<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span><br></span></div><div>>>My understanding was that when IBM did this, rather than just shutteringtheir less-profitable consumer-hardware divisions, they sold the brand to the Chinese OEM that had been making the hardware for some time now.</div><div><br></div><div>Who made the hardware wasn't the issue. The ThinkPad brand is one of the most recognized and respected world-wide. That is why Lenovo was willing to pay for it. The only comparable brand HP has is the HP printer (thanks to Deirdre for reminding me of the printers.)<br></div><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><div style="font-family: times new roman,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br><br>>>I mean, I can understand why HP would want to be a consulting company; Consulting, when you have a big name
and the marketing muscle to back it up is a license to print money.<br><br>They don't want to be a consulting company, they want to be a full service technology supplier, which includes but is not limited to consulting. Or, to use currently popular terminology, they want to offer "the whole stack." As previously mentioned, IBM derives significant advantage to providing customers a one-stop shop, including the ability to offer special pricing when customers purchase both systems and services ("use our consultants and buy our hardware and we'll give you a 10% discount on the whole bundle.")<br><br><br>>>At one of the places I worked, we hired a lot of bright kids fresh out of college. I mean, they were <br>bright, and better looking than average, but they were fresh out of school. Zero experience. Within a year, the better looking kids of the group were hired by one of the $BIGNAME consulting company, given a few months of
training, and sent out as consultants. Think of it; If you have the name, you can hire entry-level people and you can rent them out as expensive consultants. That's got to be pure profit.<br><br>I remember one huge project for a phone company, to completely revamp all software and systems. The newly minted consultant kids from $BIGNAME all looked like GQ or Vogue models. I also find it highly amusing that a particular $BIGNAME consulting company likely would not hire me if I applied, yet I developed (with one other person) the programming and OS training manuals used by all the new kids at that company to learn C and Unix (back in 1990 when C and Unix made their corporate breakthrough and the demand curve exploded.)<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div></div></div></body></html>