It's also why HP, the actual engineer led scientific instrument manufacturer HP, left the computer industry and became Agilent leaving the vacuum cleaner sales

It's also why HP, the actual engineer led scientific instrument manufacturer HP, left the computer industry and became Agilent leaving the vacuum cleaner sales people part behind. It's a crying shame, but you're right, PC manufacturers were and still are in a brutal race to the bottom. For a while I though HP might have a chance on mobile, when they took on webOS. If they could have established a compelling platform stack with hardware, operating system and a decent dev environment they could have had a chance to grow their margins a bit. The problem is I suspect the PC side of HP just wasn't up to it. I had an HP digital camera around that time and it was a bulky, blocky uninspiring lump of a device.