Agilent, for those of you who don't recall, is the "real HP"--the measurements company that made scads of money by producing really awesome Microwave test equipment for a communications hungry country (and world) back when radio and television were 'local' without national or international reach.
It also made a fair amount of money on all sorts of instrumentation for other engineers, scientists, and doctors, to mention just a few. And because instruments have to measure things 'at the state of the art' they must be, in some respects, better than the state-of-the-art for whatever application they're on. And that fuels INNOVATION to stay ahead of the curve.
That, more than any one thing, accounts in my view for why HP -- the 'real HP' -- was so innovative for so many years. It HAD TO BE, to stay the leader in instruments, no choice.
I tried once to capture some of that with a personal memoir, one built around a decade of my life developing Logic Analyzers, which were tools that empowered the Computer Age as we know it. The book includes some Take-Aways, for folk worried about 'large company innovation' today, and as such, it has gotten a modest reading.
It is Lulu Press available, just type "Permission Denied Lulu Press" into your browser, and you should see an order page with a bearded visage of me.
I mention this because it is interesting to compare the results in the stock market for Agilent, one of their competitors who play much like 'the old HP' today -- Danaher -- and today's HP. Actually, it is fun to look at the "PC players" as well
Below, I show the chart for Market Capitalization (e.g. stock valuation) vs. Revenue for seven companies. Maybe these smaller innovative companies 'know womething'? But maybe those investing in Intel and Microsoft (remember that they get 80%+ of their revenues from PCs) know something that says Dell and HP are underpriced. Or is it the other way around?
No comments:
Post a Comment