It's been a real shame to watch the decline of HP.

In the early 90's when I was just starting out in IT, their brand was very highly regarded, especially their laser printers which phenomenal workhorses.

They also made a huge bet on Itanium which obviously didn't pay off. HP, along with Intel, has arguably recovered from that strategic decision, but a huge amount of money and corporate energy went into running that play. If that money and energy had gone into other things, HP might well be in a better overall place today.

In one of the companies I worked in the past, we found that for a similar server configuration, Dell provides lower quote than HP and others almost always. So I doubt, HP can compete on prices with Dell in servers and support.

Ouch. They used to offer some awesome workstations a few years back, but the restrictions on peripherals were insane - I mean, what idiot decided to implement whitelists on processors and PCIE graphics adapters?