From the outside, looking in, HP appears to have tremendous infrastructural problems that at this point are no longer a matter of "We haven't been using a compe

From the outside, looking in, HP appears to have tremendous infrastructural problems that at this point are no longer a matter of "We haven't been using a compelling customer management or CRM system for years". (I know that wasn't the only point in the article; still, it seemed like an odd one to have there at all given what we see of HP.) HP's printers are ... OK. Not exceptional, not market leaders, but OK. But, their printer driver and AIO software is renowned in the tech industry for its awfulness. It is truly, exceptionally terrible. One of the strangest workstation issues we ever had to diagnose was caused by a messed-up HP software installation, where the HP drivers for one printer interfered with the HP drivers for another printer (http://www.robsheldon.com/puzzlepage http://www.robsheldon.com/puzzlepage). HP's had multiple consumer laptop lines with a stupid overheating issue which consistently cooks the graphics chip almost exactly 14 months after purchase, due not to a manufacturing defect but a design flaw. (A thermal pad is being used in a space which is too large for a thermal pad -- there are seriously guys on eBay making decent side money selling copper shims for these things.) We recently had an HP AIO workstation in the shop with a bad BIOS. The chip seemed fine, but the BIOS software had become corrupted (possibly due to a virus attempting to re-flash BIOS, although I haven't heard of that actually being tried in quite a while). On a Dell system, this is an easy problem to fix: we go to Dell's services & support page, enter the service tag number of the system, hit drivers & downloads, select the BIOS flashing utility, download and run and done. HP? Not on their website, and their technical support -- while sympathetic -- couldn't help either. They literally had no BIOS flashing utility for that model. Our customer, a student, was out several hundred dollars on an otherwise fine computer because of that. We've been making a point of warning our clients away from HP for years because this kind of crap just keeps happening over and over and over. They'll call us asking for a recommendation on a new system, we'll give them some specific options, and if it sounds like they want to go shopping, literally we'll say, "Just don't buy an HP, whatever you do." What a shame. HP used to have a well-deserved sterling reputation. I have no idea what their enterprise business looks like, but it's hard for me to imagine a consumer line being that through-and-through screwed up without also corrupting the enterprise side. I honestly was relieved -- and heard the same from a number of other support-level companies -- when scuttlebutt had it that HP was going to get out of the consumer market. I think they should have stuck with that plan, scrapped their PC business entirely, gotten the rest of their higher-profit-margin business back in order, and then a few years later re-launched their PC business when they could do it right and without all of the added baggage of a stinky reputation.