HP CEO outlines rules for business in the online age

Paris - You've probably heard of Moore's Law, and probably even Metcalfe's Law, but yesterday Hewlett-Packard Chairman, CEO and President Lewis Platt outlined a set of rules for successful business practices in the Internet age that he dubbed "Lew's Laws."

Speaking at International Data Corp.'s European IT Forum here, Platt said that companies need to adapt to the rash of new Internet technologies coming onto the market in order to survive, and he outlined a five-point plan for their success. But above all, large companies, including HP, need to think like small companies and overcome the problems of complexity and inertia that weigh them down, he said.

Lew's Laws, or rules for survival in the connected electronic world, consist of the following:

Make sure that your company continually produces new products that make existing products obsolete;
• Hire a wide range of employees from all backgrounds, ethnicities, lifestyles and cultures;
• Listen to your young and low-level employees, who often have new and interesting perspectives;
• Move quickly and at Internet time;
• And finally, simplify the complexity of your IT infrastructure and make the network simple to use for everyone.

  Being a large and not very modern company hit with the Internet, HP had to make many of these changes itself in order to survive, he said. Still, Platt admitted, it hasn't been easy and HP's market share of worldwide Internet product sales hasn't been as stellar as companies that embraced the Internet more quickly.

  In an IDC survey that asked executives to identify the IT company with the most impact on their Internet strategy, HP didn't even come out in the top five, while Microsoft Corp. garnered the top spot worldwide, followed by IBM Corp.

  To raise its profile in the Internet business, HP plans to launch a huge push to its corporate customers positioning itself as a provider of Internet products, especially for companies that want to meld Unix with Windows NT, Platt said.

  Platt also said that HP would increasingly look to Europe in order to market its Internet and other products. With the U.S. IT market beginning to flatten out, and the economic crises in Asia and Latin America having put a huge dent in HP's worldwide revenues, Europe is the region growing the most steadily, Platt said.