(Column) - The latest news in the industry is that HP has given away its optical drive manufacturing to Lite-On. First of all, it’s great move by HP; since Lite-On makes the world’s best (budget) optical drives barring Plextor. But this move got me thinking about something that I have long been wondering about for some time now.

Before I begin though, I have a question for you. What do you think is HP’s core strength?

The answer to me is marketing. HP (and other OEMs) are perhaps the world’s best marketing companies that does little more than stamping pre-made products with their very own logo and then retail them at a premium price. Why do I say this?

I once had an HP desktop, and in those days, I wasn’t into opening up PCs and checking them out, but when my PC went kaput, I promptly opened it up and was quite surprised to find that not one component was made by HP. I mean not a single piece of hardware. The hard disk was from Quantum, the CD-ROM was from Lite-On, the motherboard was from an "unknown" OEM, the processor was from Intel, and the necessary peripherals such as the keyboard and mouse were from Logitech.

Today, I have a Compaq notebook and I find the same scenario of re-labeling and repackaging a PC, which is then displayed on retail shelves. Of course, I’m not as surprised as I was back when I first opened an OEM PC, since it’s a common practice among OEM PC builders to pack in everything, offer their warranties and retail millions of PCs to users globally.

Getting away from the PC/notebook, however, do you know who sells the maximum number of Inkjets in the world? HP. Do you know who makes these printers for them? Canon. Yep, this is confirmed information from Canon itself. Apparently, HP is Canon’s biggest competitor as well as the biggest customer. B-school business model analysts, analyze this…

Next up, servers, same concept (PC/notebook) applies here as well. HP doesn’t make anything here either, it’s just a large system integrator. Pretty low for a company with the tagline "Invent" unless it really is desperate to come up with something, anything it can really claim to have manufactured.

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