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HP Delivers on the Future of Work and Play at CES 2021 — An Interview with VP Mike Nash – Futurum Tech Webcast Interview Series

On this episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast – Interview Series I am joined by Mike Nash, Chief Technologist and VP of Customer Experience and Portfolio Strategy, Personal Systems at HP. Mike is responsible for making sure products and technology that HP develops meets the needs of customers — a vital role in today’s business climate.

Our discussion centered on how HP is delivering on the future of work and play at CES 2021 and was a great addition to my conversation with HP’s Alex Cho on The Six Five Podcast with Patrick Moorhead. Be sure to check out that conversation as well.

The Future of Work and Play at CES 2021

My conversation with Mike also revolved around the following:

  • An exploration into HP’s 2021 CES theme “The Three C’s” and how it ties into 2020’s theme “The PC is Essential”
  • How remote work and hybrid work might continue to evolve this year
  • How HP is building the solutions to meet the changing needs of consumers
  • What HP is excited about sharing at CES 2021 including the new advancements being made in software and services

CES is an exciting time of year for tech companies as they launch new products. And even though this year is remote, the advancements that are being announced, including a few from HP are going to continue to move digital transformation forward. This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in the technology that will continue to transform the way we work and live.

Watch my interview with Mike here:

Or listen to my interview with Mike on your favorite streaming platform here:

Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.

Read more analysis from Futurum Research:

HP Delivers A Stellar Quarter Powered By Huge Notebook Demand 

HP Makes 3D Printing Technology And Digital Manufacturing Announcements 

Intel Announces A Flurry Of CPU And AV Updates At CES 2021

Transcript:

Daniel Newman: Welcome to the Futurum Tech Podcast. I’m your host today, Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. Excited about this special edition of the Interview Series. We are in the middle of CES 2021 Remote. That means the show is not live, which is a surprise to nobody after what’s happened in 2021, but thrilled to have this show and thrilled to be joined by Mike Nash of HP, which I’ll be doing that in just a moment. Before I bring Mike onto the show, I just want to go through a quick disclaimer and say, this show is for information and entertainment purposes only and while we will be sharing new products, new services, possibly talking about publicly traded companies, nothing we say on this show is for investment advice. But I’m really excited for this show. Without further ado, let me bring Mike Nash of HP to join me.

Mike Nash: How’s it going?

Daniel Newman: Mike? How are you doing today?

Mike Nash: Living the dream, not waiting in a line for a lift.

Daniel Newman: Oh yeah, it’s funny, we also had the opportunity to talk to one of your cohorts over on the team, Alex Cho who is Personal Systems and you know Alex well. And it was funny, we said the same thing in background. It’s like, yes, there’s kind of a sadness about not being physically present and in the same space with everybody, but at the same time, gosh, it’s kind of nice to just be doing this remotely at our desks.

Mike Nash: There’s friends that I sort of only see at CES sometimes and it’s fun to go out for dinner with them and stuff. But I will say that the hustle and bustle is something that I think we have better things to spend our time on. It’s good to spend time with you today.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s absolutely great. It’s easy. We get an hour and we actually get an hour, no racing, no chasing, no finding. We are here and I’m glad. Over the next 20, 25 minutes, I’m really thrilled to have you here. I wanted to talk about some very exciting announcements and very interesting announcements that have come from HP. Before we do jump in and get to the meat as I like to call it of the conversation, I would like to introduce you, maybe have a little bit of fun. You’ll see I have his title down there in the bottom, says that he’s chief technologist of personal systems at HP. That’s only half the title. We ran out of room. I didn’t have a scrollable ticker.

Mike Nash: That would be the way to do it.

Daniel Newman: Yeah man, please, go ahead and just introduce yourself. Everyone out there on the Futurum Tech Podcast and our community, all of our great listeners, tell them about yourself, who you are, a little bit about what a day in the life at HP looks like.

Mike Nash: Cool. I think first of all, I really appreciate the opportunity to come chat and have again sort of casual time to talk about our announcements and kind of what our strategy is. I lead a group called customer experience and portfolio strategy and really allows me to look across all of personal systems, understand kind of the things that customers care about and making sure that a combination of our technology strategy, our product strategy in terms of experiences, but also kind of the way we look at our business strategy, all sort of fit together.

A little bit I will say for sure I have probably the coolest job at HP, if not in the industry, because I kind of get curious about different things and sort of form hypotheses and go see where they take us. I think the key thing here is really understanding the customer is the center of the circle and really having that empathy and really bringing that empathy back in a data driven way to the product groups and other parts of HP to make sure we’re doing things that raise the bar for customers every day. And it’s just so much fun. It’s probably what I would be doing if I wasn’t being paid and here I get to get paid and get access to all kinds of cool technology and work closely with our alliance partners. It’s just, it’s a total blast.

Daniel Newman: It’s funny you say that. I can’t speak for HP, Mike, but I can speak for what we do, what I do. Pat Moorhead And I always joke on the Six Five that when we had real jobs, meaning before we were industry analysts, and now we always talk about how we have the coolest job. You might have the coolest job at HP. I like to think I just have the coolest job period, which lets me get to talk to people like you and get to hear all about the coolest and wildest things that are going on in the tech space.

Mike Nash: No, and it really goes to that point, which is I think, in the middle of everything going on and there’s obviously some major tragedies that have happened over the course of the last year that I certainly we could never feel good about, but I will say that we’ve probably never worked in a more exciting time in tech. And we’re very fortunate to be able to be in that space.

Daniel Newman: Which is so odd because it’s been such a crap year this last year, but overall for tech, it was cool. You know what I mean? For tech, we got to discover ourselves and got to do so much. Digital transformation accelerated at breakneck pace. We were adopting and innovating and growing and scaling at such a breakneck rate in the year. While again, it was kind of one of those things you had to balance because you wanted to be very subtle and humane, but for tech it was wild. Like I said, I had the busiest year of my career in 2020.

Mike Nash: No, it’s interesting. There’s a lot of things that I think we’ve been looking at as an industry and at HP in particular around, I think you said digital transformation. I think also the blending of your work life and your personal life. Something that HP we’ve been calling one life for a number of years. And as a result, we were making a lot of investments in things like how do I build a device that I could use for my personal stuff and for my work stuff? And how do I help people work wherever they have to work? And we’ve been investing in this thing and focusing on it and really by the way, it was very customer driven. Customers are telling us this is what they wanted to do, but the adoption rate kind of wasn’t where we thought it could be. And I don’t think anyone would have thought that we’d have the last year is the catalyst for that.

But I think we were very pressured to be investing in those places. In fact be very fortunate to be ready to really respond to customer needs. We used to talk about how PC and PC relevance was increasing because of a lot of different things. And over the course of the last 12 months, the PC transitioned from being relevant to being essential. And I measure that in terms of minutes of use people spend on that device, whether they’re working from home or creating, whether they are learning from home. I have three kids in the house right now that are going to school. Or frankly, just kicking back and relaxing, either watching a video or playing a game, the PC is the place where you’re doing that to be connected. My daughter who I think was never thought she would be a gamer, started playing games because it was a way for her to be socially connected with the students and her classmates that she didn’t have the opportunity to see during the pandemic. It’s been interesting.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. The PC is essential is a great topic. We had Alex do the keynote for our Six Five Summit last year on that topic. And I really, I love that story emerging because I said this on other shows, I’ve said this probably in the media to press, to journalists basically the demise of the PC has been greatly overstated. And in fact, if we didn’t have a year of rekindling our relationship with larger format devices in 2020, there’s no bigger year, but it wasn’t a moment in time. It wasn’t cyclical.

We’re not just going to go back. We realize the power of that device and how much more we can do. It’s not that we don’t love our phone, that’s fine, but there were so many things. We were doing this. I don’t want to do a video FaceTime on a small device that I got to hold and kind of. It’s great to sit in a comfortable chair with a propped up device that has better speakers, a better camera that you can multitask more easily, Mike. It was a really, really good year. And I thought HP did a good job of really embracing that.

Mike Nash: No, and I think that’s true, but I think if you turn the clock back, when people were saying, “Hey, the PC is dead,” Eight years ago, 10 years ago. I think there’s a lot of things where minutes of use were shifting away from the PC to phone and tablets. And I think a little bit, it was on us in the PC industry to sort of realize, oh my gosh, we’ve got things we’ve got to do better. And what’s happened over the course of the last year. And again, HP is, I think, been a leader there, but so have our partners as well is to realize, okay, we’ve got to go solve issues so those minutes of use come back to the PC and thank goodness we did because as a result, when the PC needed to be essential we were ready as an industry.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, spot on. Look, they were too big, too clunky, the integrations and collaborations of these PCs to do what we need to do now would not have been good. If we had a 2014 laptop trying to operate in 2020, it would have been a very, very bad experience. Look, I got a bunch of questions I want to hit you on.

Mike Nash: Go for it. All right, good conversation though.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, no, we can talk more. We’ll make some time offline for sure.

Mike Nash: This is why I love my job.

Daniel Newman: This is fun. And by the way, thanks again for spending some time here with me. You started to allude to this. My first question is, HP is sort of referring to something it’s calling the three C’s and this is sort of a subplot to what we were just talking about. But talk to me a little bit about how this ties to 2020 and into 21 and that whole PC is essential theme.

Mike Nash: It’s interesting, I think one of the things that we’ve seen is obviously a very important part of our strategy is focusing a little bit less on the tech. Not that we don’t care about tech, but focusing on experiences. As we started to study, what were people spending their time doing on their PC? And as importantly, Dan, what do they want to spend time doing? It sort of broke into three big buckets and as we’ve been calling them, the three C’s. The first is they want to spend time consuming content. I think consuming content comes in a lot of forms. It could be watching a video, playing a game, shopping. Those are all sort of forms of consume.

The second C is really about creation. And I think what we realized is that we’re all sort of all creators in our own special way. I love to write. I have a lot of colleagues at HP that loves to do PowerPoint. My daughter is amazing at doing video editing. These are all forms of expression and the PC is a great place for doing those things.

And the third is collaboration. And collaboration, it could mean being in a chat like we’re doing today, using Zoom or Teams or another product to sort of be remotely present. But it also is about how we work on a document together or design a computer together or maybe build a house remotely. And those things are happening more and more in a digital forum. I think as we’ve been focusing on this, it’s been like, okay, what are the experiences in the buckets of the three C’s we want to make sure we’re making just amazing on a PC and then behind that, okay, what are the technologies you need to go do that?

We do wifi six and 5G because they enable those experiences. Not because wifi six and 5G are important on their own right even though they probably are. I think we look at things like, okay, if you want to be in a remotely collaborative way, investing in a camera with great resolution and a great sensor is super critical. Audio matters a lot when you’re watching a movie on your PC, but it also matters a lot, like we’re doing a call right now and the base roll off of how the low end of spoken word sounds matters a lot so we invest in those things. But those speeds and feeds and technology capabilities are all done in the name of supporting those experiences.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. And you guys definitely seem to get it. And look, Mike, I love what you’re saying. I wrote a book called, Building Dragons and the sub title was Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy. And then we wrote Futureproof, that was my next book. And my point is it was all experience driven. Everything you’re saying is, as much as I love tech, if you can’t kind of align tech and experience, that is why certain companies really rose to perpetual fame. Was nothing to do with having the leading edge tech, it had to do with creating an experience that people just fell in love with.

Mike Nash: Yeah. Well, you need the tech to make the experience happen and that’s the magic.

Daniel Newman: There is a interdependence, but the consumer rarely cares that much about it. And what I mean by that is, I’ll give you a quick history, but you probably remember watching movies in a home theater. There was a time when there was an old technology, I remember it was called Kaleidoscope. And it built a touch panel controllable movie library. And it used these really complex systems from companies like Crestron, where you would have to program everything, you’d have to upload the DVDs into these big servers. And it was amazing. You’d go into these really wealthy people’s homes and have these home theaters, these touch panels, you pick a movie and now we have Netflix. What I mean is Netflix is available to everybody that has five bucks extra a month. The entire experience looks exactly like that. Nobody really thinks about where’s that video hosted? How is that video transcoded and made available to play in high definition, on my display, over a wireless connection that I barely understand how it works in my house? But the tech is awesome.

And so the fact that you’re thinking this way probably impacts 90 plus percent of your consumers that just want an awesome laptop with great graphics, that video looks good, their applications run smoothly, their games play well, all the connectors work every time you connect them, they updates. All I’m saying is you guys moving in this direction is huge.

Mike Nash: And it goes to the power of ecosystems, too. The scenario you described only works because of the ecosystem, all those pieces together. I don’t have to understand what an IP address is to watch a movie, but back in those experiences you were describing from 20 years ago, someone did and now you don’t. And that’s pretty cool.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s awesome. I wanted to ask you, because like I said, I’ll be candid. At the beginning I’m talking these big picture themes with you, as we get to the end, I’m going to have you spill the beans on a little more of the new products and solutions here, Mike. But so 21, everybody I think was really optimistic that it was going to be different than 20. As I see it, 21 is going to look exactly like 2020 for at least another six months, maybe not longer, but one of the big themes at HP has been really this whole remote and hybrid work. How do you sort of see this all evolving though? As there are going to be at least some level of returns to an, I won’t say normal, but to something else.

Mike Nash: I think it’s going to be the new normal. I think you make a great point. I think maybe it’s just a mindset or hope as the calendar shifted from December 31st to January 1st, there’s not a magical thing that happens on the day of that transition. I do think that we learned a lot in 20 and some things are very, very hard. And again, a lot we’re at a moment now where I’ve had for the first time people in my orbit affected by COVID, which hadn’t happened till a few months ago, which is sad and scary all at the same time. But I do think there’s a lot of things we always used to do for whatever reason that are sort of causing a transformation to deal with the moment of COVID.

And I think and some of those things will actually become in a positive way, best practices that come out of that. And for me at my job at HP, I used to spend probably seven out of eight weeks on the road. My eldest kid was in fifth grade when I started at HP, he’s now a freshman in college and you sort of realize, wow, did I need to be traveling? Probably. Do I need to be traveling as much? Absolutely not. I think, right now we’ve all learned how to work from home. I think, we’re going to get into a mode where we’ll probably be working at least partially back in the office, but the opportunity to work remotely will still very much be there. And so therefore having technologies like I’ll pick sort of a basic one, but having to go to the dock at home and at work with my laptop, having that work really well, that’s important, it’s going to be important.

And I think, I may not have my own dedicated desk in the office. I may have a desk that I share with other people because maybe I’m in two or three days a week and the days that I’m not there, someone else is using my space. And investing in things like USB-C and having a portfolio of displays and accessories from HP that work with USB-C so I can use a single wire to get video and power and my keyboard and mouse with one wire for docking, it’s pretty universal, is a very critical part of our strategy. And it sounds kind of basic, but again, making the experience of, I can use any one of the hotel desks that I pop into work. There’s a lot of technology behind that and that’s kind of cool.

I’m not sure we know all the answers to those things. I think remote meetings going to be critical as well. And there’s this whole notion of the importance of being in the room when it happens, that’s less important now than it was because we’ve all learned how to work in a virtual room.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. I think you bring a lot of great points there. And by the way, if you had all the answers, you’d be doing something different and HP would maybe have a $40 trillion market value by now. And it’s doing a good job, but I just mean having all the answers is pretty unplausible. But the beauty of the ecosystem is as you come together, you keep building it and you have that customer centered idealism in terms of when you’re developing. And when you’re building, when you’re expanding. You bring all those things together and you do yield growth, you do yield a greater affinity and greater adoption rates. And so I do think companies that have at least made that pivot to experience economy and experiential design have largely outperformed the market. And that’s not just my opinion. That’s really been driven by science too.

Mike Nash: Yeah, I’d say if there’s one characteristic, I think it sort of goes more to culture than anything that it makes me proud to be at HP. It really is empathy, I think. And empathy, as you’re designing an experience, thinking about what it’s like from the customer’s perspective or from the partner’s perspective as they’re installing it and whether that’s using a product or going to different parts of the support experience, being empathetic in those key moments and understanding the experience from the perspective of not the designer of the experience, but from the user of the experience is what’s so critical.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s a great point. In the Seven habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey wrote, I read that book 10 times and look, it’s not all great. Not everything about that book is great, but I still remember the one line was, “Seek first to understand then to be understood.” And that was the one line I took away from that book when I read it right out of college and I sort of applied a lot of its ideas. That’s the one that stuck though. And it’s sort of a, I know this show is a tech show and not a life show, but you got to bring it all together.

That’s probably served me better than almost anything else was when people, customers, when it’s your employees, when it’s your partners, when there’s a true belief that you care about what they feel and what they think, you will always get a better return. You always maximize the return and you don’t do it with that in mind, Mike. That’s not why you do that, but you do yield a better outcome when people feel like they’re cared about.

And so you’re bringing up great points. And by the way, maybe, we’ll have to do a whole nother show. It’ll be a empathic human development show, starring Dan and Mike. No, you’re a lot of fun talking to you about this. And clearly you’re shifting the lives of consumers. I want to jump ahead because I was going to ask you about that, but you’ve really already touched on it, but let’s talk CES. It only took 20 minutes to get here, but CES 2021, give me the highlights. Tell me about what’s the big lineup, big products, things you’re really excited about and why should consumers and businesses be excited about them?

Mike Nash: I think, first of all, thanks for that opportunity. I will say that a lot of what we’re launching this week at CES is focused on helping customers solve a lot of the problems that I think that existed through the last nine, 10 months or 11 months now, but really it helps them get ready for what comes next as well. And really, it was an eye toward that new normal that sort of drove a lot of these strategies. And again, our design cycles for products, Dan, are longer than the time we’ve been in the pandemic, if you can believe. Anything would be longer than that. But I think it really sort of goes to the fact that a lot of the direction we’re heading in, in terms of one life sort of was ready for that situation.

But I think one example that I’ll talk about is the update to the EliteBook Dragonfly, the Elite Dragonfly products. And we’re launching two things here at CES this week. One is the Elite Dragonfly G2, which brings together more advanced collaboration, more capabilities, but I’m also really excited about the Elite Dragonfly Max. And it’s sort of the step up product for the customer that wants the very, very best for these remote scenarios. Has a five megapixel camera. 5G is an option on this device. The ability to have much better audio, especially that low end bass roll off. And one of the things I really am excited about is the noise cancellation that doesn’t just manage the angle of the microphone, but actually uses AI algorithms to say, “Oh, that sounds like a dog, let’s mask that out.” And you hear a slight change in the audio, but you don’t hear the dog. You don’t hear the crinkling bag of potato chips. You don’t hear the pen clicking. I think are super critical things about that.

And really they complete that experience. We’ve also decided to launch this new set of earbuds, the Elite Wireless Earbuds that really what’s amazing about those is they’re designed for conferencing and they do this thing where they essentially take a custom print of your ear because everyone’s ears are a little bit different, to make sure you’re getting an optimal experience on your particular set of ears. You have a much better experience when you’re doing conferencing using these earbuds.

A second sort of PC product that we’re launching this week at CES is a product called the Elite Folio. And what I love about the Elite folio is it sort of builds on things we’ve developed in the past and like something called the Spectre Folio that we did a few years ago, this is a device that can run in sort of three postures. It can run as a regular clamshell. You can pull it forward for consumptive experiences like watching a video or you can drop it down into a more tablet mode, where it’s exactly the right angle with a pen that docks when you want to do things that are other annotation or illustration. It’s actually leather bound using, in this case now, we call vegan leather because it has better durability and frankly is better environmentally, but also uses the Qualcomm SoCs so we’re getting great, great battery life, really solid performance on a platform that’s really designed for the way people are trying to work.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it was a real hot set of announcements for me. Because it’s remote, I think being a little narrower in focus in terms of it’s going to help people decide what to zoom into Mike, the earbuds caught my attention because I was thinking to myself, I’m sure HP can do this great. I’m really going to be interested in kind of how adoption rolls out since you don’t have the mobile device that people have really immediately glommed onto. But as you explain that to me and I’m sure you’re like, I got it. As you explain that to me, look, why are we not pairing our laptops the way we pair our phones? And it isn’t always super convenient in the PC world to go from a one Bluetooth set to another Bluetooth set when you’re doing a lot of meetings on Microsoft Teams or Zoom or a WebEx. To give a tool that’s instantly connected, integrated, high quality and designed for collab.

Look, I’m being totally honest, Mike, if I wasn’t so straightforward, I wouldn’t just come out and say this, but I kind of want to try it. That’s a hint for me as the analyst and saying, I want one of those Dragonfly Maxes is because I do 7,000 video meetings a week and I bounce between, a full, a desktop Cisco unit. I’ve got Apple and Mac units. I’ve got PC units, desktop and workstation. And I’m saying, I would love to know, can this thing do that all for me? Can this be the thing? And I think that’s where you’re kind of going.

Mike Nash: Oh what’s interesting also is there’s other basics around this. And I just got, and we want to make sure as soon as we have them in production, we’ll make sure we get one towards you. But I have, I got mine the other day. And what’s interesting about it is again, you’re spending all your time on these devices. My minutes of use between my phone and my PC, I looked at my phone bill the other day, my data rate on my cellphone bill, it’s nonexistent because I’m either in the house using wifi on my phone or in the house using wifi on my PC. But on the Dragonfly Max it’s things like, it’s the audio that’s just breathtaking. The camera, which I’m not sure if you want more resolution or less resolution on this, but I think for me, exactly.

The keyboard is also something that’s really, really important. And just the feel and the time we’ve spent on the little details of just like, what does it feel like as you’re pressing on the key? How the keys pressing back on you. Does the touch pad work? All things that are super, super critical. And frankly also realizing that even in the house, because we’re sort of forced to work in different parts of the house, battery life matters a ton. And we focused a lot on that as well.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. You guys hit a lot of key areas. It’s an exciting event. Everybody out there, please check out the show notes if you’re listening live. I’m going to have some links out so you can see some of these new products. I’m super interested. If I get my hands on them, you can be sure I’ll be providing my analysis of what I think. But I like the concept of what you’re doing with the Dragonfly Max. I like the concept of having a pair of earbuds that would sort of sitting court side to my laptop at all times. And just like I’ve, with my mobile devices, kind of treat it the same way, but for that dedicated collaboration experience. I think HP could have some real success there. And it’s something that I’m going to be watching very closely. I only have a few minutes left with you, Mike, and I want to get you home and get you back to the CES show as well.

Mike Nash: I was going to talk about one more product as well, if I can.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

Mike Nash: The ENVY 14 is another product. It’s a consumer product, but to the notion of those three C’s, really designed and optimized for creators and by working closely with Intel and with Nvidia And frankly with creative partners like Adobe, really building an optimized experience for photo editing and video editing that I think is, it’s a 14 inch device, but it’s designed to be super small and portable. Has the audio experience we talked about before. But if you’re a person who’s hobby or maybe even your job is to do video editing and photo creation, back when we had live sports in high school, I was the team photographer for my kids’ sports and having a device where I could just have the capacity and the power to process photos was just an amazing opportunity. And we’re psyched to be working closely with Intel, Nvidia and Adobe on these kinds of experiences.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s a powerhouse. By the way, I have an ENVY, whatever the most current generation is that floats around the house and everybody in my house is a big fan of it. Super light, very, very well built. It was one of the devices where I really saw a change in direction from the PC makers to make something that really hits that ultra premium, portable and good looking, which is by the way, something I was waiting a long time on and the ENVY has always been that. I’m excited to hear how this one is received in the market.

Mike Nash: And I think focusing on creators helped us to raise the bar, even if you’re not a creator when you use the device, because it was designed for creators, you’re getting the benefit of that focus.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it looks good. I’m excited. You got me a little bit excited about all of them. I wish I had more hours in the day, but thanks to stay at home and not traveling, I do have more time than ever before to play with all the devices, all the test units and stuff that gets sent to me. That is part of the, when I said coolest job on the planet. I love talking cloud and AI, but nobody’s going to send me a giant, high performance computer or data center GPU to hang out and play within the house. Those are just cloud instances these days that I get to touch, but the PC and consumer stuff is fun because that stuff ends up in the house and I’m getting to touch all that stuff. And HP has always been really generous about that so thanks HP.

Got just a couple of minutes left here, Mike, I have one last question for you that I want to hit you on. I’m going to ask you to kind of wrap it up quick, keep us on time, but you talked a lot about hardware and hardware and hardware and hardware. We also talked a lot about the soft spot of experience, but HP has expanded a lot in software and services. Can just talk a little bit about some of what you’re doing in 21 in those areas, because I think that’s a differentiator.

Mike Nash: Yeah. I think there’s sort of two things. First of all, it’s absolutely true because experiences don’t happen. They require hardware, but they’re lit up and come to life through software. And this is probably two big examples. Maybe three that I’d focus on. The first is I think, this whole notion of helping customers to move content, making their mobile devices part of their creative experience. I think the focus on using this product we have recently launched called HP QuickDrop, which is really designed to help you get photos and other small bits of content back and forth between your phone and your PC. And I think we’re very excited about that work. And I think it sort of goes to a key, both aspiration and pain point we saw customers having in the past.

I think the second really is sort of focusing around our strategy around device as a service and something that we have technologies we have called TechPulse. And the idea is really help drive better management of our software through telemetry to our customers. As a part of that, we also have launched something called Business Boost, which is really about helping customers, especially small and medium customers to be able to manage the key phases of the IT workload, especially for companies that don’t have dedicated IT staff. When you think about the challenges of remotely managing somebody working from home or onboarding a new employee that has never been on the premise of your company, the whole idea of Business Boost is to make the friction of that just much more reduced. And as you said, that’s all those experiences are powered by software.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Mike, I want to thank you so much for spending a little time. Just giving me the rundown, talking to the community here at the Futurum Tech podcast about HP CES. But really, as an analyst, we like to go deeper. And that’s why I spent a lot of time talking about what’s the vision of the company? Where is it heading? What does it mean? And I think if you’re out there listening to this, I really hope you got a sense of that. There’s a little bit more purpose than ever before from the tech community and from HP. At CES this year, it’s really been all about, how are we making lives for the consumers and for the enterprises make more sense in this balanced hybrid work from home world? Mike Nash, you’re a great guest. Love to have you back on the show.

Mike Nash: It’s been fun.

Daniel Newman: Thanks for joining me.

Mike Nash: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Newman: I’m going to kick you out to the green room and I’ll be right back with you after we wrap up.

Well everybody, great show. It was a great conversation today. I really appreciated the chance to talk to all of you here that joined me on the Futurum Tech Podcast about what’s going on at CES 2021 and what HP is doing. Mike Nash, heck of a good guest. Really knows his stuff. Some really interesting products, again, check out that stuff in the show notes, click on those links, learn more about all those new products and services. We’ll be covering across Twitter on our blog. And of course I’m always writing on the Forbes and MarketWatch and other places about what’s on in tech and what my analysis is. For this episode, it’s about time to say goodbye. Hit that subscribe button though. Stay a part of our community, get those alerts and updates. Whether you’re listening on Apple, whether you’re on Spotify or you’re watching us on YouTube. For this episode and for this show, I got to say goodbye. We’ll see you later.
 

Author Information

Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.

From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.

A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.

An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.

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