Biography: Name: Bernard Guidon Age: 48 Place of Birth: Paris, France Car He Drives: Ford Taurus (company car) Current Position: General Manager, Workstation Business Unit, Hewlett-Packard Co. Time in Current Position: 6 months Years in the Industry: 21 Pet Open Systems Peeve: "I think there is a need for people to readjust their perception. People may not realize how powerful the unification is, that has happened in the last two years. Eighty percent of what they ever needed in UNIX unification is being done now and people may not have realized this is available now. They still may have the impression of the way it was three to five years ago. The unification of the applications and the unification of the user interface-those things are very powerful." Management Philosophy: "I strongly believe in people. You tell the people what you think is the right direction to go, you make sure they have a chance to discuss and understand a specific objective, and then you get out of the way and let the people do it. That's one management idea. The second is to listen to the customer and always be ready to reconsider what you believe based on what they say. So I'm someone who spends a lot of time listening." On UniForum: "UniForum is one of the few organizations that embody the philosophy and the spirit of open systems. UniForum is really the mindset of open systems, and that's exactly what the customer wants to have. It should promote the value of open systems, which is basically the power of choice".
It's a good thing Bernard Guidon is fond of traveling. Six months ago, the 21-year Hewlett-Packard employee and native Frenchman was transferred from France to the United States for the fourth time, this time to head up HP's Workstation Business Unit in Chelmsford, MA. Although it was a promotion Guidon was happy to take, he had to leave his family behind in France so that his two teenage children could finish their schooling there over the next two years.
Although he misses his family, Guidon is excited about the opportunity he has. "I love the job because HP has a very strong position in UNIX," he says. "The workstation marketplace is a very fast-moving kind of marketplace, for which HP has a tremendous opportunity. The most challenging thing is to move not only on the workstation, but to really cover the overall space of technical computing and bring overall technical computing into the client/server arena. The workstation marketplace is about a $10 billion market for all companies, but technical computing is a $75 billion market."
HP's main thrusts in workstation products now are coming in two areas-technology and distribution. Guidon wants to produce leading-edge technology, especially in the visualization and computational aspects, across a broad product line. "For example, for our RISC-based workstation, we have very significant investment going into graphics and visualization," he says. "Because we have such large revenues associated with our UNIX and workstation program, we can have some very large investment going on from an R&D perspective." On the distribution side, HP is focusing on very large accounts. "The very large accounts like to do business with HP," he says.
Another boon for HP, Guidon believes, will be the company's agreement with Intel for advanced microprocessor development, aiming at products to become available around the turn of the millennium. Then the company will be able to provide workstations that handle not only technical computing, but also Intel-based software such as that now running on DOS and Windows. That will eliminate the need for technical workers to have separate PCs to run such applications as word processing and spreadsheets.
Guidon developed a fascination with the United States, one he believes other European technologists share. He decided to move in 1973 and took a position in the Boston area as a software designer doing research and development with Hewlett-Packard. "The U.S. was leading everything-the new ideas in both technology and society in general, and I definitely wanted to be moving into more leading-edge things that way," he says.
At the same time, he was never sure exactly where his career would take him. "I wanted to be in on the design of computer systems. But over time, who could say where that was going to lead me? I had always had a very pragmatic mode of operating-kind of doing one step and only then deciding what to do next."
Over the course of his career, Guidon gained experience in many areas of the computer business. His first job with HP was working on the design of a real-time driver, an integral part of HP's real-time executive for the HP 1000 computer.
The company moved him to San Diego in 1974, where he worked as an engineer on some broad technical issues connected with a card reader. Between 1974 and 1975 he helped move all the product's technical knowledge from San Diego to HP's operation in Grenoble, France. "I was very much involved in all aspects-hardware, mechanical, software, production-everything. It was a very comprehensive and very broad kind of experience," Guidon says. He had to move back to France on that project, where for less than a year he worked in Grenoble. Then he was transferred to Boise, ID, where he became the U.S. marketing manager for peripherals. "I started to get involved much more in marketing activities at that time," he recalls. "At the end of two years in Boise, I had gained an engineering understanding, a production understanding, and a marketing understanding, and I'd had the opportunity to work both in the United States and in Europe. So that started to give me a broad set of knowledge, and I really like having that broad knowledge to be able to handle a multifunction type of job. I think HP has continued to push me into that direction as well."
By that time the UNIX business was starting to become significant for HP, and Guidon had to put together a networking strategy, much of which was related to UNIX. After a few years, he became business manager for HP's commercial UNIX operation, which was less than $100 million a year at the time. It was during that time that Guidon began to visualize the great commercial potential of UNIX. "That's when I started to realize that UNIX was more than likely going to become the number one commercial operating system in the world," he says. Guidon was given the task of helping to create and write a business plan for a new organization for UNIX called the General System Organization, under which HP has built its commercial UNIX-related business to between $2.5 and $3 billion a year.
After a total of seven years in California, Guidon made a personal decision. "I wanted to take my family back to Europe, especially for my kids' education, and send them to a French type of secondary school," he says. So, in 1992, he moved his family back to France, where Guidon managed some of HP's European computer marketing activities. It was a move his family appreciated, but HP had further plans for Guidon. In mid-1994 he was named to his current position and had to move across the Atlantic for a seventh time. This time, his family stayed in France so that his 16-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter could complete their schooling.
What needs to happen now is for UNIX vendors to unify at the desktop level, Guidon believes. "The desktop has a Microsoft flavor, which is not open," he says. "What we need is either to get Microsoft to be open or to get an open desktop type of thing coming together, so that everything from the desktop to the data center-across everything-can finally be based on an open systems philosophy. I am optimistic. Somehow, I think the customer always wins, and I believe this is what makes sense for customers. So one way or the other, someday it's going to happen. The issues are how and when."