Could Open Source Investment Save HP? 126
deadeyefred writes "HP's new CEO, Meg Whitman, has a number of issues to deal with to right the ship and put the company on a growth track again. Instead of massive changes to its organization and product line, could $4.5 billion in open source investments do the trick? An argument might be made that HP could boost its competitiveness by putting half of its R&D budget ($1.5 billion a year) into projects like Xen.org, Android and OpenStack. It would still be less than half what HP is paying for Autonomy and allow it to focus on solving problems rather than protecting proprietary product lines and fiefdoms."
Hey, I have an open source project! (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!
Re:uhm let's see (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not sure this is a useful guide to what HP would do. After all, some of Apple's software is also open source; witness the Apache Server bundled with all the stuff on my Mac laptop. You quote numbers which look authoritative, but we don't know how much of consulting and services is attributable to open source and how much is attributable to proprietary, so they don't really make the case for open source.
It's worth noting that Sun under Schwartz had a plan for open source software, it just did not succeed. As related at the time, the goal was to use open source as a lever into Brazil/Russia/India/China and other places, and then sell other stuff. The goal was that almost all software would be open sourced, under the theory that most of Sun's paying customers (not to be confusing with non-paying non-customers) really didn't have a choice to just download their stuff from the net and service it themselves, either because of expertise issues, or regulatory issues, or quirky-customization issues. That is, Schwartz was pretty explicitly buying into the notion that non-paying software users need not represent lost sales, because the bulk of those users would not pay for it under any circumstances (unlike, say, the RIAA, MPAA, or BSA). They were serious about this; they flew a mess of people out to Santa Clara in late 2007 for a several-day open source summit, and I have 60 pages of notes that I took there.
Obviously the plan didn't work, but it was a plan, and it had connectable dots. My thinking is anyone proposing open source to save HP's business, had better be able to outline a plan that is better than Schwartz's outline to us.
I'd like to see the HP train stop wrecking. I have some friends who work there. There's lovely schadenfreude in seeing overpaid board members making stupid mistakes, till you notice that it's not their jobs that are on the line.
Re:uhm let's see (Score:4, Interesting)
Sun's plan worked brilliantly. They dominated workstation markets pretty much everywhere, and their open source policy was central to that. The main reason for Sun's early success (remember how they killed Apollo?) was they just ran the same software that all the universities were using. I remember how my own code just ran on the things... it was awesome. Their open-source policy, which was long before the phrase "open source" was coined, enabled them to trash the competition. Then they got big, and as the number one company in their space, they got cold feet about open source. IMO, the single biggest mistake Sun ever made was to take Berkeley Unix private, and relabel it Sun-OS (and later, Solaris). It was unbelievably super-dumb. Had they kept it open, there never would have been any compelling reason for Linux, much less BSD. My guess is that they realized their mistake, and tried to the end to make up for it by becoming radical supporters of open source. It was too little, too late. However, it wasn't that their open source strategy failed. It was their choice of back-stabbing the community that killed them. Well, that and Moore's Law, and the lack of an evil marketing genius like Jobs.
Anyway, Meg isn't the marketing genius HP needs. She pretty much is a nail in the coffin.