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World Inc. Excerpts
Chapter 7:
HP and the Vast Universe of Consumer Delight
The argument in short goes like this: There is both great risk and stunning opportunity in the fact that less than 10% of the world's population can afford to buy your products. That is, if you are already selling in over 180 countries, and 90 percent of those populations have only watched others use your HP stuff with intense brand loyalty, then you can strut towards them with new products and in new ways. They called this bold "strutting" across the divide of the wealthy to those in need of new products their "e-inclusion strategy."
E-inclusion began as a social and business vision for the new millennium, whereby the next 4 billion disadvantaged potential users of HP products could come from the other side of the digital divide. The small could be bigger, and the sense of scale in your business could change rapidly with HP's better products. HP was actively searching the globe for "the next Ben Franklins" (one of their marketing execs phrasing near 2000), so they could tell many rag to riches stories, sensing that this would fuel further growth in each of their four divisions. The small got bigger with HP products, "fueling," in Carly Fiorina's phrase, "social change." This is why HP often makes reference, as Fiorina did before the Confederation of British Industries in the opening statement, to "more and more shareowners, customers, partners, and employees" all in one long meditative breath. They see it as a social spectrum of change.
"The world is a big place" — I have heard many pros at HP chant, sounding more like a motto once heard in a church than a London bank. HPers often bring this zeal to work. With only 7 percent of this new century now over by this book's filing, I find any reference to 'a brief history of the 21st century" rather premature in its boldness. All of us have only begun this new century. The real revolution in business and society is only beginning to mount — this is the one that involves the other 4 billion folks on this earth that are not wealthy, not yet using HP products. No one can imagine what this revolution will finally look like when the other 93 percent of this century transpires. Will they mostly have Toyota cars? Will they mostly be using HP software, hardware, and new office and factory products? Will a new Microsoft emerge?
My point is rather simple: HP started this bloodless revolution in product change. Intel manufactures the guts. Microsoft packages the software and operating systems. It was HP that articulated the new world-view of a more equitable global market. As we next examine HP in detail, think of this "S-Frontier." This is where the swiftness of information enabled by an HP or Dell and IBM, played out across the severity of markets and new climate and environmental changes, makes the best firms adopt a more open, Social Response form of capitalism.
We call this the S-Frontier because in every "S" you will see some of the companies within its dual curve will be going up into the future, and some of them are destined, it seems, to be crashing down in the other side of the S. Depending on how you chose to interpret the data on your S curve, you are either preparing for growth or denying the wind in your face. The following HP case may help you see these choices more vividly.
