Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ): This Company Is Still Trying to Solve Yesterday’s Problems

Here’s the thing, though: Whose servers is Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) comparing its Moonshots to? Google builds its own servers from the ground up — by some measures, it’s the fifth-largest server manufacturer in the world, and it doesn’t sell a single one. Likewise, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), which had at least 180,000 servers as of eight months ago, designs its own servers from the ground up and freely shares those designs with interested parties to advance development. Both buy chips directly from Intel. Amazon’s EC2 had an estimated 454,000 Linux servers a year ago. Not much is known about the hardware behind EC2, but older reports (from 2008) indicate that Amazon treats servers as commodities, placing huge orders with companies like Rackable, which became Silicon Graphics International Corp (NASDAQ:SGI) a few years ago.

This little list doesn’t cover many of the larger cloud companies, but you can get a better idea of just how widespread the move toward cloud hosting is with a series I wrote last year called “Investing in Cloud Computing for Dummies.” Cloud computing isn’t going away, and even with much greater efficiency, it’s debatable whether Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) can crack a market increasingly moving toward purpose-built machines with similar characteristics as HP’s Moonshots.

You’re going to have to do better, HP. A low-power server isn’t the future when the present is already dominated by companies building their own servers and renting out capacity to smaller operations.

The article HP’s Still Trying to Solve Yesterday’s Problems originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.

Fool contributor Alex Planes owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool recommends Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, and Intel.

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