HP and Microsoft; who do you think matters more to the technology industry?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Business, Hardware, Server, HP, Microsoft on
Microsoft makes a lot of noise. The company holds dozens of conferences, broadcasts its ambitions in every market from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV, goes on a buying spree, gets taken to court by everyone from Novell to the EU. HP also makes acquisitions and has ambitions in a lot of markets and employs over twice as many people as Microsoft, but it doesn’t make nearly as big a splash in the industry, for some reason. It’s not for lack of success. Microsoft boasts of the 31 million Windows Mobile phones it’s sold; HP boasts that eight out of every ten text messages are sent using HP technology (inside the mobile operators rather than in your hand).
Wherever Microsoft is, HP is there too (from mobile phones to data centres to next-generation TV); in almost all cases, selling infrastructure rather than competing software. The exception is system management and when a dealer asked Mark Hurd this week why he’d asked Steve Ballmer along to the event where HP was sharing what it wanted dealers to get excited about this year, Hurd pointed out that even there HP takes a wider view. “Microsoft is very focussed about managing Windows environments and Microsoft environments. That’s what’s important to them. And it makes sense for them to be the best in the world at that. We have to be the best in the world at managing heterogeneous environments; we have to be able to take an IBM environment, a Linux environment, a ‘insert name here’ environment and be the best. Microsoft has to optimise simplicity of management of the Microsoft environment. We don’t believe the world will ever be exclusive to Microsoft.”
Ballmer wasn’t offended by that and used the broader view line himself, emphasising all the places from printers to blade servers where the two companies collaborate. He’s also banking on HP to put some style and sparkle back in a PC marketplace that can look lacklustre compared to Apple products that look good even when they can’t compete on features. “We’ve got a lot of work we’re doing on the future of the PC and what that looks like; driving down price, driving up features, driving more excitement. Certainly neither Microsoft or HP likes the shots we’ve been taking with Apple’s adverts and the blah blah blah… On the consumer side there’s so much opportunity today, we can add value to business productivity ; we’re stepping back to remind ourselves what we can do.”
Adding features matters more than driving the price down to get businesses to keep buying new PCs every three years rather than pushing older machines to last a decade and that’s where HP Labs comes in.
HP cares about research, but it’s a means to an end – solving problems by creating products and services – rather than pure knowledge. For pure knowledge you stay in academe; although Microsoft’s Bill Buxton points out that he left academic research for commercial when he was asked to write business plans rather than papers. Mark Hurd is totting up his R&D dollars but it’s not the cost he complains about; “We spend 4.2 billion in R&D to get the best products and services and then only go after half of the market.”
Rather than squeezing the research budget specifically, he’s leveraging it and putting more emphasis on the D than the R. HP Labs looks five to ten years ahead, but it also collaborates with engineers to create products. Microsoft Research uses a mix of technology transfer and researchers who move across to product development groups to shepherd their project into the commercial world. The really important thing is that they can always go back to research afterwards; their job is guaranteed to be there.
HP takes a different approach. Phil McKinney is the CTO of the personal systems group – everything from iPaqs to the Blackbird gaming system that’s selling to developers to the 2710p tablet PC we both use to the shiny and cute new 2133 Min-Note UMPC (which manages to achieve Apple levels of desirability despite the Via C7-M processor – which might make it even more like an Apple product). But he also runs the Innovation Programme Office and I don’t think it’s named IPO by accident; it’s certainly about taking things public.
The way it works is that a team from the IPO works side by side with the researchers (quite literally; they sit at the next desk). For 12-18 months the two teams work together; the researchers carry on researching, the designers build products and gradually the researchers do less and less and the designers do more and more. Then one day the designers have learned everything the researchers have found out and they spend six months running that into the final product.
There are 28 products in the pipeline with the IPO, coming out two a year – which means starting with 1,800 pipedreams that get whittled down to 200 ‘workable’ ideas. Blackbird was the first, cherry-picking existing HP technologies like blade cooling and push-fit hard drives. The new DreamColor screens are the second. These are LCD screens with colour accurate enough to satisfy DreamWorks and there’s a 30” screen on the way. And there’s a team in HP Labs right now, sitting next to the data centre than rendered Shrek 2, working on the next project. Odds are, it will be something that Microsoft will be interested in…
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