HP's war with depth vs breadth

The debate is all about breadth versus depth. In other words, should HP be
more like IBM or Dell? While IBM represents sheer breadth in products and
services offering, Dell has carved its business model on going for depth. By
turning the PC business into a conveyor belt operation, Dell has more than
effectively proved that innovation in the PC business has more to do with
logistics and less to do with getting better PCs out.

Missing the woods for the trees, HP did make a halfhearted attempt at going
the net route to sell more PCs. Needless to say, it failed. It compounded its
error by acquiring Compaq. This is not wisdom in hindsight, it was already known
that the future of computing would move away from desktop-style computing to a
more mobile, devices based computing. This obviously meant little or no
significant innovation on the PC front, and therefore no significant market
advantage.

Instead, HP should have sold its PC business to Dell and focused on its other
core line of business-enterprise solutions business. It would surely have lent
more teeth to its Adaptive Enterprise strategy, which is now turning out to be
more of a back-end play, which is being leveraged by IBM. Clearly, HP's
breadth strategy-reaching out to the entire spectrum, from consumers to
corporate customers-was also a little removed from market needs. Perhaps the
focus should have been on providing the breadth of services to the enterprise.

Will HP make it or will it go the Compaq way? Indeed, there is much going for
HP if it is willing to completely jettison its old ways and adapt itself to the
new world. While there is much anticipation around on-demand computing, utility
computing, business agility, adaptive enterprise and words such as these, they
are still to play out its full potential. The market is still evolving and in a
market in evolution, it is those companies, which are innovative and agile that
will gain the market advantage.

So if HP can successfully prove the old adage of dog eat dog food, then we
might just see a renewed HP. One could debate on whether Carly Fiorina's
shifting priorities and strategies led to HP's confused state. The other way
to look at it is that from chaos emerges order and perhaps these events would
propel HP to shed parts, which are not going to be part of the core components
of tomorrow's economy and become agile, competitive and become the role model
for enterprises to adapt its technologies and solutions.

LATHA CHANDRADEEP