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Has there ever been another company that declined as much from its glory days as HP? During the second half of the 20th century HP was a fabled brand. They ma
by PopePompus 3y ago
Has there ever been another company that declined as much from its glory days as HP? During the second half of the 20th century HP was a fabled brand. They made beautiful equipment for which there was often no comparable quality alternative in the world. The pocket calculators they built in the 1980s are still sought-after, not just as collectables but also as daily drivers. They built computers during that era, but they we never a "player" in that industry.
Then they shifted their focus to computers and began their long decent into the crappy husk of a company that they are today. The engineers who work there should be ashamed when they implement malware like this printer ink scam.
- pulvinar 3y agoPlenty of other companies have declined, or just changed as the people composing them changed. But for HP, yeah, I miss their heyday too. I consider their spinoff Agilent to be the "real" HP now.
- scarface74 3y ago> They built computers during that era, but they we never a "player" in that industry. HP was definitely a player in the PC industry and has been the number one manufacturer at different times.. https://statisticsanddata.org/data/best-selling-computer-brands/ https://statisticsanddata.org/data/best-selling-computer-bra...
- PopePompus 3y agoYes, but I would claim that was when they started going to pot. LONG before the PC era, HP made its own line of computers, which were seldom seen outside of labs, and even labs were much more apt to have a PDP-8 or PDP-11. Their move into commodity computers and peripherals moved them from a situation where they were building the highest quality products available, into one where they had no "moat". After all, who would buy a spectacularly well built PC early in the PC era? After two years you would have wanted to throw it out regardless of how solidly it was built, because back then PCs doubled in performance nearly every year.
- scarface_74 3y agoThere would never be a moat around mainframe computers as commodity Intel chips became more powerful. SUN, DEC, Stratus, Irix, etc all fail to commodity PCs.
- znpy 3y agoI would blame it a bit on standardisation… not too much, but when you drop the development of your own cpu, your own operating systems, your own hardware… you’re an oem like the others.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoI often wonder whether companies like HP gave up too easily, why did they let Microsoft and Intel walk all over them.
- znpy 3y agoIntel beat them by far with price/performance ratio. Not to mention, Intel and Microsoft kinda explicitly targeted all the market share that hp and other similar companies were leaving behind… like desktop computing at home. HP and similar companies just were blind to that, and never adjusted/resized their research efforts to those markets (huge markets obviously).