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David Packard Writes HP Epitaph
ewhac continues: "Today, he shared his thoughts on the merger in the form of a poster placed in the Stanford Theatre lobby:
Hewlett Packard
1938 -- 2002
R.I.P.
The Stanford Theatre still exists today only because of the employees of the Hewlett Packard Company. Without their achievements over the years, there would have been no foundation to purchase and restore this theatre.
Palo Alto might have had one more book store, or perhaps another restaurant. Architects had plans ready for a new "Casablanca Cafe" at this location when the Packard Foundation rescued the theater in 1987.
The Hewlett Packard Company was founded in 1938 in a garage on Addison Street only a few blocks from where you are now standing. Back then, the Stanford Theatre was showing brand new movies. In 1938 you could have seen Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday . You could have seen Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood . You could have seen Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, and Tyrone Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band . You could have seen Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You . You still can see these same movies at the Stanford Theatre. Our audiences know that they are truly timeless.
The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.
HP employees are now on a new ship, being taken on a new voyage. The company has even changed its stock symbol to HPQ to stress that the "old" HP is gone. For the sake of the surviving employees, of course I hope for a good outcome. But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.
David W. Packard
The Stanford Theatre Foundation.
"The San Jose Mercury News also has a short article about Packard's message.
"Editorial Content: HP's road to the merger has been the subject of much lunchtime controversy out here. As one of the "founders" of Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard has for decades been a highly respected institution who earned their reputation through solid engineering and research, and by creating a legendary workplace envied the world over.
"Especially in the Valley, people within and without HP came to feel as David Packard did; that The HP Way would survive management fads and fickle stockholders, and serve as a lasting example of How To Do It Right. But HP's current management has won the right to move onward; to where, no one is sure.
"Though the company is still there, the HP mythos and The HP Way seem to be gone. All anyone can do now is watch and see what happens next."
They spammed me yesterday and told me so.
--Chag
More high-tech and effective than Slashdot ? Come on...
If I didn't shed a tear for DEC, I'm hardly likely to do so for HP.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
David Packard illustrated, imho, The HP Way.
By tastefully posting a brief of his position and doing so without mud-slinging. Props to Junior.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
IAC, I'm not surprised he is sad to see HP go. Fuck, we are all sad. But there is some good to be found.
Remember our mutual enemy: Microsoft. And the enemy of our enemy is also our friend, in this case. In other words, Microsoft is a huge company. Only by creating a company huge enough to battle it (Linux is too small right now, but maybe they will get bought by HPaq!) may we triumph. It is the American Way.
HP and Compaq have already gotten themselves behind the Linux movement. Linus himself even suggested once that perhaps Linux should change its name to ComPHux, IIRC. This is great news for every true geek out there, and a Good Thing (tm).
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Carly thinks that since they lucked-out with the laser printer that they are now a consumer products company. I am annoyed with the attempeted separtion from the core values of a test equipment manufacturer with the Agilent spinoff, how many millions were wasted on ads on sporting events for the Agilent brand, a total and complete waste of money. I used to respect HP as a company of smart people, but no more
Free cell phone tracking
This is particularly inappropriate considering the other current thread on news editing & munging.
Aside from that I'm glad to see Mr. Packard sharing his feelings. Did he need to use another means? No, this one was apparently quite effective.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sounds like Microsoft after an unfavorable antitrust settlement :)
I think we forget that these companies are groups of people.
He's not saying anything about HP's products or technology, his business is a movie theater and his concerns lie elsewhere. He's lamenting the passing of an organization founded by his father, not a line of consumer and business electronics.
It's kind of like my highschool. It certainly wan't a great place, and won't be winning any awards for education. But I miss being there with my friends.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Right. Just like Martin Luther - changing the course of history and having an immeasurable impact on the worl we live in today.
Oops. It's not like that at all. It's this rich kid who's bummed because his dad sold out but wanted to retain control. Look at what he says,
"The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law. "
The HP Way would last forever? What kind of delusional ego trip were these people on.
Just what kind of religion was this HP Way? Apparently one that worships in old movie theaters.
This whole thing reaks of much of what is wrong with this country.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Nice to see David feels some sympathy, but I've felt for a while that his 'work against rather than with' attitude has done plenty of harm in itself. Seems the time for him to take an active interest in HP was years ago. He missed it and has handled the whole merger issue badly. Ironic for someone with an interest in theatre to be so poor in the PR sense.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When you think about how it must feel to watch your family legacy so completely turned on its head, I am shocked that, given that he would make a public statement at all, that this one was quite restrained. Typically if someone is going to cross that line and get invovled, there tends to be a lot of emotional momentum. I suspect this is why, during the Compaq/DEC merger, there wasn't much talk at all outside business issues. It is a shame to see that the concept of family business has taken another hit, but Packard is obviously a mature adult, something that we're not exposed to often enough. [troll] Think about other vocal members of the tech community? Does anyone really consider Stallman a muture adult?[/troll]
This too shall pass.
; - P
Companies are taken over all the time. What makes the "HP Way" so special that we should all mourn its passing?
If the "HP Way" means releasing vastly unreliable Deskjet printers into the consumer marketplace, then I for one am glad it's dead.
No matter how close you get to a corporation, even if you're related to the founder, PLEASE get some perspective. Company mantras do NOT qualify as religion.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Why not get sentimental for a company that actually took care of it's employees and took pride in quality, innovative products?
These companies are being killed/bought/monopolied out of business by the "new" corporate America that cares only about executive and shareholder enrichment. The new corporate America that will fire 6,000 employees on Monday and give "retention bonuses" to "talented executives" on Friday.
There was honor in the way HP did business, an honor that is all but forgotten today; replaced with shameless greed and profits at ANY cost. Nothing is sacred in the cult of Carly Fiorina.
Polaroid. HP. The list will get longer as once good companies are ass-fucked to death by the pirates of the new corporate America.
Silicon Valley Daily has a short summary of HP including what their first product was and a picture of the garage where it all got started.
It may be a bunch of rubbish to you, but it's not to the people who built HP over the years. HP pretty much got the Silicon Valley ball rolling. They did it the right way - Hewlett and Packard didn't even know what they were going to build when they started the business. It took them several years before they focused on office and computer technologies, but they were built on the notion that inventive, hardworking, principled people can do great things.
The success of HP and Intel and Apple led to a concentration of creative energies that built more of the technologies you and I take for granted than I could list.
Sure, there are a ton of needs that are of much greater importance than building a company. But this isn't just about multimillionaires, this is about thousands and thousands of people over the years who worked at a place they could believe in. They didn't feel like they were fleecing the public. They were proud of what they were producing. They were happy that the company they were working for took care of them.
I'd say that's pretty important. But I guess I'm not being cynical enough.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Check out all those Hollywood hyperlinks
I can't believe all these snotty posts sneering at the end of HP and poking fun at Hewlett and Packard family members for lamenting the loss. I guess that, unless you experienced the old HP, you can't understand why this is a big deal. It's not about "they took away my daddy's company." It's about the end of an era, and a loss of continuity. Or to use an image that may resonate more clearly in our post-literate society: its impact is like the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, or Michael Jordan retiring. The clueless comments here just show the posters' ignorance.
down with the merger....
we do not need consolidation, we need multiplication!!! spin off the parts that are brining you down HP, don't buy another company.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Is this story about Packard's poster or the Stanford Theatre's film schedule?
Oh wait, it is about Packard -- I didn't see the "You Can't Take It With You" link near the bottom of the list.
In the current climate in the US, producing goods and services are becoming incidental part of the operations compared to branding. Naomi Klein's book No Logo describes this trend... "This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race."
Shitty PC's
Overpriced (read price gouging) ink jet cartrides
Disposal Printers
etc.
The HP you lament was dead long ago. You just weren't notified. Not that HP / Compaq won't be going down the crapper forthwith...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
I liked vaxes. And vms. If DEC had avoided the merger then the Alpha might have gone somewhere.
Best Slashdot Co
...of the HP way.
/. forget there is a world outside that - it was a company with alot of great products, and one division of the company basically took over and eviscerated the rest.
HP was simply not a company of printers and cheap consumer computers. Or at least, at one time, it was not. I am going to have to buy an extra calculator - they had amazing calculators, once you figured out how to use RPN. MY friend fell one day and broke the display on his 28S, and they gave him a new one. gratis!
They had amazing test intruments. The nicest ocilliscopes were HP. Sure, techtronix has some nice models, but the HP digital scopes kicked ass.
The laser printers were rock fucking solid. I have suffered through brother, samsung, toshiba, etc. I *never* had an HP printer give me trouble. Even the deskjets were not bad - for all those people out there who moan about them, what would they replace them with? Epson? Nice printer, as long as you use it constantly.
I was never fond of the computers, but in fairness, I have yet to meet a consumer machine that I like.
So it's not just the loss of a consumer computer company, although I know sometimes people at
It seems a lot of younger posters aren't familiar with "The HP Way".
Well, if I enlightened you as to what the "HP Way" (or the "DECcie" culture), you'd just cast it off as old-fashioned, Keynsian, Socialist management.
What great technology companies (as opposed to, say, most of the Silicon Valley fly-by-night operations) do is give respect and value: for employees and for customers.
In addition, great technology companies invest heavily in R&D, the accountants', bean-counters' and short-term investors' worst nightmare.
HP and DEC offered in effect lifetime employment among other perks. Sure, some employees took advantage of this and offered low productivity but the innovations of both companies speak for themselves.
HP and DEC actually listened to their customers. In particular, I've spoken directly to DEC engineers in reporting/resolving problems - NOT some third-party technical support office.
Though I've never directly spoken to HP salespeople, DEC salespeople were engineers selling to engineers - NOT some business-school hack who's more qualified selling stock or used cars.
Of course, quality service and quality products are typically low-margin and low-profit; stockholders and accountants shun all this.
Hence, we're left with Microsoft, Compaq (now HPQ), Dell, Apple, Intel and a slew of other substandard, ephemeral technology. At least it's all substantially profitable :-/
~PAA concept currently out of favor.
HP & COMPAQ in a few months? Probably in a failed relationship hoping t get the best from the greatest divorce in history.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
David Packard, using his superior brain power cunningly embedded a repeating hidden message in his poster (five times).
Using a complex mathematical formula, similar to the one used in the Bible Code, David has the last laugh.
I have decoded it here for you:
Hewlett Packard
1938 -- 2002
R.I.P.
The Stanford Theatre still exists today only because of the employees of the Hewlett Packard Company. Without their achievements over the years, there would have been no foundation to purchase and restore this theatre.
Palo Alto might have had one more book store, or perhaps another restaurant. Architects had plans ready for a new "Casablanca Cafe" at this location when the Packard Foundation rescued the theater in 1987.
The Hewlett Packard Company was founded in 1938 in a garage on Addison Street only a few blocks from where you are now standing. Back then, the Stanford Theatre was showing brand new movies. In 1938 you could have seen Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday. You could have seen Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood . You could have seen Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, and Tyrone Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band . You could have seen Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You . You still can see these same movies at the Stanford Theatre. Our audiences know that they are truly timeless.
The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.
HP employees are now on a new ship, being taken on a new voyage. The company has even changed its stock symbol to HPQ to stress that the "old" HP is gone. For the sake of the surviving employees, of course I hope for a good outcome. But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.
David W. Packard
The Stanford Theatre Foundation.
Read any good sonnets lately?
During 15 years as an IT manager I dealt with a lot of companies. In my mind, I assigned each a BSQ, or Bullshit Quotient. HP employees were the only ones who always had the guts to tell me "We can't do that" if they did not have a solution for me. I found that refreshing.
Have fun in your Brave New World.
Wait, is this David Packard fellow related to the co-founder of HP? The submission didn't really say anywhere.
sed == stream editor
lex == lexical analyzer
origins of names of common unix utilities have more to do with typing frugality than latin -- read a few history books
Did he really put a bunch of URL's to imdb into his poster? NEAT. :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Since the mid-nineties, HP's engineers in the PC and printer divisions have had *way* too much free time to devote to developing unneeded solutions to monumentally non-problems. Compaq isn't any better (you want to load the BIOS setup program from *WHERE*?), but I've wrestled too many idiotic HP driver install procedures and weird motherboard over-engineering (in the bad way) design 'issues' to have any real sympathy for them. Their printers are still pretty good hardware for the most part, but I use the old embedded MS-written LJ5 series drivers because HP refuses to understand that their drivers cause STOP 50 errors on Citrix servers and most of the time, I can live without the extra features the new drivers would provide. (Don't even get me started on the stupid trend they started with the "printer-monitoring" software for their inkjet printers!) I can understand that they need to try to differentiate their products, but sheesh -- go play some golf or something!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
As a Stanford grad, I have to disagree (HP grew out of Stanford and vice versa). Messrs Packard and Hewlett spent a very big chunk of their fortune on philanthropy, medical research, and education. They build a company that showed respect for its employees, that flourished on enterprise and innovation and that spurred the community that surrounded to flourish too. Never mind the fact that HP was the spark that ignited Silicon Valley.
Corporations should not, as a rule, be anthropomorphosized by mourning their passing or by promising unconditional loyalty. However, HP is (alas, was) one of the exceptions to that rule. HP is dead, long live HP...
Like HP's test equipment, there's some more technolgy that's obsolete.
You can't keep holding on to the past, Mr. Packard!
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
I won't cry for HP the company, but I almost did cry when I discovered that my trusty HP48SX had slipped out of my pocket, to be lost to me forever.
I can only hope that it somehow found its way into the hands of some other geek, to be loved and cherished always, maybe even to this very day, and that it did not end up crushed, broken, abondoned, littering nature.
<sniff> I. miss. you.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Family and relationships are vitally important, and I think that to have a balanced life, these things have to take precidence over work. However, we spend a good 1/4 or 1/3 of the best years of our lives at work.
Since that's the case, some people choose to embrace work as something with intrinsic meaning. You seem to be advocating not getting emotionally involved in your current place of employment, which is an approach that makes sense for you.
But for some people, work needs to have meaning. These people form strong bonds with their coworkers, they enjoy collective endeavors, they believe that if they work hard with the other people in their organization, they'll all be rewarded.
I have done the 60-70 hours/wk for the cause type of work before. I enjoyed it at the time, and it provided me with many benefits. But the things that matter to me have shifted, and now it's rare that I put in more than 50 hours a week. But everyone's sense of priorities is their own, and I find it difficult to disparage people who put a lot of hard work into something they believed in.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Well as someone whose family has been involved with the company for many decades, one who spent many summers working various positions in the company and finally someone who joined the company after university I can say that the company I longed to work for and loved to visit dad at was not what I expected in 2000. I left after less than a year, I wanted to be a geek in THE geek company, however, all Carly wanted was sales and marketing. Salesperson does well, give him/her a fancy car for a year, geek solves customer problem in days that has plaqued them for months, tell him it didn't matter cause the sales guy said it should only take a day.
I would love to go back to the old HP, I suspect Carly will be gone before the end of 2003, all she wanted out of the merger was her massive bonus and raise and to layoff the 15,000 employees who best understood what the HP way was. She will do this and more and find that her synergies will never quite add up to what she hoped and by 2005 hp will look like it did a year ago.
Sad what a BOD/EC and CEO can do to a company, HP sent me dozens of proxies to vote on the merger, but I have yet to receive a proxy of the March Vote on the BOD. This time next year, we can welcome Walter and hopefully a few other intelligent folks to the board and get back on track.
Every HP product I've owned was absolute junk. I had my CDR (7000 series) replaced *3* times before it went out of warranty. Each lasted about 3 - 4 months before it would only produce coasters ... cost me easily 200$ in cds (this is back when they cost 2 - 5$ each)
My HP printer worked when it felt like it. It made these noises like the bow of a ship buckling as it was printing, still worked if you didn't mind being gouged 30$ for an ink tank. Convienantly after its waranty was up, whatever was making the noise gave out completley... printer dead.
I'm on my *third* HP scanner, the first two died. 90 day warranty my ass. First one, just stopped working one day, electrically dead ... second one, mechanical failure, it made a chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk sound the innards ground to bits one day, also conveniantly out of warranty.
My *expensive* HP computer at work, the on board sound card just *died* one day. Never has worked since ...
This is what the death of the "HP way" means to me, less bullshit products. At this point I've basically sworn never to buy another HP again.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
It makes me sick how this campaign going on equates merger with Compaq as Death.
Carly Fiorina came up with HP Invent campaign and other motivational campaigns and probably saved a stagnant company. Now with a merger, the company should be stronger and produce more great products. HP is not about "cheap PCs" or "disposable printers" as other users have posted.
What about the new stuff they've given out, like the free HP Application Servers? What about all those chips in your cell phone that filter the reception so it isn't complete crap? HP Labs produces all sorts of great technology.
Maybe it was time for the "HP Way" to go, because the company was slowing down by the time Fiorina got there. This is probably the last battle needed to get rid of any career bueracrats (sp?) left in the organziation.
Vital Idea
Many of the good, progressive things we have cherished about the hi-tech world, such as its egalitarianism, informality, and respect for doing the right thing came directly from these two men.
You forgot to mention products that almost never install correctly on the first try.
Also, troublesome printer software, that even HP tech support tells you should be used.
First spinoff: Carly Fiorina. Who'll give me a plug nickel? Who'll give me a green stamp. Ladies and gentlemen the auction for this fine item of American corporate management expertise has begun and bidding starts at one S&H green stamp or 2 crackerjack boxtops ... what am I bid?
Full many a industrial giant could restore or ensure their longterm profitability with a similar move: spin off your upper management as a crack consultation firm. Or a shroom consultation firm --whatever their hallucinations most closely resemble.
HP repent.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
does kind of sound like Microsoft. They have this nasty tendency to appear to be cooperative while behind the scenes doing something dastardly.
What is your Slash Rating?
Why do people bother trying to 'reinvent' themselves when they are already making a profit and will likely continue to do so in that fashion for as long as the eye can see?
HP closed their Calculator Research lab, yet it was making them a profit with each new model of calculator released. Yah really smart that one, closing a PROFITABLE part of your business.
The lady who is now in charge of HP, it says her mission goal is to "Make HP into a innovative internet company."
Uh WTF??
Internet companies suck, period. You make a printer you sell a printer and you have yourself a profit. Guarn-friggin-teed.
Hell I think that this is one case where some CONSERVATIVE management could actually have came in handy.
Imagine the PHB's conversation for awhile if you will;
PHB-1: Are we making any money?
PHB-2: Yah tons of it.
PHB-1: Ok, lets keep on doing what we are doing and make even more money!
Compared to what seems to have actually happened;
PHB-1: Are we making money?
PHB-2: Yah tons of it.
PHB-1: Ok then lets completely restructure the company go through a big merger close down our operations assloads of profitable sectors and go with something completely new and untested!
And people wonder why I have such disdain for business majors. . . . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
The HP Way, as I understand it was to give the employees of the company a free hand in deciding what products needed to be developed, and what parts were needed for those products. From the equipment they initially built and sold to the Walt Disney company, through their decision to let "The Woz" take his computer design with him as he left the company, they showed an interest in those products that they believed would be profitable, and letting engineers have a free hand to do what they wished, including leaving for greener pastures.
While I am not sure that the new company will exhibit the same "Way", I do not see anything preventing new startups from using this method of operations.
As I understand it, parts of this "Way" have been used in other companies. There has been much talk of the "Apple Way" which encourages people to try new things.
We may never see another large company that works the way HP did. If so, I think the world will be a poorer place. On the other hand, as companies are looking into more and more Open Source projects, I suspect that the philosophy of Open Source will propigate into other parts of corporate operations.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
is that several of my friends who work in the trench at HP were very much against the merger while another friend at HP (upper management and gets to ride in the plane with Carly) was for it. Don't know what that tells you, but there is a definite fragmentation between employees and management. Time will tell, but the fragmentation is hard to overcome.
Second thing... Feel bad for the many good employees at Enron and Arthur who really had no say in the demise of their companies AND lost their jobs. I'd rather receive a call like the DEC emplyees did than spend endless nights awake wondering if/when/where the second shoe would drop. Just reaffirms the advice that everyone should have 3-6 months of expenses banked away. I finally got there and have never been sorry (well, I had some nagging thoughts during the dotcom stock craze about missed opportunity, but not now). No, it wasn't easy... but I sure sleep better.
We're an insidious virus infecting the unsuspecting legions of corporate proprietary software slaves. Mwuahahahahahaha!
Seriously...it all goes back to memes. The open source meme > proprietary software meme. I wonder what kind of meme would displace open source...?
What is your Slash Rating?
"Honor" may be a bit too ideological.
How about this? Shafting your employees and ripping a company up without a pretty clear, concise, and well-defined goal is a bad idea. You kill worker morale, you lose customer confidence, and you (as in any reorganization) are going to be losing money for a while. As a matter of fact, the only people that are likely to benefit from this merger *may* be the shareholders of HP (which I really, really doubt...Compaq is a godawful acquisition), and, of course, the execs, which get nice merger bonuses.
Frankly, I think the entire idea of executive bonuses for execs in strategic decision-making positions should be tossed in the trash. It biases the exec to do a job that will make them money, not that will help the company. If the board of the directors wants to vote to give a specific person a nice fat bonus for something exceptional, great.
May we never see th
I think the roadmap looks fine, since a lot of the HP desktop/mobile lines were crap compared to compaq. Look at the numbers -- people perfer the compaq lines -- and that's why a lot of the HP divisions are going to be trimmed.
I only buy compaq notebooks lately, since they're easy to fix/upgrade/maintain if you get the right line. HP laptops? I never considered... I've tried half a dozen other OEMs for PC laptops, but never HP. It seems looking at the sells figures I wasn't alone.
As for backend systems and consumer desktops it's not even close, Compaq is #1 b/c of their branding and deals with PoVs like rat shack. HP should've made better products at better price points. BTW I only use IBM for my workstations, sorry guys. I wouldn't mind a nice Proliant however if we weren't locked into Dell at work.
I'm sorry Packard, but even Carly is right sometimes.
Let's get real here. Change happens. I'm a former IBMer who worked for that company before their big (and badly needed) changes in the 1990's. Do I lament the tons of dead wood IBM had on staff? Do I lament the socialist society IBM built within? Do I lament the multitudes of poor quality products IBM produced due to extremely poor management practices (and the aforementioned dead wood)? Of course not. The "HP Way" is dead. Who gives a shit?!?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Actually, he's been paid $1 for each year so far.
But don't go giving him an altruism award anytime soon...I believe it was only last year that Apple gave him a private jet (quite a few millions), and recently that they gave him quite a few more millions in stock options. The $1 salary is a cute quote, but doesn't mean much.
May we never see th
HP was one of the few large tech corps that I did not hear or come face to face with it screwing over its customers. My only problem with HP was price. But, the damn things worked.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The real HP became Agilent a couple years ago. I heard that when preparing for the split HP determined that the PC portion of the business would not survive a name change (which means all they had to offer in competition was name recognition).
HP is alive and well and out of reach of Carly, it's just known as Agilent now.
(And no I don't work for HP, I work for a competitor.)
Sig is on vacation
Maybe they can use that Compaq reverse-engineering know-how to get around those chips in teh HP inkjet cartridges.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
How ironic is it to read the "Epitaph to HP" and have an HP ad right next to it?
HP employees (not the company) helped save the Stanford theatre. Stanford theatre good. HP employees did good things. "HP Way" good is somehow inferred from that.
HP merged with Compaq and changed the symbol. The old HP Way did good things. I don't think the HPQ way will be good because the HP way was.
WTF? That made no sense at all. If HP employees did good things, presumably that should not change at all with the same employees working for pretty much the same company with a different stock symbol.
This will probably get modded down as a troll by those who disagree - oh well, I'm karma capped anyway.
Regardless of your opinion of whether the merger is a good thing or not, this letter is nothing but FUD. He spends a lot of time talking about how the Stanford theater is great and how great the old days were but completely fails to connect that to the merger or the name change being bad.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The HP/Compaq situation and the effect on the employees brings to mind one of my favorite questions:
Who is our economy for, anyway?
What I see David Packard as crying over was NOT HIS dreams or needs, but the EMPLOYEES of HP.
If he is right, HP will probably be a dying company. One that was great fun to work for from all accounts. It had upper-management that required respect for the employees and that rolled downhill...all the way to the lowest rungs of the company.
As Eccl. in the bible says...
I paraphrase.
"It's all been done before. You'll never REALLY do anything new. But the one thing you can have some solace in...Your work. Do a good job, and take pride in it."
HP allowed many to do that, while also working for someone else. That's a rare treat in todays mega-corp world.
That's why we're sad to see HP change and the old way die. Perhaps it's inevitable, but still sad.
Cheers!
It's interesting, though, that according to whois, the same guy who runs that web site, also owns this curious site . I wonder if David W. Packard has anything to do with the Mighty Oracle of Ya-hoot?
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
On the bright side of things, though, a lot of the testing equipment was taken over by Agilent when they split. Hopefully, if HP stops producing quality 80grand test equipment, Agilent will fill that gap. The thing that upsets me the most though, was that they simply dropped the calculator division!!! Their calculator division was profitable, and had excellent market penetration. What the heck were they thinking??!?
A solution to the problem with music today
So... two struggling companies with ineffective, clueless CEO's come to the only decision that'll keep them in a position of power for another year or so..
The deal was masqueraded in bunches of buzzwords and double-speak. They claimed it would allow them to leverage all sorts of synergies for their customers. Of course, they never told their customers exactly how the joining of two alike companies would be beneficial. We were just suppose to trust Carly and Mike that it would. They even tried to coax Wall Street's blessing by saying that the merger would allow them to (gasp!) compete with IBM and its Global Services Division! Goodness knows that was so very re-assuring to the thousands of HP customers who were left in the dark for months and who were lied to about the e3000 line of servers.
So now, Compaq and HP shift from the HP Way to something more akin to the Woolworth Way, which goes something like this: let's sell as much crap as we can, as quickly as we can, before we go under!
There have been a lot of Slashdotters comment negatively about David Packard's eulogy for the HP Way. I've seen numerous comments that say it's just a company, not a religion and other such rubbish. But for tens of thousands of HP employees, the HP Way was as much a part of their lives as religion. It gave them a sense of belonging, a sense of security and a sense of honor, all at the same time.
This week, one man and one woman have succeeded in absolutely destroying the lives of tens of thousands of people, all in the name of corporate profits and non-sensical words like "synergy."
Take a minute to respect that and to think about that, because a very unique and wonderful chapter in American business history was just closed.
but i work at the "mergee" - and while at first it REALLY bugged me, now that it's over and me whining does no more good - i can look at it a bit more objectively. hp may have great people, but they lost money in all of their business divisions except printers (sorry, the calculators are gone). how can you be a big computer/services company if you only make money on printers? (and then a lot of it was on the cartridges and paper) compaq made money (albeit not much lately, but then NOONE is right now) in all of their business divisions, and had no printer division. if you line the 2 product lines up, they actually mesh VERY well. excepting the jornada and netserver, everything else meshes. hp has nothing to match a himilaya, for instance - and compaq has nothing to match an hp9000 (you can pretend big alpha's do, but businesses don't think so). on the software side the only "overlap" is tru64/hpux, and hpux is WAY more accepted by the market. the new hp has announced the new product line, but i don't see it on the web page so i'm not going to list it, but anyone knowledgable looking from the outside can see they mesh very well with a few exceptions.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
If a company like HP wanted to preserve its "Way" forever, then it should have never gone public.
The moment it did, it surrendered any right to completely control its destiny---trading it instead for a duty to preserve and enhance shareholder value. At that point, The HP Way survived only to the extent that it didn't conflict with that new, higher-priority goal.
The problem is that the value of a stock is in its growth potential, not in its current value. Therefore the shareholders rightly demand not just that the company is profitable and maintains that, but that it becomes more profitable over time. A private company has no such requirement. If its owners are content with slow growth and rock-solid profit, it has no need to alter its strategy.
Furthermore, even if the HP Way may have provided genuine long-term growth, most shareholders simply aren't that patient. And it's not the company's job dictacte how much "long term" is acceptable; it's the shareholder's job to dictate that to the company. Again, another vote in favor of private status---if the owners are willing to swallow some lean years, it is their prerogative.
The HP Way, therefore, took its first step towards the grave at HP's IPO.
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/07may02b.h tm
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
sed: -e expression #1, char 2: Extra characters after command
oh well.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Pubiq Hacker?
Or maybe they should get some new name that includes morphs of "paradigm", and "synergy", that make abosolutely no sense yet are trademarkable.
I bet "Synerdigm" and "Parasys" and "Digmergy" are all already taken, though.
Used to be, you turned to HP when you needed a transistor tester, a logic analyzer, a microcomputer with CRT display and built-in printer that you could hook up to a lot of other equipment but was small enough to carry under your arm, an oscilloscope, a precision function generator, the kind of calculator you needed when you were through "screwing around," a minicomputer to run avionics test systems - basically most everything you would need to design, build, and test complex electronic equipment.
Now, you turn to HP when you want to buy a PC from a department store that runs a second-rate, security-compromised OS whose basic goal when you first turn it on appears to be to sell you stuff.
Your corporate "way" isnt a religion until you have your own hymn book.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
lex is short for Lexical Analyzer. It's useful for developing grammars and languages, a la Chomsky and Greibach.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
That's about when they started with all this abrasive-in-the-toner crap and microchip in the ink ribbon kind of silliness. Any business that treats customers like captives instead of customers is circling the bowl. It may take a generation to go down the tube, but it will.
I have to say I was moderately touched...he doe seem right, a lot of the direction and focus isn't apparent any more since the merger. It's sad to see one of the founders of the computer industry being destroyed or changed beyond recognition.
Heh. A quick look over at the Internet Anagram Server took paradigm and synergy and came up with Spermy Dairy Gang.
Do you think that's trademarked yet?
(It's actually a serious criticism I've got of market forces these days: far from being an engine of diversity, they seem to be driving the United States toward a rather boring and bland monoculture. I look at changes in Palo Alto, and I can think of a dozen bad losses, and one gain, and that's the result of a non-profit organization...)
But anyway, if you happen to be hanging on the Bay Area peninsula for any reason, definitely check out the Stanford Theater on University Ave. With any luck, you may get to see Edward Everett Horton and/or Eric Blore.
(One complaint though: David Packard is a little too tasteful for my tastes. Silicon Valley needs more bad SF movies. I want to see a Roger Corman festival. )
People in Silicon Valley now feel the same way about HP as people in Boston felt about Digital when Compaq stole it. I am sure they see what happened to DEC, their respected competitor, and see the end of their institution looming.
Honest, Competent technology companys are being abused by CEOs for their own short term gain. They fail to realize that they are being given a sacred trust, not a cash cow.
Maybe it's time to start to look at the laws of the states these comapnies are incorporated in before sinking time and money into said company. Delaware gives management a lot of power, which is one of the reasons so many companys are incorporated there. Was HP? I don't know.
Packard runs an historic theater, and Packard's placard was put up in that theater. It is arguable that to some degree it in fact *was* a speech about movie history, at least as it relates to the context of the HP Way - his point is that HP had such a strong sense of connection with the cultural world around it (as of 1987) that it wanted to restore an historic theater that dated from approximately the time of its founding. Packard's point was to connect the company and its ideals with the cultural ideals of the Stanford Theater, and to show that these values are now dead in HPQ.
As such, I think the links to the movie information were relevant. It's not as though the poster were *forcing* you to follow the links; if you are not interested in cultural references outside the compu-tech world, don't follow them.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.
Maybe they'll rethink some of their "Fuck the printer customers" attitude and business practices.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I concur with the other slashdot readers who say that HP has been on a downward spiral for a while now. However, this merger has become the final coffin nail for the "old" HP (old != bad).
I am too young to remember the earlier days of HP -- the first memory I have of HP is my father's RPN calculator in the early 80s. I was too young at the time to remember now, but my parents tell me that while they were doing the taxes in 1981, I knocked a Coke over (I was 1!) and into the calculator. Needless to say, the calculator didn't work during that tax season. After a nominal fee, it returned perfectly fixed. Several years later, the keys had been so worn from use that they no longer had labels. HP replaced the entire keyset for free!
The central theme with those HP experiences -- customer service and satisfaction. High-Quality products. The Free-Market Capitalist system is one that is supposed to reward the hardest workers, pave the way for high-quality products that consumers benefit from.
HP represented all that is good about free-markets. It has the classic founding and success story -- 2 guys beginning in a garage, then becoming business successes. It has provided excellent products to its customers -- HP Printers, calculators, and other tools are world-reknown. Each product is associated with quality, innovation and reliability. The company grew at a steady pace and still provided great products. HP was loyal to its employees, and its employees were loyal to HP. Those who worked for HP were treated well. Customers were treated well. It was the kind of company that makes one think "I'd like to do business with them". It represented all that's good about free-markets and the capitalist system.
This devolution of quality and integrity is nothing new -- rather, it is a condition that has existed across the board for years. Take a look at some of the GREAT audio manufacturers of the 1970s -- Marantz is still around, but it's product quality and excellence is nowhere near its former level, Pioneer is still doing well and has good stuff, but its products are not nearly what they once were, Akai no longer produces the excellent and sturdy products it once did, and Sansui has gone from a top-notch audio equipment manufactuer to a bargain-basement company that makes crappy TVs and audio "equipment" that gets re-branded to sell under a different crappy label. It's the devolution of capitalism -- GREAT products are the exception, not the norm. The 80s and 90s found products decrease in quality, but increasing in price.
What we're witnessing is what's bad about free-markets. Companies have spent years building excellent customer relations only to see them disappear as the company devalues its product in order to increase profits. An excellent profit with great products and a solid customer base is no longer accepted. Profits need to be growing. The easiest way for companies like HP to do that is to decrease the product's quality: "Write printer drivers that are less-robust. No more padded cases with HP calculators. And lay off 5000 people this month. That'll keep our revenue growing and our share price up."
At HP now, there are still many quality products. But there are also lots of mediocre, inferior products. Take the newer calculators for instance. I have an HP 48G - greatest calculator I've ever used -- sturdy, reliable, RPN (hurray!), and it has EXCELLENT features. The quality of construction is second to none. My brother just purchased a new HP graphing calculator for his highschool classes. I've never seen such a piece of junk. It seems to have a tendency to lock-up, requiring a "reset" by pressing three keys on the keypad. The documentation is no longer a 500 page manual, but more like a 10 page pamphlet. The casing is cheap, and the buttons no longer have "the HP feel". I would use a cheap grocery-store calculator over this POS any day of the week. Needless to say, he's looking at a TI-83 now.
HP began because it capitalized on the good qualities of a free-market system. But it's spiraling downward because it has become trapped by the negatives of free market. It's too bad . . .
The comment about the "next generation" taking over and losing touch is sort of humorous in that in the HP case, a second-generation family member was the one fighting against the merger.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
in HUGE numbers!
What do you think those very same people are going to do to your company after you give them control?
Liberty uber alles.
Agreed, props for the Stanford Theater.. I lived nearby (relatively speaking, normally I live several states away) one summer. Sometimes there were silent movies + live accompaniment, what could be more cool? I still keep their showtime listings bookmarked in case I spontaneously find myself in the area (sigh).
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
There is something fundamentally wrong with the market if you can buy a printer with ink cartridge for the same amount of money that buys you just a cartridge. For most users, TCO is dominated by the cost of cartridges.
I'll leave it to the respective zealots to point out that this is what makes capitalism great or to point out that it sucks, I don't care.
I'm just wondering how this market survives at these price points. All the consumer inkjet printers suffer from it do some degree, and I would not expect that to be sustainable.
The only thing I really hold against HP is the way they squandered the Apollo name. HP manufactured printers that suck to the point they don't want their name on it get branded as Apollo, and back when HP acquired Apollo no one expected the name to be dragged through the mud that bad.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
In HP's Avondale plant, HP hired huge numbers of staff as "temps" - that is, they kept these workers the maximum amount of time they could without paying any benefits, then laid 'em off, then re-hired 'em after the minimum time possible had passed.
This was due to a court decision that basically said they couldn't keep people on staff forever and treat them like shit just by pretending they were "temps". The decision stipulated time frames, so HP used those time frames as guidelines for their systematic abuse of their workers.
When HP eventually sold off the site it was discovered that they had been secretly polluting the local water table for years, and the whole area around the plant was contaminated with toxic waste.
Check it out, it's all true. The HP these people are lamenting was just another nasty corporate criminal that this entire region was happy to see the last off.
"Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash"
-- Winston Churchill 1874-1965
I thought the "old" HP way was the new (continuing) Agilent way? No?
Anyone else notice that Hewlett-Packard Corp. no longer identifies itself as such? I purchased a printer in 1997, it said "[hp] Hewlett-Packard" on the lid. 1998-era scanners at work are branded the same way. Presario computers, laptops... The big ad at NASA mission control had the same logo: "[hp] Hewlett-Packard." Then Carly Fiorina came along and they spun off the company's good technical and inventive divisions and came up with a new ironic slogan, "invent." Now the company advertising and Web site is branded as "[hp] Invent." No Hewlett, no Packard. The new HPaq Web site says "The New HP" at the top and has that "[hp] Invent" logo. The old site said "Welcome to Hewlett-Packard" after the HP. The only clue that the company isn't named "HP" or "HP Invent" is in the copyright notice in small light text at the bottom of some pages (and nowhere on the homepage). Even the new stock symbol trashes that heritage - the W from Hewlett is tossed out for the Q from Crampaq. It's almost as if the company is ashamed of its name. Or the names of its founders. The whole thing is a huge slap in the faces of the Packard and Hewlett families and anyone who ever worked for the company or believed in The HP Way. This merger tosses the best of Digital Equipment Corp, Compaq, Tandem Computer, and Hewlett-Packard to the curb and leaves the worst aspects of all those organizations, then blends it all up with some terrible management into a shit milkshake and brands it all as "HP Invent." Absolutely disgraceful.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
It is sad, really. They were once a great company.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
This reminds me of my own scanner, the last one made by a forgotten scanner company called Storm Technologies. See, they made scanners, and only scanners--the highest-quality consumer-level scanners in the business at the time. They were innovative, anjd on their last model they even included an RCA video input for people to capture still images from their camcorders or VCRs, right alongside the flatbed scanner. 36-bit color when most people were still below that. They even invented an incredible de-interlacing algorithm which made images looki far smoother than even the de-interlace algorithm in Adobe Photoshop does today, for when people captured stills from video. And their scanners were the first consumer-level ones to use good CCD technology.
They went out of business because the Asian companies were dumping cheap no-name scanners into the marketplace, such that overnight the ImageStudio VF scanner from Storm went from being a technological marvel priced affordably at $250 minus $50 rebate, to something that looked less attractive when sitting next to a $49.95 no-name scanner that listed a similar resolution but certainly couldn't live up to the same image quality.
That's what killed HP's reputation. They had to compete with no-names in the consumer space--the average person wouldn't know the difference between a good-quality HP machine for $2000 and a crappy eMachine for $569. Likewise, the $69.95 no-name printer looks the same to most people as the $250 HP printer. Consequently, compromises were made. Unfortunately for HP's reputation, a few too many compromises were made. They were never as bad as Compaq or that bastard brand Packard-Bell, but they weren't up to the sterling reputation HP had earned in earlier years, before having to lower standards to compete in the consumer space.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
It's not as easy as just plowing your revenues back into investment, either, because to do something like build a factory, or create an industrial park, or whatever it is you need to create the next big product, can cost millions and millions of dollars. But unless you make that leap, the company will never be able to progress to the next level.
Also, taking a company public doesn't just make fat cats fatter. Thousands of people and institutions made a heap of money by investing in HP on the stock market over the years. Going public actually spreads the earnings around far more than keeping a company private.
Ultimately it's almost impossible for an entrepreneur to hold onto the reins of a company forever, while still building the company into an entity that can compete on a national and global scale.
So it appears that Hewlett and Packard made their decision, to grow the company and forgo absolute control over its culture and direction. And somewhere along the line, their successors decided to take another path.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Compaq killed DEC, their desktop machines melt on command, and now they're gunna mediocrify hp as well. Evolution in action. Yay. :-P
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I had a HP 35 calculator. One afternoon it fell out of my bike carrier into the road - before I could retrieve it a car had driven over it. I was really annoyed with myself. I took it out of its case to inspect the wreckage and found my calculator - with a small crack in the plastic on one corner - working fine.
More to the point, when my nephew was born he had a serious problem with his respiration, and spent the first fortnight of his life in an oxygen tent. Attached to his chest were sensors with "Hewlett Packard" on them, connected to a rack of instruments with "Hewlett Packard" on them. I'm glad that these instruments are still being made by Agilent, but why-oh-why-oh-why did HP get rid of the part of their business which gave people a warm fuzzy feeling - and which represented excellence?
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
First the bad news for my fellow HP employees (I'm an ex Digital ex Compaq employee now HP). The business world has gotten nasty in the last 10-15 years. Lifetime employment is gone, you had just been sheltered from this change a little longer than the rest of us. The world changes more quickly now and a company that isn't agile is in trouble. This ride is NOT going to be real fun for a while. I've been there, done that got the t-shirt with the acquisition of Digital.
Now the good news. When Compaq bought Digital they were 20K people and we were ~80K. Most of the people you're getting in Services and the Northeast are Dec/Digital folks. We're a heck of a lot more like HP than you think. Most of us still live by Ken Olsen's old motto "Do the Right thing". That's our culture, its been suppressed for a while, but even several years of Compaq couldn't kill it.
Looking at the folks I've been meeting from the HP side this looks like it might be the beginning of something very interesting if we can keep it stuck together for a bit and we all stop crying in our beers and act.