8 ms·

Part of the cause is that the people doing this still benefited - if you can cut a bunch of costs and bump profits for the next few years it doesn't matter to y

Part of the cause is that the people doing this still benefited - if you can cut a bunch of costs and bump profits for the next few years it doesn't matter to you as an executive whether those changes ultimately lead to significantly worse outcomes for the company in the longer term. Brand loyalty takes a while to fade, there seems to be a cycle with a large number of successful companies that goes work honestly to build a good product -> generate brand loyalty -> people with integrity get replaced by people who would have had no chance of building that successful product/company in the first place -> cut as many corners as possible while riding the brand loyalty to more short term profits -> eventually, on the scale of decades sometimes (because people take a /long/ time to realize that 'well known brand' !== quality), get out-competed by a small company building the same thing as you with integrity -> return to step one with new company.

Pxtl 5y ago
How many folks out there got burned by HP products when they were hip-deep in that step 3 step 4 zone of "strip-mine your own brand reputation selling cheap crap"?
- civilized 5y ago
  Maybe I'm revealing my youth here, but... when was HP good?
  - tigershark 5y ago
    Do you have any non HP printer from 20 years ago still working as expected?
    - roland35 5y ago
      Not 20, but my 10 year old HP color laser is working as well as new!
    - buescher 5y ago
      I have an opening price point Brother laser printer from about 2002 whose drum is on its last toner cartridge worth of wear. I’ve only used it lightly since I stopped contracting about fifteen years ago though.
    - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
      I have a Fuji Xerox colour laser printer bought in 2005 still running the same as it ever has
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - addaon 5y ago
      My ImageWriter still works, although my ImageWriter II gave up the ghost a decade or two ago.
  - gh02t 5y ago
    HP was legendary in electronic test equipment and early computers, calculators etc. Look on Ebay for HP branded power supplies or multimeters, for instance, and you'll see that they still command very high prices. And it's not collectors buying them AFAIK, it's mostly people using them-- even 30 or 40 year old gear. They spun off the test equipment division as Agilent (which still exists and is highly respected under then name Keysight) around the time their computing division started to go downhill.
    - jdkee 5y ago
      LaserJet III.
    - WWLink 5y ago
      This is all true. I always hated their deskjet printers, though. The First one I had was a Deskjet 500 and that thing was a massive turd with very expensive ink cartridges, and no matter how many times I cleaned the rollers, it'd still have issues not being able to feed paper. Shit design.
      - toast0 5y ago
        I had a 600 something C that was pretty decent, and my wife had a 720C that we abandoned because drivers got too fussy around Windows 8.1ish (the 64-bit driver in windows update didn't work, but if you got the driver from 64-bit xp, it would work). The color had stopped working, but not bad for 15+ years of service.
      - CSSer 5y ago
        Has there ever been a good printer though? If there has I'm either out of the loop or sad that I'm not old enough to remember it.
        nonesuchluck 5y ago
        I sympathize with this sentiment, I hate printers. Worked in a copy shop for a time. Hate em. But there has been at least 1 good printer, and HP made it: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5 Also, 9-pin dot matrix printers were workhorses.
  - dhdc 5y ago
    Before the 2000s or the Agilent spin-off, HP was the undisputed king in electronics test equipments. Their flagship multimeter HP3458a, launched more than 30 years ago, is still the standard in metrology. And Keysight (spin-off from Agilent) is still making them with little to no significant modifications over the years. They also made some great RPN calculators.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
      And used 3458As (in working condition) tend to go for between $5000-7000 these days. The HP ones, not the newer Agilent or Keysight ones.
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      Very entertaining video explaining a bit about the HP3548a: https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ
  - AvocadoPanic 5y ago
    Before Carly Fiorina.
    - oldgradstudent 5y ago
      A repeat offender. She also had a stint at Lucent.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    LaserJet 4 (20 years old?) still runs.
  - rasz 5y ago
    There are tons of great innovation coming out of HP pre 2000. Do you enjoy using optical mice? Thats HP.
  - sliken 5y ago
    Heh, back in the day they made the best calculators, test equipment, disk drives, workstations (early PA-risc snakes), etc. Even their printers were a unique technology using an HP print engine that was wonderfully durable. Then they killed off the calc division, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't as profitable as ink. Years later they decided to upgrade the calculator (TI had won the market in the meantime), instead of doing something innovative they bought a new arm chip and ran an emulator of the old chip and used the old software stack with minimum polish under the emulator. Not surprisingly Texas Instruments laughed all the way to the bank. Their laser printers were starved as well, again not as profitable as selling ink for ink jets. So the print engine was killed off and now uses the same print engine that you get in a Dell printer. Which was sad, they weren't nearly as durable. It was sad to watch
- tigershark 5y ago
  I don’t feel burned honestly.. A HP printer that I have is probably 8 years old, another one is about 20 years old and they are both still working as expected. (The 20 years old now feels slower than my grandmother drawing, but it was expected at the time)
cheriot 5y ago
This is why I think we need to figure out executive compensation. Boards just rubber stamp whatever the CEO wants. Tie their compensation to real goals and require them to hold for the next 10 years.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  What do you mean "we"? Like government intervention? These are private companies, if they don't want to change this aspect, there's not a lot you can do aside from getting on the board...
  - bckr 5y ago
    > What do you mean "we"? Perhaps people who are interested in building great companies, like the regulars of a tech startup-centric forum
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      I think it's great that companies particularly large incumbents tend to decay and fall after a time. It promotes renewal and evolution, like the cycle of life and death. It's a bit sentimental to want a company to survive decades. It would be much worse if the big incumbents all remained at the top and dug themselves into the regulators and politicians and crowded out others (they already do to a great extent but it could be a lot worse).
      - bckr 5y ago
        On the other hand, as a consumer, I'd like the services that I'm using now to remain useable for the rest of my life.
        throwawaylinux 5y ago
        People in 1900, as consumers, thought they'd need a reliable supply of horse feed for the rest of their lives too. Uncertainty and risk are big reasons why people fear change, I completely understand. I'm not saying the feeling or desire for stable incumbents is invalid, although maybe my comment could have been worded a bit better.
andreilys 5y ago
Correct, it’s effectively the moral hazard problem. Where executives capture the upside (of short term gains in stock) and pass on the risk to future execs/shareholders. Very difficult to align long term incentives unfortunately, unless the company is founder led.
- alcover 5y ago
  Yes. Some big old companies have been family-owned for generations. You may be much more intent on keeping brand quality if you envision your grand-children prospering off it.
mrjangles 5y ago
You know, normally I agree with you. But I looked it up, and Intel has only barely tripled revenue in the last 20 years. Their stock price has followed almost exactly this increase in revenue. These are not what I would call super gains, they are definitely good gains, but they are what anyone would expect from a blue chip company like Intel. So the point is this isn't people looking at the short term, this is a company that used a strategy to optimize growth over a 20 year period. Yes they hampered future growth after those 20 years, but this is a technology company, most technology companies don't even exist after 20 years. I don't think there is really any policy or attitude or anything at all you can implement to get people to maximize revenue over a longer period than 20 years, especially in a technology company. No one would invest in such a company because, because such an investment would be extremely risky.
emodendroket 5y ago
I mean it's not just that, right? Investors do not reward long-term, slow-growth policies as much as those which pay out in the next quarter.

Pxtl 5y ago

How many folks out there got burned by HP products when they were hip-deep in that step 3 step 4 zone of "strip-mine your own brand reputation selling cheap crap"?

civilized 5y ago
Maybe I'm revealing my youth here, but... when was HP good?
- tigershark 5y ago
  Do you have any non HP printer from 20 years ago still working as expected?
  - roland35 5y ago
    Not 20, but my 10 year old HP color laser is working as well as new!
  - buescher 5y ago
    I have an opening price point Brother laser printer from about 2002 whose drum is on its last toner cartridge worth of wear. I’ve only used it lightly since I stopped contracting about fifteen years ago though.
  - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
    I have a Fuji Xerox colour laser printer bought in 2005 still running the same as it ever has
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - addaon 5y ago
    My ImageWriter still works, although my ImageWriter II gave up the ghost a decade or two ago.
- gh02t 5y ago
  HP was legendary in electronic test equipment and early computers, calculators etc. Look on Ebay for HP branded power supplies or multimeters, for instance, and you'll see that they still command very high prices. And it's not collectors buying them AFAIK, it's mostly people using them-- even 30 or 40 year old gear. They spun off the test equipment division as Agilent (which still exists and is highly respected under then name Keysight) around the time their computing division started to go downhill.
  - jdkee 5y ago
    LaserJet III.
  - WWLink 5y ago
    This is all true. I always hated their deskjet printers, though. The First one I had was a Deskjet 500 and that thing was a massive turd with very expensive ink cartridges, and no matter how many times I cleaned the rollers, it'd still have issues not being able to feed paper. Shit design.
    - toast0 5y ago
      I had a 600 something C that was pretty decent, and my wife had a 720C that we abandoned because drivers got too fussy around Windows 8.1ish (the 64-bit driver in windows update didn't work, but if you got the driver from 64-bit xp, it would work). The color had stopped working, but not bad for 15+ years of service.
    - CSSer 5y ago
      Has there ever been a good printer though? If there has I'm either out of the loop or sad that I'm not old enough to remember it.
      - nonesuchluck 5y ago
        I sympathize with this sentiment, I hate printers. Worked in a copy shop for a time. Hate em. But there has been at least 1 good printer, and HP made it: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5 Also, 9-pin dot matrix printers were workhorses.
- dhdc 5y ago
  Before the 2000s or the Agilent spin-off, HP was the undisputed king in electronics test equipments. Their flagship multimeter HP3458a, launched more than 30 years ago, is still the standard in metrology. And Keysight (spin-off from Agilent) is still making them with little to no significant modifications over the years. They also made some great RPN calculators.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    And used 3458As (in working condition) tend to go for between $5000-7000 these days. The HP ones, not the newer Agilent or Keysight ones.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    Very entertaining video explaining a bit about the HP3548a: https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ https://youtu.be/upTgM_S5rAQ
- AvocadoPanic 5y ago
  Before Carly Fiorina.
  - oldgradstudent 5y ago
    A repeat offender. She also had a stint at Lucent.
- djbusby 5y ago
  LaserJet 4 (20 years old?) still runs.
- rasz 5y ago
  There are tons of great innovation coming out of HP pre 2000. Do you enjoy using optical mice? Thats HP.
- sliken 5y ago
  Heh, back in the day they made the best calculators, test equipment, disk drives, workstations (early PA-risc snakes), etc. Even their printers were a unique technology using an HP print engine that was wonderfully durable. Then they killed off the calc division, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't as profitable as ink. Years later they decided to upgrade the calculator (TI had won the market in the meantime), instead of doing something innovative they bought a new arm chip and ran an emulator of the old chip and used the old software stack with minimum polish under the emulator. Not surprisingly Texas Instruments laughed all the way to the bank. Their laser printers were starved as well, again not as profitable as selling ink for ink jets. So the print engine was killed off and now uses the same print engine that you get in a Dell printer. Which was sad, they weren't nearly as durable. It was sad to watch
tigershark 5y ago
I don’t feel burned honestly.. A HP printer that I have is probably 8 years old, another one is about 20 years old and they are both still working as expected. (The 20 years old now feels slower than my grandmother drawing, but it was expected at the time)

cheriot 5y ago

This is why I think we need to figure out executive compensation. Boards just rubber stamp whatever the CEO wants. Tie their compensation to real goals and require them to hold for the next 10 years.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
What do you mean "we"? Like government intervention? These are private companies, if they don't want to change this aspect, there's not a lot you can do aside from getting on the board...
- bckr 5y ago
  > What do you mean "we"? Perhaps people who are interested in building great companies, like the regulars of a tech startup-centric forum
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    I think it's great that companies particularly large incumbents tend to decay and fall after a time. It promotes renewal and evolution, like the cycle of life and death. It's a bit sentimental to want a company to survive decades. It would be much worse if the big incumbents all remained at the top and dug themselves into the regulators and politicians and crowded out others (they already do to a great extent but it could be a lot worse).
    - bckr 5y ago
      On the other hand, as a consumer, I'd like the services that I'm using now to remain useable for the rest of my life.
      - throwawaylinux 5y ago
        People in 1900, as consumers, thought they'd need a reliable supply of horse feed for the rest of their lives too. Uncertainty and risk are big reasons why people fear change, I completely understand. I'm not saying the feeling or desire for stable incumbents is invalid, although maybe my comment could have been worded a bit better.

andreilys 5y ago

Correct, it’s effectively the moral hazard problem. Where executives capture the upside (of short term gains in stock) and pass on the risk to future execs/shareholders. Very difficult to align long term incentives unfortunately, unless the company is founder led.

alcover 5y ago
Yes. Some big old companies have been family-owned for generations. You may be much more intent on keeping brand quality if you envision your grand-children prospering off it.

mrjangles 5y ago

You know, normally I agree with you. But I looked it up, and Intel has only barely tripled revenue in the last 20 years. Their stock price has followed almost exactly this increase in revenue. These are not what I would call super gains, they are definitely good gains, but they are what anyone would expect from a blue chip company like Intel. So the point is this isn't people looking at the short term, this is a company that used a strategy to optimize growth over a 20 year period. Yes they hampered future growth after those 20 years, but this is a technology company, most technology companies don't even exist after 20 years. I don't think there is really any policy or attitude or anything at all you can implement to get people to maximize revenue over a longer period than 20 years, especially in a technology company. No one would invest in such a company because, because such an investment would be extremely risky.

emodendroket 5y ago

I mean it's not just that, right? Investors do not reward long-term, slow-growth policies as much as those which pay out in the next quarter.