The news landed with a predictable thud, yet it carries the unsettling echo of a long-drawn-out tragedy. Hewlett-Packard – or rather, the remnants of the once-mighty behemoth split into HP Inc. (the PC and printer arm) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) – has signalled its latest, vast round of “restructuring.” The headline figures are stark: up to six thousand jobs on the chopping block over the next few years, stretching out to 2028, all rationalised under the banner of a pivotal shift towards artificial intelligence. For anyone who has watched the slow, painful dismemberment of this pioneering technology name, this isn’t innovation; it’s corporate vandalism disguised as strategic foresight, a cynical move that prioritises the short-term pleasure of the stock market over the long-term health of the business and, most grievously, the careers of thousands of hard-working staff.
To understand the sheer short-sightedness of this announcement, one must cast an eye back to the original ‘HP Way’ – the legendary culture built on mutual trust, engineering excellence, and respect for employees. That culture, already battered by years of mergers, divestments, and the trauma of the 2015 split, is now being systematically dismantled. The latest plan to cull staff isn’t a sharp, decisive action aimed at immediate correction; it’s a four-year sentence of uncertainty for every employee who remains. What happens to the institutional knowledge, the commitment, and the simple desire to innovate when a substantial percentage of the workforce knows they are on a multi-year redundancy watch? The answer is a corrosive decline in morale that drains the company of its intellectual vitality, leaving behind a scarred, anxious workforce preoccupied with survival rather than market leadership. This is a profound failure of corporate stewardship, sacrificing invaluable human capital – the very people who have kept the printing and PC divisions profitable despite market headwinds – for the promise of a leaner, more abstract future.
The damage is felt profoundly in regional hubs, including the Australian and New Zealand offices, where dedicated teams have spent decades translating global corporate directives into successful local programmes. These are the engineers, sales specialists, and support staff who understand the unique dynamics of the ANZ market, forging those crucial client relationships that are the lifeblood of B2B and consumer technology sales. When a company targets six thousand roles globally for elimination, the institutional memory stored within these regional teams (knowledge of local regulations, established supply chains, and specific customer needs) is treated as collateral damage. The company is, in effect, pulling the rug out from under its most loyal contributors, often those in their prime earning years with deep expertise, swapping stable, experienced labour for the risky wager of fresh, cheaper talent supposedly versed in the latest AI trends. This constant, rolling state of anxiety becomes the company’s defining culture, making HP a far less attractive proposition for the skilled individuals it desperately needs to recruit for its stated ‘AI transformation.’
The Illusion of the AI Strategy
The stated rationale – to fund and fuel a pivot toward artificial intelligence – is the ultimate modern corporate bromide. Every large technology firm now uses ‘AI’ as a catch-all justification for radical moves, but for a company whose current incarnation remains fundamentally anchored to the declining markets of personal computers and physical printers, this pivot rings hollow. HP Inc. is a massive-scale logistics and assembly operation. Its core competency lies in the efficient manufacturing, distribution, and maintenance of hardware. To suggest that a successful transition to becoming a leader in the deep-seated, complex world of AI services and sophisticated software is simply achievable by shedding thousands of legacy staff and re-allocating a portion of the resulting USD$ cost-savings is strategically naïve, if not outright delusional.
A genuine pivot to AI requires a profound cultural and structural transformation, starting with attracting and retaining world-class software engineers, data scientists, and cloud architects – the very cohort that demands high salaries and a work environment focused on fundamental research and development. Crucially, these are the highly-skilled roles that typically cost more than the positions being eliminated. By funding the future through the cost-cutting axe, HP is essentially creating a knowledge vacuum. It is sacrificing the established technical expertise that provides the revenue to sustain the business today, in pursuit of an uncertain, highly-competitive future where they have minimal differentiation. This strategy neglects the crucial, painful truth: successful strategic shifts are built on adding new, necessary skills while nurturing the existing foundation, not burning down the house to afford a new coat of paint.
The competitive landscape only sharpens the critique. The AI field is not waiting for a traditional hardware vendor to catch up. It is dominated by giants (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and specialist firms like Nvidia) who have spent the last decade building massive, proprietary cloud infrastructures and intellectual property. For HP to enter this fray late, while simultaneously hobbling itself with massive internal upheaval, suggests its ‘AI effort’ is more a marketing exercise aimed at analyst reports than a serious technological commitment. Their most likely avenue will be integrating AI functions into their existing PC hardware – the ‘AI PC’ concept – a sensible evolutionary step. But that step does not require shedding six thousand people; it requires collaboration and refinement of existing expertise. By linking the job cuts directly to this AI push, the company has inadvertently framed its supposed innovation as being fundamentally antagonistic to its own workforce, painting a grim picture where technological progress is defined by mass displacement rather than human augmentation.
The False Economy of Short-Term Profit
The primary, unstated driver behind such mass ‘transformation’ is invariably the immediate financial benefit. When corporate leadership announces job reductions of this magnitude, they are looking to deliver hundreds of millions of USD$ in annual savings. These figures, when presented to shareholders, usually elicit a positive bump in the stock price – a classic example of Wall Street rewarding the immediate, tangible action, irrespective of its long-term strategic viability. Yet, any seasoned business observer knows this is a false economy, a mere financial sugar hit that almost always conceals greater, more complex operational costs down the line.
The real expense of a restructure is rarely reflected in the headline savings figures. The cost of redundancy packages, which for thousands of long-serving employees can be considerable, immediately eats into the first year’s savings. More debilitating is the cost of disruption. When teams are halved, remaining staff must shoulder double the load, leading to burnout and decreased output. Complex projects stall. Customer service falters. The company is then forced to spend significant capital (often much of the money saved) on external contractors or highly-paid consultants to temporarily fill the knowledge gaps that the fired employees once covered seamlessly. This cycle is a corporate farce, where the savings are effectively recycled back into stop-gap measures and then hailed as success, while the core operational capacity is permanently diminished.
Furthermore, the act of reducing labour expenditure fundamentally shifts the company’s internal dynamic. It sends a chilling message to the remaining talent, particularly the high-potential younger staff, that loyalty and institutional dedication are unrewarded commodities. These are the individuals with the portability and skills to jump ship to competitors like Dell, Lenovo, or other surging technology firms that are not perpetually mired in cost-cutting programmes. Thus, the job cuts create a debilitating brain drain that saps the company’s ability to execute complex strategies, including the very AI pivot they claim to be funding. When the focus becomes so obsessively directed at expense reduction, the capacity for risk-taking, breakthrough thinking, and genuine innovation (the engine of any technology firm) is inadvertently crushed, leaving HP a hollowed-out entity more focused on managing decline than seizing opportunity.
A Legacy Tainted by Corporate Amnesia
The story of the restructured HP is increasingly becoming a cautionary tale of corporate amnesia. The repeated attempts to ‘right-size’ and refocus (whether through the initial mega-split or these constant, granular job purges) have eroded the trust that once defined the brand. The original Hewlett-Packard Way wasn’t just a quaint corporate philosophy; it was a pragmatic business model that recognised that a company’s most valuable assets walk out the door every evening. By consistently targeting its core labour force as the primary source of financial flexibility, the current leadership has demonstrated a profound detachment from the principles of sustainable growth and ethical corporate behaviour.
For the long-serving individuals, many of whom dedicated their entire careers to the HP badge, the announcement is nothing short of a betrayal. These are not idle employees; they are the specialists who ensured the quality of the world’s printing infrastructure, the salespeople who maintained massive corporate accounts, and the technicians who solved intractable problems. They are now being told their decades of service and deep understanding of the product are less valuable than the current market enthusiasm for a poorly defined AI future. The human cost of up to six thousand redundancies, spread across continents and communities, is staggering (the mortgages put on hold, the education plans derailed, the personal anxieties that stretch far beyond the corporate balance sheet).
The path HP Inc. and HPE are navigating seems less like an inspired leap into the future and more like a retreat into financial conservatism, sacrificing long-term competitive integrity for immediate fiscal comfort. In the merciless world of technology, market leaders are defined by their capacity to innovate sustainably, and that innovation is always, without exception, powered by highly-skilled, motivated people. When a company chooses to eliminate its most valuable asset, its experienced, knowledgeable labour, in favour of chasing the latest technological fad on a shoe-string, it risks becoming strategically irrelevant. This latest move, stretching the cuts out over four years like a slow, painful execution, ensures that HP will remain defined not by its legacy of invention, but by its ongoing, tragic failure of leadership, resulting in the demoralisation of thousands of staff who deserved better than to be treated as disposable line items on an expense sheet. The promise of AI cannot mask the profound, short-sighted cruelty inherent in a strategy that chooses the share price over the skilled worker.
A Note on Context and Depth
The analysis must delve into historical context, competitive landscapes, financial mechanics, and the pervasive cultural impact of such large-scale corporate actions. A seasoned journalist understands that the story is not just in the numbers, but in the long-term strategic damage and the human consequences of prioritising quarterly financial engineering over the foundational health of the enterprise. This decision is less about streamlining and more about the ongoing, gradual dilution of a globally recognised brand, proving that corporate entities rarely learn the lessons of past restructures when the incentive structure remains focused solely on short-term gains. The long tail of these six thousand job losses will stretch far beyond 2028, haunting HP’s culture and capability for years to come.
The reliance on AI as a justification reveals a lack of genuine, internally-grown strategic vision. If AI were the true driver, the company would be investing heavily in up-skilling its current workforce and acquiring specialised talent, not relying on cost-cutting measures that drain institutional knowledge. The move is a desperate signal to the market that management is willing to shed its past to appease present shareholder demands, a tactic that rarely succeeds in the hyper-competitive, innovation-driven realm of global technology. Ultimately, this ‘transformation’ will likely serve as another chapter in the sad, continuing story of a tech pioneer sacrificing its soul on the altar of temporary financial metrics, an outcome that is neither sustainable nor justifiable to the loyal, hard-working people who built its success.