Hewlett Packard to cut around 7,500 jobs

I just read in this thestreet.com article that HP plans to cut 2 percent of their workforce.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10503179/1/h-p-hits-target-plans-to-cut-2-of-jobs.html

According to HP's Website, the company employs 321,000 people. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/facts.html

That means that around 7,500 Hewlett Packard employees will lose their jobs. That's mind blowing.

I noticed that the Street article didn't mention how many employees would be cut. It's as if they decided
to say a "2 percent cut", which might sound more benign than the hard numbers.

I wondered about that, after I posted this.

HP obviously has many workers worldwide, so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

For a decade the PC market boomed. First it was getting PCs into homes and then faster machines. The growth fueled companies like Dell and HP that cranked out machines to meet the growing need. The market hit a peak a couple years ago as IPODs, Blackberries and IPhones drew the attention and the need for bigger machines (just like bigger cars) waned. People no longer upgraded and the money they would have spent on a computer now goes to a digital TV or other contraption.

Add to the shrinking demand, a glut of machines that hit the market just as the economy went into the tank. The collapse of the consumer market just accelerated the change in the overall computer and technical marketplace. It's a shame to see so many jobs lost, but it's a reflection of the marketplace moving away from the big boxes.

Silly me ... always out of sync. :dunce:

(It's a bit overwhelming to deal with the enormously more powerful machine.)

Parts have never been cheaper...if you're capable of doing the upgrade yourself. A new MB and memory upgrade is still the way to go. I just maintain what I have...I miss the days of going from a lawn mower to a rocket ship.

Cheers...

:hi:

... the late 90s. This machine I'm still using (while I prepare to migrate 20 years of data/archives) was a Micron Technology machine into which I installed SCSI and other upgrades. It's a 450MHz Pentium II with (256+128) 384 MB of memory running tuned and tweaked Win98. It's finally crapping out too much after 10 years so I had to obtain a new box ... custom ordered through CostCo from HP. That saddles me with Vista Ultimate -- as overbuilt and fat an O/S as I could imagine. (The number of third-party software purveyors they put out of business must be enormous.)

I'm noodling through the yeas-and-nays of migrating my Mozilla/Seamonkey legacy email and settings ... resisting IE8 but not seeing any warm fuzzy about running SeaMonkey under 64-bit Vista. It's gonna take some trial-and-error and experimentation, I guess. (I'd hate to lose all the crap I have in SeaMonkey at this point.)

All my Office documents seem safe ... simple file transfer. I wish I could say the same about my Faxes, genealogical data, etc. Oh well.

I figure it'll take me about a year to FULLY migrate ... on a half-life progression time-line. I'll hopefully be able to upgrade to Windows7 in that timeframe -- if it stabilizes. (I don't do bleeding edge anymore. My days as a beta-tester are passed, too.)