Four months into her job as president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., Carly Fiorina outlined the new HP in her first Comdex keynote.
Fiorina said the company will direct its attention to the intersection of e-services, information appliances and infrastructure, and will launch a worldwide branding campaign.
“You can expect to deal with a reinvented HP,” Fiorina told the Comdex crowd. She presented the “new HP” as a return to the company’s roots: a company focused on innovative engineering. “Somewhere along the way we stopped talking about invention,” Fiorina said. “We will start talking again.” Fiorina said she had spent much of her first months at HP inside the company’s R&D labs.
Appliances figure high in Fiorina’s plans for the new HP. She announced a deal with the Swatch Group to develop Internet-aware smart wristwatches. She even claimed that HP shipped the very first information appliance, the handheld calculator.
Much like Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates did in his keynote, Fiorina sketched a wired future with multiple, connected information appliances. But while Gates’ demo about the “personal Web” focused around the PC as the focal point for computing, the PC hardly figured at all in Fiorina’s vision of multiple intelligent, connected devices. She talked about cameras that “squirt” their digital images directly to printers, and handheld computers that send the URL for a slide presentation to an LCD projector, which accesses the images directly from the Web.
Fiorina also expressed her views on how enterprises should fulfil the potential of the Internet. She said companies must start to look at all products as platforms for delivering services. For instance, she said, the oil industry is starting to see the gas pump as a vehicle for the delivery of services, and the automotive industry is starting to see cars in this way. Fiorina said companies should rethink their business in terms of services that can be delivered over the Internet.
