XVI. Look through the text and answer the questions given below. Hewlett-Packard: Strategies for Leadership

Hewlett-Packard Company is in one of the most dynamic periods of its forty-four-year history. It is a time of change in the needs of customers, in the technologies available to meet those needs, and in the size and shape of HP itself.

When a company changes as rapidly as HP, there is a possibility of it growing apart, of its product lines and operations diverging. For HP, the opposite is true. Its organization and products have become better integrated to shape and support the company’s purpose.

Although HP’s 6.400 products serve many different markets, their common purpose is to provide customers with the information needed to solve technical and business problems. HP’s strength lies not only in its wide spectrum of products, but also in its ability to merge technologies to provide comprehensive solutions to a va­riety of specific problems. HP products are information tools in a three-tiered strategy.

Tie One

HP is containing a strategy that has served it well over the years; offering products that represent state-of-the-art technology and that are useful on a stand-alone basis. Each product is a tool that provides information to help solve a problem, such as the measurement of an electronic function, the analysis of a chemical compound, the monitoring of a vital life sign, or the computation, analysis, display or transmission of data.

Tie Two

Joining individual products to create systems is a second way HP is making information an effective decision making tool. Increasingly, HP is designing its products as modules that can interact with other HP equipment or with products of other vendors. HP’s systems may consists of test and measurement instruments, data-processing equipment, instrumentation for chemical analysis or medical monitoring, or combinations of these product groups.

Tier Three

The third tier of HP’s strategy is to provide software packages that further integrate HP equipment in order to solve customer problems, productivity networks is the term HP used to describe its integrated software packages. Just as a system represents linked equipment, productivity networks represent software programs that are linked to provide total business solutions.

Some of these networks are designed to meet the needs of a wide variety of customers. For example, HP’s Information Productivity Network allows any organization to effectively use word processing, data base management and electronic mail. Other productivity networks serve specific kinds of organizations such as manufacturers, retail trade and distribution industries, laboratories, hospitals and educational and financial institutions.

Source: Hewlett-Packard Company Annual Report, pp.5.7.

Questions

1. What is Hewlett-Packard’s mission? How does this mission influence the firm’s marketing strategy?

2. Evaluate Hewlett-Packard’s three-tiered strategy. Could the three tiers be set up as strategic business units?