HP. Losing 27,000 staff and 9 billion Dollars a quarter. A giant, but a giant of the old world order.

HP, Hewlett Packard, the former giant of computing (and a former client of mine) is losing people and losing money.

4,000 people left in its third fiscal quarter and they expect to lose about 11,500 employees this year and a total of 27,000 by the end of 2014 by merging divisions like bringing together their PC and Printer businesses. That's a lot of hurt.

It also made a historic loss (in the company's history) to the end of the quarter to July of nearly 9 billion usd. That's right, billion.

Whilst the company tells this as a streamlining of its business as its on the cusp of a turnaround, but to the great unwashed (you + me) it just seems like a huge, deepening hole. 

Printer sales were down 23%, revenues across the board were down as consumer products fell 13%. Whilst there's talk of new "tablets" and a new range of PC's this Autumn, which will have a "design focus" (oh dear, like Apple 8 years ago?) it all seems a little stale.

“HP is still in the early stages of a multi-year turnaround, and we’re making decent progress despite the headwinds,” Meg Whitman, HP president and CEO, said in an earnings release. “During the quarter we took important steps to focus on strategic priorities, manage costs, drive needed organisational change, and improve the balance sheet. We continue to deliver on what we say we will do.” That's Meg at the top of the blog and put any PR gloss on these numbers you like, but you can't get away from poor numbers like this.

What is happening of course, is that consumers want mobile computing, rather than PC's, and HP, well, they're not really at the races. Don't misunderstand me, this is a giant but a giant of the old world order.

HP seems to me, to have failed in generating new products, new innovation, new thinking, as consumers have changed quickly. A big ship is always slow to turn and HP is a classic example.

Bringing products late to market and massively reducing overheads through seeing off staff, is not a vision for the future. Nor will it achieve much except to keep the financials right short term and keep markets happy.

It strikes me too, that I can't see a real burning consumer loyalty or love affair with HP the brand, which once there was. Attempts at Advertising recently (like Plan B and Russell Brand campaigns) didn't do it for me anyway and for most, will be hard to remember. The brand just looks, boring.

CEO Meg Whitman may not exactly be the visionary of a Steve Jobs.
But she now, really really needs to be.