The Six Five team discusses HP Amplify 2024.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: We were at HP’s massive partner event this year, called Amplify, in Las Vegas.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I have to tell you, the PC industry has gotten away from big tent events. And then you had folks like Lenovo come in. PCs are a part of Dell Tech World, but not a big piece. But HP brought it, they brought it across workforce solutions, across PCs, across printers. And it was really about the connective tissue of AI honing in on what it could do for hybrid work. And I really like the focus. And it’s not that there aren’t consumer PCs or consumer printers, but they really honed in on the work part. I think that’s smart, given that I believe that’s where the AI opportunity is. And also, by the way, it’s where the margins are, right? Unless you’re Apple, you’re not printing money as it comes to the consumer market. So a lot of good insights here.
And I’ve been covering HP for 13 years. I worked for a company that HP acquired, called Compaq, from ’95 to ’99. And a lot of really good things have stuck, like focusing on the channel, focusing on use cases. I really love the conversation that we had with Personal Systems’ Alex Cho on use cases, not specs. Use cases, not specs. And then when you put an entire layer of services on top of that, that Dave Shull is in charge of, and you sprinkle in their printers. By the way, there’s been ink as a service before any of this as a service stuff became popular. And I do like the focus. I mean, Dell and Lenovo had end-to-end, but HP just seems very focused. And I like what I saw.
One thing, my final comment on the keynote, and by the way, you can watch the 13 videos that Dan and I did for all the insights there. What I loved, what they had, is I’ve never seen the industry come out before in a way like this, CEO of Microsoft, CEO of Google, CEO of NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel. And it was just I’ve never seen that. And I’m not talking about a video that you play that we see a lot at these events. These were on stage. I think only three of them were video, but they were live video.
In fact, one guest came on late, I don’t know, didn’t come in on time. And so they had to do a real time change in terms of guests, and they had to get Pat Gelsinger on there pretty quickly. If you were wondering where the furniture was for them sitting down there, it was not there because Pat wasn’t supposed to be the first speaker. I think it was Satya. But I left the show with a higher level of confidence on what the team is putting together. I think they’re being very conservative on the call of AI PC, but that’s okay. I think that’s a good place to be because quite frankly, the industry can’t show what’s coming down the pike in the middle of the year, which I think will get a lot of people excited.
Daniel Newman: It was a great overall keynote and set of keynotes, Pat. You and I weren’t there for the whole thing, but day two actually continued with the momentum. And there was a lot of rumblings about what it would be, but we ran the gambit. You ran the gambit of the big partners on the OS side. We had Microsoft there. And of course, for Chromebooks, which is a big part of the HP business, we had Sundar there. There’s some interesting inflections on Gemini. Isn’t that interesting?
Patrick Moorhead: Listen, how do you play it? Gemini is under attack big time. Do you hide or do you bring your CEO out and your founders? And that’s exactly what we’ve seen. And Sundar said Gemini five times. I mean, by the way, when he got on and he said, “Here’s our AI strategy,” it was silent in that room. People were on every word, like, “What is he going to say here?” I thought he did a good job. Now he’s got to execute, right?
Daniel Newman: Well, look, sometimes in the process of evolving mistakes happen. We don’t know the exact situation. We can only speculate. It seems that Google is up for the challenge to try to regain the trust of the market, and we will see how that plays out over a period of time. But you had Microsoft and Google on that side. And then of course, we started off with Pat Gelsinger being in good spirits about having to be called up early, made a few jokes, threw a few punches, threw a nice punch-
Patrick Moorhead: I think he literally said, where’s the furniture?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, and he threw a few punches.
Patrick Moorhead: It was so good.
Daniel Newman: About the Core Ultra being the first in-market AI PC. And of course, AI PC means different things. And perhaps over time our team-
Patrick Moorhead: Did he thank Cristiano? Did he thank Cristiano?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, he did.
Patrick Moorhead: He hopes he becomes a customer, like after he said he was first with AI PC, after Cristiano announced his chipset in Hawaii in December. That was classic.
Daniel Newman: Well, there was some jabbing, but there was also some, I would say genuine mutual admiration that went around. I thought Cristiano was very humble, but also knows that they’ve got what looks to be a very strong product portfolio and lineup that’s going to hit the market, Pat. And then of course, Jensen and Lisa showed up on day two, and I watched what they talked about a bit remotely. And by the way, all the memes came out about the cousins, Jensen and Lisa, being cousins.
Patrick Moorhead: I missed those. I knew they were.
Daniel Newman: Is that real?
Patrick Moorhead: That is real.
Daniel Newman: Okay.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s real. Yeah.
Daniel Newman: So basically the two of them own like 87% of all the fabless, and they own about 99.9% of GPUs between the two of them.
Patrick Moorhead: What do you get your cousin for Christmas? Do you get them increased foundry wafer capacity or you go all in on packaging, co-ops?
Daniel Newman: Well, if you’re fighting, maybe what you do is you just do some margin destruction. You’re like, “I see what you got going on there. These MI-300s, I’m going to have your margins next year.” I don’t know. It’s interesting, Pat. But overall, like I said, I walked away with a couple of things. HP is incredibly committed to its partner led strategy. That hasn’t changed. They understand the partner’s role and what it has to play. They see the AI PC wave. I think they’re cautious about it. I actually think they’re very cautious. They’re very focused on continuing to deliver experiences that make remote and hybrid. And they’re very focused on hybrid. And hybrid is not remote.
And they’re also very actively working to transition their revenue to more and more subscriptions. And with things like the Magic Ink on the print side of the business, people don’t always recognize how much they do that’s recurring. But it’s going to be a super competitive market, no question. This next year, standing out is going to be tough. I think HP is up to the challenge, but I’m really excited to see, Pat. I love a little competition and how it can drive innovation in the market. AI PC is going to drive crazy competition in the market. Silicon craze, design, OEM, ODM craze. And of course, Apple, they got to get in the fray at some point. They’re like, “We do an AI PC.” And like, do you? I don’t know. Let’s talk about that.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
