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Why HP Fell
- Annatar 8y agoPerhaps HP’s biggest sin is how they ditched their super-cool, PA-RISC high quality workstations and servers, how they charged premiums for the hardware and the software, how one couldn’t get HP-UX, its compilers or even the mirroring software unless one was an approved HP “strategic partner”... while a busted-ass, barely good enough, cheap, intel-based PC tin bucket was eating their lunch.
- technofiend 8y ago>ditched their super-cool, PA-RISC HP had an interesting portfolio from their Digital and Tandem acquisitions also including the Alpha processor and of course Tandem's non-stop OS. I imagine the pairing of those two by porting non-stop to the Alpha or bringing non-stop's features into Ultrix might have at least kept them a niche player. Having said that HP, Digital and Tandem weren't alone in losing marketshare to Linux on commodity hardware, or for that matter Linux on HP hardware itself. Imagine if HP had read the tea leaves and created Red Hat themselves instead of losing enterprise linux to someone else. HP is awash in lost opportunities.
- Annatar 8y agoI'm imagining hp workstations with razor-thin margins running HP-UX beating the cheapest PC at brick and mortar stores feature-for-feature, value for the dollar, with tons of multimedia and productivity software preinstalled, since hp hardware had phenomenal multimedia capabilities. That should have happened with all UNIX vendors but it didn't because the managers believed that they could charge premiums. They managed to brainwash even their engineers so they couldn't see the danger. I used to argue not only with Sun salesmen about this, but even the engineers would defend the price premiums. We all know how that ended. I have the curse of being right about the wrong thing.
- acdha 8y agoThe interesting thing is that a single executive had a large share in killing both HP and SGI as major players. Richard Belluzzo was the guy who decided that HP should switch from HP UX on PA-RISC to Windows NT on Itanium, and then moved to SGI to preside over the decision to turn SGI into a Windows reseller and gave the SGI 3D graphics team — which at the time had a legendary reputation — to nVidia along with their patent portfolio.
- johnvanommen 8y agoWOW. I did not know this. And now NVidia is far more than a "gaming" company.
- acdha 8y agoYeah, there's a really interesting alternative history of computing where SGI's management was anywhere near the same caliber as their engineering.
- Annatar 8y agoSGI engineers designed and implemented mind-blowing stuff: inst(1M) software management subsystem is still lightyears ahead of any other, even today, and how long has IRIX been out of production? Unbelievably mind blowing engineers.
- Annatar 8y agoYep. "Infinite Reality" was a precursor to the Nvidia technology today. That's when first shader pipelines came into existence.
- Annatar 8y agoYep, I've studied this in great detail as I was very personally affected by it: it's always the same people who were the root cause of this. Sun Microsystems was the only company which stuck to its guns and continued with UNIX, sometimes in direct competition with the Microsoft corporation, because the engineers fought for their life's work like crazy, ultimately resulting in illumos today, so it lives on. Scott McNealy, bless his heart, was the only executive openly willing to testify in the case against Microsoft versus NetScape: none of these other "executives" had the balls to testify for fear of making Bill Gates angry. It was always the same set of people hopping companies, selling their bullshit and ruining them. Now we have an inferior operating system on inferior hardware, total chaos in virtualisation and cloud, low salaries and bad working conditions, in good part thanks to them ruining these UNIX companies.
- Tsiklon 8y agoI'd love to see an x86 HP-UX build running on a Z workstation. absolutely not going to happen but still.
- amelius 8y agoDoes anyone know how to make the annoyingly large Medium top-bar, and "open in app" button (hovering over the article) on mobile go away without installing anything? Edit: found one solution: https://outline.com/SV3V7N https://outline.com/SV3V7N
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoIf you have one of those browsers with builtin DOM element inspection/editing, you can make it go away by deleting the respective item. A bit cumbersome ...
- martinpw 8y agoReader view in Firefox cleans up the Medium cruft nicely on mobile.
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- paulcarroty 8y agoLove their business laptops, good and reliable machines.
- devtique 8y agoHappy with my HP Envy - beautiful quality performer, IMO was the best built Windows laptop available at Best Buy.
- belark 8y agoHave a MacBook Pro for work and a much, much preferred HP laptop when I can get away from the MacBook.
- david927 8y agoI swore off ever buying HP products after I bought an HP Envy with a year warranty and exactly after one year, the hinges wouldn't work. I still used it but just at home, until the hard drive had a catastrophic failure and I lost everything.
- lmm 8y agoEvery model of hard drive fails sometimes, and with rare exceptions the rate is more or less the same.
- linker3000 8y agoI used to work with someone who designed hard disks (electronics) and his mantra was '4 years'.
- linker3000 8y agoAs well as a live fleet of about 30 units, we have about 5 HP Probooks at work in different states of dismantlement; they fell apart or broke in various mechanical ways and are cannibalised to sustain the working ones. In my previous role we were a Dell shop and the XPS laptops were much more reliable by comparison.
- ahartmetz 8y agoThe story does not seem very convincing to me. The split between lab instruments and computers - may actually help fix the next problem. The disregard of consumer products - partially fixed later when they managed to sell large numbers of printers and not only business laptops. So maybe the big problems did start around Fiorina's time after all.
- flyinghamster 8y agoAlso, past the LaserJet 5, their printers started taking a nosedive in quality. In my own experience at work, the 1000 didn't last long before it started spewing toner all over the page, and the 4550N, a gigantic color laser with extremely expensive consumables, did likewise. Don't get me started on their inkjets. Nothing like an all-in-one that won't even let you SCAN when it decides to "expire" a costly printhead. My policy regarding HP printers: "Never again."
- madengr 8y agoDitto. I’ll never buy another HP product. They are now the purveyors of garbage computers and printers. The mid 90’s printers, scanners, and Apollo workstations were the pinnacle of quality. The 85xx line of test equipment was even beyond that. I don’t think something like those would even be attempted now. The true HP is Keysight, though they have quality issues now. The tile floors were to find small parts when dropped, and minimize dust and static electricity. The computer jockeys were in the wrong.
- specialist 8y agoIn the 90s, HP engineers used to visit our offices, just to see how we used their gear. Printers, large format plotters, workstations, networking, etc. They'd cold call me, arrange visits, hang out for a while. I'd see how they take our feedback and improve their products. I don't think I've loved another brand as much as I loved HP, back in the day. Alas, things change.
- eropple 8y agoThe HP Spectre 13 is emphatically not garbage. Beautiful machine, great screen, good keyboard. If the keyboard was a little better, and if their support was a little more sane, I would still be using the one I traded in for a ThinkPad T480.
- reacweb 8y agoAt school (1991-1994), we had HP and Sun workstations. The HP were nicknamed the toasters because they were hot. The Sun were beautiful beasts. After power failure, we regularly had problems with Sun, never with HP. When we were downloading games from the net, it was easy to compile them on Sun, but was always a nighmare on HP (non standard includes, libraries, ...). I think HP is excellent about hardware, but terrible for software. I often see the similar problem for car makers: good cars but with a terrible computer.
- pjmlp 8y agoWhen I was doing C in the early 2000's, our ANSI C code would cope with Aix, Linux, NT/2000 and Solaris. But on HP-UX 11 we still had a version of aCC that was a mix between ANSI and K&R, so it was the variant with more pre-processor logic.
- Annatar 8y agoThat was solved in the newer versions of aCC. I had no issues compiling most contemporary code all the way ‘till 2014 when I finally retired my private HP-UX server infrastructure. For particularly badly written software, there was GCC on HP-UX.
- pjmlp 8y agoGCC wasn't an option on our case back then, as we were required to use the system compilers due to our customer base.
- Annatar 8y agoI don't understand what that would have to do with anything, as long as you made a PSF SD-UX "gcc-runtime" fileset with libgcc_s.so.1 in it. That's what I did, worked just fine.
- pjmlp 8y agoOur customers required being able to build our product with the system compilers managed by their IT. GCC was only accepted by customers with Linux installs. Asking GCC to be available in any sort was not an option for other customers. In fact was a deciding factor why we got some contracts back then, as we always cope with whatever they had.
- kristianc 8y agoGassée's problem is that he sees everything through an Apple-tinted lens. There's almost no subject that he can't turn back to his comfort zone of talking about Apple. Here we're promised an alternative account of why the conventional story of HP mismanagement is false, and end up with a lot of handwaving and 'Apple starting' as an inevitable explanation for HP's decline, despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the intervening period.
- specialist 8y agoGassée acknowledged the conventional wisdom, but says the problem started even earlier. Seems uncontroversial.
- Isamu 8y ago>he sees everything through an Apple-tinted lens In this case he is bring his experience having worked at HP, knowing and talking with people from there over the years. He talks about Apple a lot because people want to hear about Apple a lot.
- tabtab 8y agoRe: despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the intervening period. Indeed. Apple got lucky 3 times: the first was that the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was written for Apple II first, out of sheer happenstance. It was a blockbuster that propelled hardware sales. Apple II's were otherwise considered too expensive. Second was a boom in "desktop publishing" which saved the Mac. Macs were far more expensive than CPM & PC's per processing power, and the nice GUI alone wasn't enough to justify the price for most consumers in the early years. However, desktop publishing, a field that didn't really exist when the Mac was built, took advantage of the graphical nature of the Mac and jolted its sales. (If Amiga had better coddled desktop publishing software co's, Commodore may have also survived.) The 3rd was the return of Steve Jobs. Apple would probably have sank without him.
- astrodust 8y agoIf Apple had never gotten out of the embarrassment that was the Performa Era with a multitude of largely similar but wildly different priced computers, Apple would have gone the way of HP and divested itself of different business units until nothing of value was left. Instead Apple focused, got its shit together, and did something important. HP could have done the same, knuckled down and fixed the fundamental problems with their company, but instead they decided to throw away all their babies and drink the bathwater. The problem is not that Gassee sees everything through the Apple lens, but that very few companies have been like Apple and maintained focus. Tech companies, ironically, often fail from their wild success: MySpace and Yahoo! being two notable examples. Once they have all this money they start to do lots of stupid shit and ultimately lose their way. Microsoft was on track to do this, but they seem to have sobered up. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably fail if they can't regroup and rethink their purpose. One day some telecom will buy Facebook with pocket change and we'll all go "Yeah, well, saw that coming."
- erikb 8y agoI'm working in a company that is exactly in this same position, that HP was in apparently around the 80s. The thing is that these big companies one or two generations after the founders are mostly staffed with people who know nothing else. They did their university internships in this company, they wrote their final thesis in this company, and now they work in this company. Of course that makes them super loyal, but that fact also makes it impossible for them to see that the company as a whole is currently colliding with an iceberg. I mean, it will probably still exist in 50 years and make a lot of money. I even own stock in my company because I believe it's strong. But it's quite unlikely that 10-20 years down the road it will still be the powerhouse it is now. The market is not continuing as it used to, but the company can hardly turn its course. People are not even recognizing that fact and confidently continue on the same path that worked for their mentors in their corresponding youth.
- selimthegrim 8y agoIs this company Intel, because I was working there five years ago as a contractor and this seems spot on.
- technobabble 8y agoBased on your perspective, what can the company do to either prevent hitting the iceberg, or minimizing the iceberg damage as much as possible?
- erikb 8y agoI don't think there is anything that can be done, honestly. There are reasons for the current way of decision making: keeping the people in power who have been in power since the beginning. If the way of work changes, then also the leadership will change. And the current leadership isn't that fond of such ideas. I'll keep an eye on how well behemots like Microsoft or Saudi Arabia can really change under new leadership and build my hope on what I'm seeing there.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI was always surprised they let Microsoft come in and commoditise their business, why wasn't there an HP operating system to compete with Windows?
- yardie 8y agoThere was WebOS. Which I felt was really ahead of its time. But an OS takes time to develop because of the chicken and egg problem. Once Hurd was fired it no longer had C-level interest. They sold it to Samsung, who renamed it Tizen. The UX designer went to Android. And the engineers were scattered across the mobile ecosystem.
- maxsilver 8y agoI agree that WebOS was great and ahead of it's time, and agree with almost all of the above. But just for clarity: HP sold webOS to LG (not Samsung), and it (mostly) kept it's webOS name through various aquisitions and rebrandings. See http://www.lg.com/us/experience-tvs/smart-tv-features http://www.lg.com/us/experience-tvs/smart-tv-features and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS#History Samsung's Tizen is it's own thing -- not some acquisition or rebranding of webOS.
- yardie 8y agoWow it didn’t realize that and you are correct. Was using a SmartTV and the interface felt awefully close to WebOS that I thought it was a derivative.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoWebOS was an acquisition from Palm, however. And they dumped it almost immediately after the Touchpad and the Pre3 sales tanked.
- yardie 8y agoThey dumped it because of Apotheker. This was Hurd’s project and once he was out they firesaled the whole line. It didn’t even have enough time to make a sale. That’s when I HP was in real trouble. Instead of pursuing new markets in mobile they retreated back to PCs, printers, and services. They were trying to grow into a market o it’s way to stagnating.
- mattkevan 8y agoI never understood HP's acquisition and rapid scuttling of Palm. What a waste. The Touchpad was only on the market for just over a month before being discontinued. Why do that? WebOS had a lot of potential as a platform, to the extent that both Google and Apple subsequently borrowed major chunks of the UI.
- agumonkey 8y agoThe most tragic and ironical sales I've ever witnessed. 99$ Firesale of touchpads made them an instant success, people were buying them at 300 or above the following monthes. I sold one years later for 90$~
- repolfx 8y agoThey borrowed more than the UI. Google hired one of the chief designers of WebOS to become the chief UI designer of Android (Matthias Duarte).
- johnvanommen 8y agoWhen I worked in engineering at T-Mobile, the Danger Hiptop was the device that all the engineers loved. At the time, Duarte worked for Danger. He left Danger to go work for Helio, then Helio was acquired. He left Helio to go work for Palm, and then Palm was acquired. Oddly enough, the team that wound up doing the OS for the iPod was in the mix during this timespan also. They pitched a product to T-Mobile, but T-Mobile wound up going with a competitor. So Pixo wound up selling their wares to Apple, and the rest is history. Source: I am a former employee of T-Mobile, HP and HPE.
- apricot 8y ago> Danger Hiptop (wistful sigh)
- johnvanommen 8y agoIt was a magical time. I wish I'd taken more pictures. I had no idea that these guys would go on to create Android and kinda change the world. At the time, I honestly thought it was all a bit silly TBH! "Why would I want to take a picture with my phone when I have a perfectly good camera?" "Why does Paris Hilton have her pictures stored on OUR servers, doesn't she know that's a security risk?" Fun fact - all those pics, from all the customers, were stored completely unencrypted. They were uuencoded for some reason, but if someone wanted to, they could've hoovered up every last file. I was working the day that Paris Hilton had her account hacked, that was not a fun day. It was looking like some heads would roll, and then it turned out the hackers exploited her account by simply guessing her password. The initial fear was that someone had penetrated the network.
- robdachshund 8y agoHP has been crap for about 2 decades. It seems like everyone I knew with hp laptops experienced motherboard failure early on. The pavilions had great specs for the money but could die within 6 months to a year. Things seemed to get a little better around 2014 or so, and from what I've heard they are more reliable these days. Still wouldn't buy one, though.
- anthonybsd 8y agoI remember shortly after Compaq disaster, Carly Fiorina pioneered this initiative called "Adaptive Enterprise". She went on CNET to do an interview about it. The interviewer kept asking her to explain what "Adaptive Enterprise" meant and she danced around the question talking about synergies and such. That's when a lightbulb went up in my head "This woman is a Category 5 moron".
- selimthegrim 8y agoHer first husband said the only book she ever read was “Dress for Success”
- tabtab 8y agoNot a "Category 5 moron", but a Category 5 PHB (a Dilbert reference). Marketers and clueless boards love them: they glue together buzzwords and fad memes that sounds important, powerful, and modern to the ill-informed.
- dang 8y agoMost of us have low tolerance for corporate bullshit, but please don't turn that into a personal attack. That's a low impulse which encourages others to go lower. Even if you're right, there are plenty of such execs out there, and the presence of one at the top is as much an effect as a cause.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- corerius 8y agoIt seems simple enough to me. Over time, these hardware companies grow or die. Their products have to get cheaper, hopefully due to economy of scale. Company management never wants to kill the old products with new ones, plus it's pretty hard to guess exactly where to go. Everyone eventually falls off the treadmill. Years later, of course, management has amazing 20/20 hindsight.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoI dont know about HP before the late 90s, but I have been working in some form of tech for 15 years now, and I have developed an aversion to any HP product. Seeing that logo fills me with dread and anxiety. Early on it was dealing with printer drivers, and explaining to users that you don't need the full install to use the device. Then it was painfully navigating HPSM. Then test driving the HP Stackable Switches which we bricked on the first attempt to update. Now it's HPNA, which I fear I'm going to be forced by management to port a bunch of scripts to. I have known many other people in all levels of IT that have felt the same way.
- sk5t 8y agoYou'd have to go back to the early-mid 90s for bulletproof printers that never complained and did not require (or even encourage) installation of horrible software. HP also made good oscilloscopes, gas chromatographs, and the like, but of course those weren't shiny enough to keep on making.
- technobabble 8y agoTechnically the HP division for oscilloscopes and ee equipment still lives on via Siglent/Agilent/whatever name they're calling it now. Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's? Was it to cut down on bureaucracy, or to "reinvent" the company for the digital age, or something else?
- guest2143 8y agoSpinning it off was part of the deal with Carly coming on board. :/
- reportingsjr 8y agoSiglent is a Chinese test equipment company. Agilent is HP's life science division (test equipment for biology folks) and the electronic test equipment division is now called keysight. As far as I'm aware these two were spun out since the growth wasn't as good as the consumer electronics division.
- PaulHoule 8y agoAll of the big computer manufacturers in the 1970s faced challenges in the transition from minicomputers to microcomputers. Probably Digital Equipment Corporation was the saddest case. A review circa 1980 of minicomputer development at DEC indicated their belief (probably shared by many in the industry) that there was not going to be room for such a diversity of architectures as there were in the minicomputer age and the 1980s would wind up like they did, dominated by a few chips like the 6502, Z80 and 8086. As it was the 1980s were a minefield. With hindsight one could imagine that DEC could have come out with a 32-bit microVAX-based PC circa 1985. (With hindsight I don't think anybody thought that it would take another 10 years for 32-bit OS to be mainstreamed) I'm sure they thought about that, but it was certain that such a product would have taken a bit out of the existing VAX business and not certain that it would have caught on. That doesn't excuse Carly Fiorina for the later problems at HP. Remember that Carly Fiorina was involved with fraudulent accounting at Lucent in 1999, personally I lost a few thousand bucks overnight when Lucent restated its earnings in 2000. Thanks to Carly, a proud American innovator (the former Bell Labs) got bought by a European bastion of stagnation. If justice worked for the elite, Carly would have done time in prison and certainly wouldn't get put in charge of another company, but unfortunately there is no justice, and she got a chance to run another American innovator into the ground. At least she demonstrated how tone deaf Republicans can be by thinking her experience qualified her to run for president.
- tabtab 8y agoRe: All of the big computer manufacturers in the 1970s faced challenges in the transition from minicomputers to microcomputers. Indeed! Predicting the future is hard. Only Warren Buffett can financially "prove" he has any skill at it, and he doesn't personally even claim such ability (instead following a set of principles laid down by Benjamin Graham, but often ignored by academia). PC's eventually became a commodity business anyhow, and HP wasn't cut out for commodities. Commodity businesses usually flow overseas where labor is cheaper anyhow: it's not US's bag. Microsoft made its fortune on OS's and tricking companies into entrenched software "standards", keeping it from becoming a commodity. But HP was a hardware co., not software. HP were better off as an R&D lab and "nerd tool" maker. Stay with your strength. Warren Buffett also notices that companies that deviate from their core strength tend to suffer. Do one thing and do it well. Transitions of focus can happen successfully, but are rare. Don't bet against the patterns of history unless you want to suffer the patterns of history also. (Apple is arguably an exception, but that's another long topic.)
- bsder 8y agoAs much maligned as COMPAQ's acquisition of DEC was, you have to remember that DEC's enterprise side was still printing cash to the tune of something like a billion dollars a year. Intel, for example, ran every single fab line on VMS at the time. There were other customers with similar requirements and monetary outlays when they needed something reliable. Considering this, you have a business that you can simply milk for cash profit for 10-20 years as it slowly winds down. The fact that HP couldn't figure this out is a gigantic failure of management at the board and CEO level.
- throw2016 8y agoIt would be tempting to blame Carly Fiorina and she exemplifies the cult of CEO, short term thinking, no solutions beyond wall street focused cost cutting, financial engineering and layoffs, no accountability and exiting with golden parachutes with no damage to their finances or reputation. This while the company loses long term viability, sheds talent, focus, and burns, Robert Nardelli, former Homedepot CEO is also a similar instance of CEOs making bad decisions with little push back and accountability and exiting with reputation and big bucks. Neoliberalism and a fawning media and 'economists' propping up whatever narratives vested interests push has to shoulder the blame. No company can survive short termism and a string of wall street focused CEOs. HPs decline hastened under her 'reign'. They folded from hardware, were content to sit on printer revenues and DRM and focus on 'services'. None of these have scope for innovation.
- mdellavo 8y agoAlong with board and ceo problems, the they were fighting a battle on two fronts for computer sales. The kush high end server market was undercut by the rise of linux while they floundered with Intel on IA64. All the other proprietary unixes fell in this time too. Meanwhile Dell was undercutting them for consumer PC sales.
- mark-r 8y agoMy introduction to programming was around 1973, with a Teletype connected via modem to an HP 2000C minicomputer. I've always had a soft spot for HP.
- babypuncher 8y agoMy HP Zbook at work is the worst laptop I've ever used. Most of the time, telling it to shut down doesn't do anything except kick you back to the login screen (seems like a bug with ACPI, not Windows). Behavior with the Thunderbolt dock is abysmal. Simply plugging it in does not work. In order to get my monitors and peripherals working through the dock consistently, I have to boot the machine while disconnected, log in to Windows, put the machine to sleep, connect the dock, then power it back on using the power button on the dock. The fans run loud enough wile idling that I have to keep this thing tucked under my desk so that it's not blasting in my left ear. HP didn't fall because of bad luck, or failing to adapt to a changing market. HP fell because they make worthless crap.
- madengr 8y agoTyping this on a new HP EliteDesk (corporate shitbox) that came with a frigg'n chiclet keyboard. Yes a POS chiclet keyboard, with stickey keys, that probably cost $1 to manufacture. This is how far HP has sunk. Fortunately my Unicomp keyboard will be here soon.
- johnvanommen 8y agoI've worked for successful software start ups, and I've worked for Hewlett Packard. Here's what I noticed: In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America. By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.' IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract. At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.
- Someguywhatever 8y agoI've seen the same thing. Here is my take on it: Everybody at [Big Software Co] knows the software is buggy and bad, but the client doesn't, [Big Software Co] just hopes it works well enough that the client doesn't reject it outright or refuse to pay. While [Big Software Co] works out the kinks in it's software at the clients expense it blames the failures on implementation problems user error or whatever it can to keep money coming in while it fixes the software. [Big Software Co] hopes that the client eventually sinks so much money into the software that they can't leave and also X months into the deployment it works just well enough to keep them on the hook. This pattern repeats over and over and over again in almost every industry. You see this same type of thing in construction too, where [Big Construction Co] deliberately underbids to get the contract, then runs up the cost WAY beyond what anybody expected over time, the municipality, or whomever contracted with them can't leave as they've already sunk so much money into [Big construction project] that they can't cancel and have nothing to show for it. This is almost SOP for every giant company in every industry anywhere, often times these companies are so big that the left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing so to speak, as the two are separated by so many internal layers / business units or whatever. The only reason people get into bed with these giant companies is that whoever is signing the cheques on the buy side irrationally feels that [Big Software Co] can actually deliver because they are so big.
- danans 8y agoA current anecdote that somewhat echoes the article: My wife has an HP Chromebook. She loves it. She has no idea that it's made by HP. If I told her she would probably forget. Now she wants to replace it with a newer, high end Chromebook. It might be an HP, or it might not, but either way she doesn't care.
- throwawayhp 8y agoAs someone who was with HP since before the Compaq merger, and having drifted to a spin off, I do miss the old company. The “HP Way” was given importance at least in many of the groups I worked in. The rules of the garage [1], open door policy, skip level meetings, etc., were known even to new employees. The culture fostered by the managers of those times (later displaced and kicked out steadily after the Compaq merger and the disastrous EDS acquisition) was what kept people around while the CEOs were busy burning the company down. That culture is still intact in some small pockets. Top management since the times of Carly, Mark (a one trick person who couldn’t do anything other than cut costs by selling and cutting everything), Leo and then Meg were mostly clueless on running such a large company that had the capability to create integrated solutions — HP had PCs, laptops, printers, printing solutions, PDAs, phones (briefly), tablets (briefly), software, services, security tools, networking devices, storage devices, servers with PA-RISC/Itanium running HP-UX to servers with x86 running Windows/Linux)...I’m sure I’m missing many more product areas of HP since Carly’s time and later. I still dream that HP could do better as one company with many products in different areas. But management styles that worship Wall Street and look only at their bonuses can’t handle that. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_the_garage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_the_garage
- poulsbohemian 8y agoThe Mercury and other software acquisitions were so poorly handled. There was solid software there, plenty of good engineers and consultants, but R&D was underfunded. Sales turned into a revolving door, customer support had no training, and partners (who actually understood the products, customers, and had the expertise) were mistrusted. Sad all the way around.