Hewlett-Packard gets introspective

According to Plato, "The life which is unexamined is not worth living." Hewlett-Packard Co. seems to believe that, too.

More accurately, HP is finding it difficult to live with a puny 4 percent revenue growth after spending much of its corporate life growing by leaps and bounds. Late last year, after the company's fourth-quarter report showed the emaciated revenue rise, chief executive officer Lew Platt disclosed he had imported consultants to look over HP to suggest ways to stimulate a regrowth.

That move gave new impetus to the divestment rumors flying about earlier in the year. Those apparently began when Platt, in a newspaper interview, voiced for the first time the unthinkable: that no part of the company was sacrosanct, that the very foundation upon which HP rose and grew-the test-and-measurement business-was not insured against sale or spin-off in some fashion.

Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 23, "Many industry analysts and HP insiders believe that one result of this review will be a shedding of some smaller business operations, such as its testing and medical-equipment units."

It remains to be seen how HP's culture, organization, product lines and marketing strategies will hold up under a magnifying glass. Though consultants have been called in, the handle of the glass really is held by Wall Street, which tolerates nothing that it believes holds back a stock and certainly has no room for sentiment.

Executives, engineers and marketers who grew up with the "HP Way"-those with any attachment to the company's roots, its founders or to the T&M business-may be swept away by the rising tide of the Dow Jones or S&P 500, or whatever stock index rules at the moment.

Just the other day, one of HP's most widely watched, fastest-growing business segments-color printers- took an initial hit of sorts. HP said it would enter the low-cost inkjet-printer market, selling color units below $100, by forming a subsidiary called Apollo Consumer Products Inc. The operation ultimately will encompass low-cost PCs, scanners, digital cameras and other consumer gadgets.

Until now, HP-which dominates inkjets-has cautiously sidestepped the low end, where brutal competition has caused profits to crash and forced many companies to exit a business they may once have dominated.

Of course, except for certain items, such as handheld digital multimeters, that kind of price bombing is not common in the test industry. The problem there is the markets, which, except for communications and a few others, have not been growing at the rates that stock pushers would like.

At one point not too long ago, HP's test-and-measurement business contributed more to HP's overall profitability than some of the computer operations. Through hard work and perseverance, HP's automated test operations, for one, have gained share in areas dominated by overseas or other vendors. It would be a shame to see such effort go to waste because of an unfeeling reorganization.

— Stan Runyon is Technical Editor, Test, for EE Times.