惠普拆分对与错：一家老牌巨头的迷途

惠普目前公布了分拆前最后一个财季及全年的业绩。上一财季，惠普营收同比下降7%，至284亿美元，基于汇率波动进行调整后同比下降2%。当季，惠普每股收益为93美分，同比下降12%。

这是惠普作为一家整体公司的最后谢幕。

自11月初，拥有76年历史、曾经多次调整业务方向的科技巨头惠普正式拆分为两家公司，开始了一个新的时代，变成两家上市公司——惠普企业（HP Enterprise）和惠普公司（HP Inc）。拆分后的两家公司，是否会比作为一个整体的惠普表现更好？且让我们拭目以待。

这并不是这家史诗级的科技行业先锋第一次经历巨变。早在2002年，惠普就曾剥离对于该公司极为重要的测试与仪器业务，组建成安捷伦公司。但这一次无疑是惠普史上规模最大的一次分拆。惠普企业将销售服务器、软件、存储、网络和相关服务。惠普公司将销售打印机和个人电脑。

惠普CEO梅格•惠特曼于一年前宣布了这项拆分计划，并于今年7月份提交了正式文件。

After 76 years, the tech giant will split into two companies. Can its two spawn do better than HP as a whole?

Hewlett-Packard will no longer be a single business. Instead, it will start a new era as two publicly traded companies, HP Enterprise and HP Inc.

This is not the first seismic shift to shake the storied tech pioneer—it spun out its bread-and-butter test and instruments division as Agilent in 2002 — but it is definitely the biggest. HP Enterprise will sell servers, software, storage, networking and associated services. HP Inc. will sell printers and PCs.

Plans for the move were announced by HP CEO Meg Whitman a year ago; formal paperwork was filed in July.

惠普成立于1939年，从帕洛阿尔托的一间车库里起家，主要生产音频振荡器、计算器和其他奇怪的产品。而此次拆分最引人注目的一点是，这家专注于工程、非常迟钝的公司，在创始人威廉•休利特和戴维•帕卡德及其继任者卸任之后，是如何走上迷途的。

惠普走上歧途的具体时点，是一个争议颇多的主题。但许多人认为，2001年，时任CEO卡莉•费奥莉娜错误地收购了康柏电脑公司。而正是这笔备受争议的交易，酝酿了惠普走下坡路的起点。

从那之后，这家公司一次次地品尝着自己种下的苦果：“假托”丑闻导致一名董事会成员、一名高管和该公司雇佣的调查人员因窃听记者而面临刑事指控；2010年，为了加强手机业务，该公司以10亿美元的价格收购Palm Computing公司，后来又出售了后者的知识产权。

2008年，惠普进行了另外一笔规模更大、但更有争议的收购——以139亿美元收购计算机服务公司EDS；三年后，惠普又斥资110亿美元，收购了软件公司Autonomy。这些收购交易均导致惠普的资产减值80亿美元。

除此之外，惠普还有一系列沦为笑柄的糟糕举措。比如，在2010年9月聘用李艾科担任CEO，但在一年后却将其辞退。导致李艾科下台的主要原因正是Autonomy交易，因为这笔交易最终演变为惠普和前Autonomy高管之间就欺诈问题展开的诉讼与反诉大战。

早在李艾科任职期间，就有传闻称惠普有意出售PC业务。他的继任者惠特曼上台伊始就宣布，出售PC业务是错误的。在她看来，保留PC和服务器业务，有助于惠普从芯片与存储供应商那里获得成本优势。她说道，惠普“在一起更好”。但在去年，她又推翻了自己的这种观点。

惠普的云计算业务也经历过类似的起伏。几年前，惠普高管表示，公司将在公共云计算领域，与亚马逊网络服务展开竞争。所谓公共云计算模式是指各家企业从亚马逊、微软或谷歌等供应商那里租赁计算能力，而不是自己建设数据中心。

但后来，惠普在这方面却鲜有动作，并且宣布放弃对公共云业务的竞争，重新专注于帮助客户使用亚马逊或微软Azure，来支撑它们购买的惠普私有云。通过私有云，各家公司依旧可以增加或删除计算资源，但这些资源仅限于自己使用，无法共享。在公有云与私有云混合的情况下，如果一家公司资源处理的工作量急剧增加，额外的工作将被转移至公有云合作伙伴。

所有云业务将属于新成立的惠普企业，包括相关的硬件、软件和服务。现在一个有趣的问题是，业务重心调整是否会带来回报？抑或，惠普现在才想在云计算分一杯羹，是否已为时太晚？

惠普公司将包括利润较低的PC和打印机业务，但说句公道话，这项业务一直是惠普一项巨大的收入来源。

在11月份召开的惠普第四季度收入电话会议上，惠特曼称，此次拆分规模庞大，情况复杂，是史上规模最大的一次。“这并非一次资产剥离，而是分拆成两家《财富》500强公司，每家公司的收入均达到570亿美元……这将是最好的惠普——一台执行机器。”

有人指出，惠普一分为二，与戴尔收购EMC（和VMware）形成了鲜明对比。前者将变成两家更加细化的公司，而后者则致力于提供一整套产品与服务，以发挥规模经济效应。

但孰优孰劣，时间将会证明。惠普的拆分已经结束，我们将见证这两家新公司是否会比过去10年，作为一个整体的惠普表现更好。但愿如此！（财富中文网）

译者：刘进龙/汪皓

审校：任文科

What’s so striking about this is how an engineering-focused, rather stolid company started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 to build audio oscillators, calculators, and other geeky stuff, lost its way after founders William Hewlett and David Packard and their successors stepped down.

Exactly when things went off the rails is subject to debate, but many point to the controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2001 by HP’s then-CEO Carly Fiorina as the start of the decline.

Since then, the company’s had to weather such self-inflicted wounds as a pretexting scandal in which a board member, an executive and HP-paid investigators faced criminal charges for spying on journalists; the $1 billion acquisition of Palm Computing in 2010 to beef up HP’s mobile capabilities; then the sale of Palm’s intellectual property.

Then there were other bigger, more questionable acquisitions notably HP’s $13.9 billion buy of EDS, the giant computer services company in 2008; followed three years later by its $11 billion bet on Autonomy, a software company. Those purchases resulted in $8 billion write-downs. Each.

And then there was an almost farcical round robin of screwups that included the hiring of Leo Apotheker as CEO in September, 2010 only to fire him a year later, largely due to the Autonomy deal which degenerated into charges and countercharges of fraud between HP and former Autonomy execs.

During the Apotheker regime, word of plans to sell off HP’s PC business leaked. When Whitman, his successor, took the helm, she claimed that would be a mistake given the cost advantages HP got from chip and storage suppliers by fielding both a PC and server business. HP was “better together,” she said. Then, last year she reversed course on that.

There have been starts and stops in HP’s cloud computing story as well. A few years ago, HP execs said the company would compete head on with Amazon Web Services in public cloud computing, a model in which businesses rent computing capacity from a provider like Amazon, Microsoft or Google rather than building out more of their own data center capabilities.

HP subsequently started soft pedaling that notion, and last week threw in the towel on the public cloud business, refocusing (again) on helping customers use Amazon or Microsoft Azure to backstop their HP private clouds. With private clouds, companies can still add or delete computing resources, but all those resources are dedicated to that company, not shared. In a hybrid situation if there is a spike in the workload handled by company resources, the additional work get shipped off to a public cloud partner.

All of that cloud stuff, will fall to the new HP Enterprise unit, along with associated hardware, software and services. It’ll be interesting to see if that new-found focus will pay off or if HP is already too late to this party.

HP Inc. will get the lower-margin PC and printer business which, to be fair, was a huge money maker for HP for a long time.

In November, on HP’s fourth quarter earnings call, Whitman called the breakup a big and complicated separation — the biggest ever done. “This is not a spin-off, but two Fortune 50 companies, both with about $57 billion in revenue … But this is HP at it’s best — an execution machine.”

Some see HP’s decision to cut itself into two more narrowly-focused businesses as a direct contrast to Dell’s decision to buy EMC(and VMware) which is all about scale and the ability to offer a federated set of products and services.

Time will tell, but now that the HP split is nearly final, we’ll get to see if the two pieces can function better than HP as a whole did over the past decade. One can only hope so.