96.36 billion cyberattacks against the US Navy each year
The Next Web's Emil Protalinski, quoting HP's head of enterprise services Mikle Nefkens:
“This means the attacks average out at about 1,833 per minute or 30 every second.” Those figures are simply astonishing. Extrapolating the other way, it means the US Navy is attacked some 96.36 billion times every year.
If you ever doubted the importance of cyber-preparedness, this should go a long way toward assuaging those doubts.
FBI examining HP/Autonomy accounting debacle
HP’s got ninety-nine problems, but a recently-acquired pattern recognition company with possibly-dishonest accounting practices ain’t…
…oh, nevermind.
H.P. Takes Huge Charge on ‘Accounting Improprieties’ at Autonomy
Michael J. de la Merced and Quentin Hardy, for the Times’ DealBook:
The charge essentially wiped out its profit.
The headline should say “outright misrepresentations,” not “accounting improprieties,” because the former is far more serious than the latter, and both are true.
HP hired Deloitte to review Autonomy’s books during the acquisition’s due diligence phase. Then they hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s audit of Autonomy. Only after a former Autonomy employee tipped them off did they hire PricewaterhouseCoopers, who discovered Autonomy sold hardware at a loss, despite calling itself a successful software-only company.
Whoops. And it gets worse.
Go read it for yourself. I can’t take any more of this crap.
HP CEO Meg Whitman calls it like it is: bad
Meg Whitman, as quoted by Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica:
We aren’t as effective internally as we should be because of poor systems. We are not as competitive as we need to be in how we go to market because of our IT systems. We haven’t been using a compelling customer management or CRM system for years.
She has received some harsh criticism from industry watchers like John Gruber and MG Siegler for pushing back HP’s expected mobile phone launch to 2014 at the earliest.
That criticism is justified, especially given HP’s epic Palm/webOS fail.
But this is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen from HP in years: honest self-aware, long-term leadership commitment.
I say well done, Ms. Whitman. Now, call the caterer and lock some engineers in a room for the next year.
HP’s webOS group spun out into new company: GRAM
Derek Kessler of webOS Nation wrote this up yesterday. His post included an internal email to employees of the new company, “GRAM.”
It was very evasive, vague, and noncomittal for a internal email, but this part bothered me:
Be the culture. Spread our Values: People Matter. Integrity and Trust. Deliberate Innovation. Act small, deliver big.
That is a series of bad PR poster captions strung together with no meaningful intent by HP’s Martin Risau. I hope its aimless encouragements aren’t illustrative of the kind of focus, or lack thereof, the new company will have.
webOS has deserved better than what HP has done for it from the moment their acquisition of the unique mobile OS was finalized. Hopefully, GRAM is a new, bolder, and better beginning for webOS.