal or better quality. ASUS and Lenov will fare much better. Toshiba may even do well. But one wonders what Dell and HP will do unless they have some kind of special control of USA markets.
For example a business might use a computer to do payroll. That is print the checks. If that system goes down on payday, they want to be able to call someone and have them come to the business and fix it like right now! (They would be printing hundreds or thousands of checks!)
I used to fix business computers. It is employee's daily jobs to use these computers or the output of these 8 hours a day. If one of these systems goes down, there might be 30 or 40 employees sitting around twittling their thumbs! They can't send their computer to some repair facility and wait two weeks to get it back. They want it fixed today.
Then you get a company like the natural gas company which serves the greater Los Angeles area (which I last heard was 15 million people). In the 1980's the gas company had 7 mailing machines which could each stuff envelopes at 10,000 envelopes per hour! That is gas bills they are sending out. And there is a computer printing all these bills. If the computer goes down, the bills don't get printed, then you have a whole crew of mailing people doing nothing. And if the bills don't go out, the money does not come in. Millions of dollars! Needless to say, if billing goes down for very long, you get a vice president of the company walking down see what is what is going on!
Anyway all sorts of important stuff on business computers. PC's have taken over a lot of very critical things or may be a key part of a system.
My cousin is a rather successful plastic surgeon and paid top dollar to have a LAN installed in his office of three computers. After a few years of calling 'the computer guy' to immediately fix a downed network that blocked all computer traffic, he removed the LAN and now makes three duplicate images of the computers to start the next day with. No more having to apologize to patients that the computers are down and their information is unavailable. And no more huge bills for emergency visits from 'the computer guy'.
But the simple fact is that even with business desktops, only about 15% of this years sales of computers will be desktops.
I suspect that gas company uses something besides Intel for their mailing facility, IBM or NCR equipment. The whole monthly billing might be actually on magnetic tape. Banks still forward all your 1099 data to the IRS via magnetic tape.
1) 32 bits of color is a poor choice, at least from a photographer's perspective. At 8 bits per channel that's only 256 values to choose from. The human eye can see much more than that, which is why we have HDR photography.
2) Under Ubuntu I use about 3GB when I am just browsing (I have lots of tabs open and preload installed), and when I am doing things like programming or image editing the memory usage can increase dramatically. And the swap partition is a work around for limited memory, not a solution. It is much slower.
3) With my camera, each photo takes 20MB, and if I do HDR that is 60MB (RAW images). Add in video files (~4GB) and disk space quickly disappears. If you back up your files, then you'll need even more space.
All of which are standard replies for advancement...
With tons of RAM instead now everything is instantenous (well, if that's even a word..). Starting another instance of something like firefox is < 1sec, instead of swapping&paging galore.
So yes, there's need for 64 bit which allows for lots of physical RAM and the use of it..
Just keep more than 20% of the filesystem free and there shouldn't be any need of defragmentation. Not even on Windows. You may leave even more of it free to help there. Well, I'm not extremely familiar with how good Windows handles its NTFS filesystem over the long term, but in principle it should be able to avoid fragmentation given enough free space to work with. BTW, even Linux filesystems will fragment if you keep filling them up too much.
I like that. And yes, my own gadgets are insanely powerful compared to those minicomputers I used to work on, where I could spend months to shave off another half millisecond..
The only problem with the scenario you describe is when you want fast video, e.g. as in running Google Earth through 3D OpenGL video. For that I guess I'll need my Nvidia or similar card for quite a bit longer.. video bandwidth would be problematic over wireless. Well, that's part of what doesn't fit in the 80% I guess! :-)
-Tor
But, anybody doing any real computing on larger data sets, or where serious compute is needed, will be using a box style PC. Graphics is still a concern too.
The box style PC has the superior I/O and RAM capacity.
What I think will happen is the modest PC will almost entirely disappear. Workstation class machines will improve, and we will kind of end up back where we were in the early 90's. A workstation will cost a lot, and those that need them will get them, with everybody else on laptop / pad / tablet / remote desktop, etc...
I've got clients with over 32GB RAM!
One bottleneck I see is CPU. We've topped out for now, never seeing the 5 - 7 Ghz CPU's that would have been here had the clock speed curve continued to play out. Instead, we see lots of cores.
There are a lot of tasks that just require peak compute, and those are just flat lined right now. Parametric mechanical CAD design is one of those. There are enough dependencies to prevent parallel solves. Some vendors are exploring more parallel friendly methods, but their efforts won't really play out for another 5 years or so, and there is a LOT of legacy data that can't multi-core well.
Very curious to see what happens on that front. Many cores are nice. The fat software and OS environments we've got chew through those at a nice clip now. A single core machine is crappy these days, unless one is running a lean OS. Dual cores are marginal, with four being needed for any real performance. Unbelievable. I still wonder where we got to on software...
Most of the customers I fix computers for are playing online games, checking email, and watching videos.
OBC
I've always bought "business computers" which are not sold in retail stores. You used to have to order them from a dealer like an HP Business Systems dealer. Now you can order them on the internet.
Anyway I've never had any hardware problems with these. They are very well built. So there could be a LOT of business systems out there, but they don't need service? (You get what you pay for....)
Note: The computers I've had are; Digital Equipment Corp (DEC), Compaq, and now have HP.
This is exactly why the PC isn't going anywhere. It will fade from popular use, and the margins will have to go up on a good workstation, but then again, whoever pays it will get a good workstation.
Remember what Apple has repeatedly demonstrated. If there is a good value add, and the margins from that value fund the business, then it's simply good business. No need to have a dominant share, just a consistent, high value one. That is exactly where the PC will go.
Well I hope those Wall Street protesters don't start camping out on our front lawns!