经济学人下载:惠普的远见 效仿IBM

HP seems to have ignored both currents, at least in the past decade. Carly Fiorina, its boss from 1999 to 2005, merged with Compaq, another computer-maker, in a deal worth $25 billion. Mark Hurd, her successor, cut costs but was ousted in 2010 after a dust-up over sex and expenses before he could fix the firm’s strategy.

惠普对两种趋势均重视不够，至少过去10年是这样。卡莉．菲奥利那在1999-2005年间担任惠普总裁，她曾以250亿美元的价格合并了另一家电脑制造商康柏。她的继任者马克．赫德对成本进行了削减，但他在2010年因性丑闻和虚报费用等事被免职，也未能对公司战略进行及时调整。

That job now falls to Mr Apotheker. The firm’s PC business is the world’s biggest, but is not as profitable as HP’s other units. What is more, most buyers of HP’s machines are consumers, whose demands shift faster and more whimsically than those of corporate customers. So HP intends to turn its PC business into a separate unit and then spin it off.

这项重任现在落在了阿普赛克先生的肩上。惠普公司的个人电脑销售业务全球第一，但营利却不如其他业务高。另外，大多数惠普产品的购买者是个人消费者，与公司客户相比，他们对产品的需求变化多端，难以把握。因此，惠普希望把他们的个人电脑业务先独立出来，然后再从惠普公司逐步分离出去。

Buying Autonomy also helps HP to move onto higher-margin terrain: the British firm’s operating margins exceed 40%. But the main reason HP paid a 64% premium for its shares seems to be that it believes that Autonomy’s technology could be turned into a platform to help companies make sense of their ever-growing pile of data. This includes not only “structured” data (payroll records, sales figures), but also the “unstructured” kind (documents, e-mails), which now makes up more than 80% of the information that flows through a typical company.

购买Autonomy也可以帮助惠普跨入营利高地，这家英国公司的经营利润率超过40%。但惠普愿以高出市价64%的价格购买其股份，似乎是因为，它们相信Autonomy的技术能够成为一个平台，以帮助各企业处理他们日益膨胀的数据库。这不仅包括结构化的数据（工资记录，销售数字），也包括非结构化的数据（文件、电子邮件），现在这些数据已占到公司信息流总量的80%还要多。