Hewlett-Packard, “became the first major Linux vendor to initiate a Linux Indemnity program for customers, we are working with many new enterprise customers and we made over $2.5 billion in revenue for the year,” says Martin Fink, vp, Linux, HP.

“We have established HP as one of the world’s preeminent Linux vendors and we anticipate continued growth in 2004, led by our dedication to meeting customer needs, industry-standard Linux platform leadership, a broad services portfolio, and innovation such as Linux on notebooks and desktops.”

And therein lies a potentially enormous problem for HP. Because ceo Carly Fiorina has very definite ideas on what “meeting customer needs” means.

At the recent CES (consumer electronics conference) she staged a dog-and-pony show featuring Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Universal’s Interscope music label, Sheryl Crow, Dr Dre and Alicia Keys, among others, as she [Fiorina] promised HP would build, license or acquire the best content protection technologies (DRM) it can find to prevent its customers from illegally downloading and sharing copyright material.

“Fiorina talked at length about technology finally living up to its promise and opening new ways for consumers to enjoy a world rich in culture,” as Ashlee Vance says here. “At the same time, however, she vowed to out do all technology companies in the restrictions HP will place on those consumers sharing their culture. The company whose slogan is ‘Invent’ is doing all it can to stifle innovation, new business models and new markets.”

Developed under the GNU General Public License, the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone, although this doesn’t mean it and its assorted distributions are free. “Companies and developers may charge money for it as long as the source code remains available,” as the Linux site says here.

Linux represents freedom, independence and innovation.

Paradoxically, giants such as HP are now hugely rich on Linux, which started out as a hobby for Linus Torvalds who was studying at the University of Helsinki in Finland when he came up with it.

Even more ironically, when HP starts its drive to force people into becoming what Carly Fiorina sees as good citizen-customers, kept in line by HP’s DRM technologies, Linux will be in there somewhere.

This year, Linux will be even more profitable than in 2003, hopes HP – hence the new raft of Linux products.

However, HP isn’t the only game in town. Far from it. But it’s the only one which is so blatantly trying to control what its customers see, hear and do.

Linux is ultra-popular with a lot of the people Fiorina has more or less accused of being thieves.

HP has sold what it’s already sold. New (and many existing ‘old’) customers, however, may not be as keen on seeing Fiorina as Arbiter of their Consciences as Fiorina is on Looking Good to Hollywood.

It’ll be interesting to see just how damaging her Hollywood-like arrogance will be to HP’s future prospects.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2004 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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