6 ms·

I was at HP during the Carly years and I would say that between her and Hurd, anything that made HP anywhere close to special was destroyed by indiscriminate fi

I was at HP during the Carly years and I would say that between her and Hurd, anything that made HP anywhere close to special was destroyed by indiscriminate financial engineering. During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers. Our lab, which was one of the best places that I can look back on in my career, had been acquired by HP. Their messing about, sending us various failures as 'senior management' resulted in it draining all of its good people to companies such as Microsoft, Google, and etc. It was a terrible shame. Edit: I guess I was trying to say that HP legacy has been destroyed pretty good by all the mergers, cuts, 'retirements', etc.

pjmlp 9y ago
Which is a good example of how good technology gets destroyed by management. Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq. Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :( EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.
mathattack 9y ago
During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.
zrm 9y ago
> During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers. And it's not just the employees they're annoying. I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives. When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?

pjmlp 9y ago

Which is a good example of how good technology gets destroyed by management. Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq. Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :( EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.

mathattack 9y ago

During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.

zrm 9y ago

> During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers. And it's not just the employees they're annoying. I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives. When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?