Re: Bit too late?
HP bought Compaq but unfortunately didn't keep up the quality.
(my personal belief: they swallowed the Win-10-nic Koolaid too much, and it KILLED their product line, along with capacitor problems and other quality issues)
HP's upper management staff is to blame. Period. OTHER makers (like Lenovo) have done well in the desktop and laptop business. HP could have done well, too. But they went the wrong direction (like so many others).
Xerox seems to be doing well enough to afford a hostile takeover. So maybe it'd be a benefit to LET THEM?
HP has Romans at the wall demanding surrender. They can try outlasting the siege, but that's unlikely to work. They can try fighyting back to the last man/woman/child but that's suicide. They can INSTEAD take a lesson from our President, and MAKE A DEAL. Then, if they play their cards right, EVERYONE will win, NOBODY will lose, and both companies continue forward in a brighter future!
It looks like HP has chosen the 'suicide path' from what I can tell... maybe I could study this a bit more, see what Fox Business News has to say about it, read up on some other info from WSJ and others that know more than I do and are trustworthy, but at least from THIS article and my experience with HP products [and how they've slow-boiled me into never buying HP again] that the Xerox thing just might be their best bet at future profitability and actually EXISTING...
/me has worked with HP minicomputers in the early 90's, exclusively used HP printers since the mid 90's, owned an HP laptop from 2008-ish, and my most recent "all in one" printer that has slow-boiled me but at LEAST is supported by CUPS...
(after hitting preview I'd fix that spelling error except that the font in the edit window is SO small I can almost NOT EVEN READ IT and picking through the text to find it isn't something I wanna do right now...)