HP Plans to Cut 25-30k Employees, Force Those Left to be More Efficient

Had a brief post on this last week, this is the scoop. HP plans to cut up to 30,000 workers. While attempting to increase effeciency.

In other words, HP is going to invest in trying to do the same amount of work with a smaller workforce — a popular move of late in the post-recession U.S. market.  While that approach may indeed improve margins, it may also leave a bad taste in the mouths of some investors that had hoped HP would make more drastic changes to its cloud computing efforts, or invest in resurrecting its dead mobile device lineup.

The job cuts could be announced Wednesday, when HP is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings.

Quick, let’s have a show of hands … how many of you had a HP PC as your very first PC? We can’t see what you are doing but if we are betting men we would bet a lot of you reading this have your hands up now. So that makes today’s developments even more interesting.

Yep that was me. First laptop too. The local chains discount them heavily, so why not? They have all been good reliable machines. So have the Dell servers I have bought over the years.

As The Economy Roars: Hewlett-Packard Said to Consider Cutting as Many as 25,000 Jobs

Bloomberg:

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) is considering cutting as many as 25,000 jobs, or 8 percent of its workforce, to reduce costs and help the company contend with ebbing demand for computers and services, people briefed on the plans said.

The number to be cut includes 10,000 to 15,000 from Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise services group, which sells a range of information-technology services and has been beset by declining profitability, said these people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t final and may change.

Meg Whitman, chief executive officer since September, is seeking to reverse the growth slump that led to the ouster of her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. The company’s PC sales are dropping as consumers favor tablets, such as Apple Inc.’s iPad, and it has been slow to adapt to the shift toward cloud computing, away from the IT services Hewlett-Packard provides.

So keep on roaring out there Barry and Joe, apparently you are howling in the dark.

HP WebOS Goes Open Source

HP believes there’s room for an open source mobile operating system that’s not fragmented — an apparent reference to Google’s Android, which has been customized by third parties like Amazon, and which exists in many different versions, without a strictly defined release or update schedule for all device makers who use it. This suggests that HP will still retain some control over the software to prevent it from being forked by third parties.

HP hasn’t yet decided which particular open source license it will use, but it will be a “copyleft” license, meaning that any third-party changes to the OS will have to released back into the open source world so others can see and use them, and won’t be allowed to copyright any Spinoffs. The company also said it would have to do some work to replace parts of WebOS that are protected by patents today.

Last spring, HP said that WebOS would ship on HP PCs starting in 2012. The company offered no update to those plans, but noted that WebOS can run in any WebKit browser.

Here’s the press release:

HP Does A Flop-Flip On PC Business

Why the former president of HP ever thought that getting rid of their PC business was a good idea.

Here’s the news:

• HP has decided to hang on to its PC business after all.

• More specifically, HP will be focusing on Windows 8 tablets.

Hewlett-Packard Stock Plummets Under Meg Whitman New CEO

Meg Whitman lost her bid to become governor of California last year and things aren’t looking so hot as she takes the reigns at Hewlett-Packard. The former eBay CEO was appointed as the new CEO to HP Friday and the company’s stock fell to its lowest point in six years.

Yikes!