Speeches

© Copyright 1999 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P
All rights reserved. Do not use without written permission from HP.

Keynote Highlights

On Monday, November 15, 1999 HP CEO, Carly Fiorina delivered a keynote speech focusing on the future of the Internet and how HP will play an integral role in making the Internet work for people. She went on to describe those elements that would drive the future of HP's success, including a promise of a new HP, a spirit captured in HP's new brand identity that was launched at the conclusion of her speech. The following are highlights of that speech.

Carly opened her remarks by asking if the Internet was really working for people and continued to affirm that she believes that we are at a critical juncture in the Internet. Describing the present Internet as elite, the purview of technologists and, as implied by the word Cyberspace - distant, cold, alien and threatening, Fiorina outlined the future of the Internet as pervasive, intimate, warm, friendly, useful and personal. To realize this promise of the Internet, where rather than working the web, the web works for people, a change, in our companies is required.

"I believe companies, to succeed in this new era, to really fulfill the promise of the Net, must build a new culture."

Carly explained this new culture as composed of three elements:

1. Radical ideas - allow unorthodox ideas to flourish.
2. Inventiveness - take those radical ideas and execute them quickly.
3. Balance - synthesize the old and the new, dot-com and established business, the old guard and the young turks.

In addition to this culture, Carly described a world driven by services -- a world in which the pure product era has ended, where products become much more useful because they are surrounded by service. Products are platforms for delivering services; cars for example from in-car navigation to emergency roadside assistance.

Companies are figuring this out because services drive the customer experience and where products are wrapped around by a service is where customers find it more valuable and useful. The question then, is to define what types of services are going to define a company's value proposition to customers.

"This new opportunity is about the intersection of three important vectors."

The first vector is about the e-services wrapped around products. HP's Internet strategy revolves around creating and delivering services over the Net. This is about more than web sites. According to Carly, it is about delivering Internet services to devices, and she described HP being about helping new business models to be created and inventing the technologies that support them, with HP's E-speak at the core of this inventiveness. HP E-speak was described as a remarkable software technology that is at the heart of the company's belief that anything can be turned into a service for revenue and profit, a technology that makes it possible to create, locate and request any service on the Internet from any device. In the spirit of HP's history of being a better partner and collaborator than any other technology company in the world today, Carly announced that HP intends to release its E-speak source code on the web on December 8, 1999.

The second vector is appliances. Carly thinks appliances will proliferate and that everything with a microchip in it becomes an appliance and can be connected to the web.

The third vector is infrastructure and Carly went on to describe that HP views it as needing to be always on, always reliable and always secure. This infrastructure environment, described as pervasive computing - as available as oxygen, as reliable as the sun and as invisible as radio waves - is a concept first developed by HP chief scientist, Joel Birnbaum, 15 years ago. HP has been building this infrastructure to create a computing utility that meets the challenge to support billions of devices and trillions of transactions.

"It is the intersection of those three points that really is the promise of the Net, a Net that can work for you, instead of you working for it. HP has a unique position. We sit right in the middle of this intersection."

Carly then indicated that she, and the rest of the people at HP, was focused on one goal - to exploit the intersection. She continued to emphasize huge confidence in HP's future, confidence supported because of the people of HP and their inventive spirit, best personified by what she found in HP Labs.

In talking about appliances, Carly indicated that they have to be useful, everywhere and inexpensive. What she found in HP Labs are contributions like Chai, software that allows device manufacturers to enable their appliances to access e-services and communicate intelligently with each other. Other contributions include hardware, the foundation of HP's PC appliance program called e-PC, combining the functionality of a PC with the form factor of an appliance.

Carly also announced a new partnership with Swatch to develop the word's first wristwatch that delivers on the promise of the Internet. This watch will be a device through which e-services can be accessed, a watch that connects to the web. Carly asked the audience to imagine a world where these types of appliances were everywhere. Then people will have the ability to access services anywhere. This imagined world is a reality today in HP Labs, a town where e-services are accessible from almost any point. HP calls it Cool Town. In Cool Town, everything is connected. It is a model for how appliances, plus e-services, plus infrastructure will deliver what people want. Cool Town is about reinventing the Net to work for people.

Another exciting area for HP outlined by Carly is Digital Imaging. A major area of invention for HP, what is now broadly called Digital Media, is the embodiment of thinking in terms of the intersection between the three vectors of services, appliances and infrastructure.

"We happen to be the largest, most successful printing and imaging company in the world. But now we are putting our inventive minds to work to identify ways in which services, plus digital imaging and e-publishing, will revolutionize the whole process."

Carly spoke about an installed base of 130 million printers, and how HP was thinking about how to add a service component to make those printers, those appliances, more useful for businesses and families by connecting them to web in new ways. An example presented was one in which a printer becomes like a mailbox where, in the morning, only those newspaper articles of interest are automatically printed. Another technology described was JetSend that enables information exchange between digital imaging devices, avoiding the need for cables or printer drivers. HP is also expanding into e-publishing and the digitization of hard copy, where we move from print and distribute to distribute and print. These are examples Carly used to describe how the Internet will work for people.

Carly summarized HP's vision of the Internet by emphasizing three things:

1. Profit is at the intersection of services and appliances and infrastructure.
2. Revenue comes from wrapping services around products.
3. Culture, more than technology is going to help the Net deliver what people want.

Carly concluded her remarks with a brief description of how HP's culture is being changed to meet these challenges. She described HP as having started in a garage 60 years ago by inventors with radical ideas. HP invented many firsts, from the hand held calculator to creating flexible working hours on the factory floor. HP is a company of inventors with great inventive capability and Carly talked about how HP will re-ignite this spirit and start talking about invention again.

"You can expect to work with a reinvented HP. We will work differently. We will sound different in our communications. We're even going to look different, and it will be far more than a symbol. It is about the fundamental transformation and reinvention of this company."

Carly explained that HP was returning to its roots, preserving the things that made the company great and offered to reintroduce the audience to HP by screening a video that captured the spirit of HP and launched its new brand and new cultural identity - invent.