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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.
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!
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
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
HP is/was good at what they do/did. The Deskjet fiasco, well, Microsoft released -- and continues to release -- unreliable operating systems. But, at least HP has some redeeming qualities, such as producing some pretty decent desktops and some high-quality laser printers.
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."
I liked vaxes. And vms. If DEC had avoided the merger then the Alpha might have gone somewhere.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
True. But there are companies, and there are companies.
All too often these days, people think anything goes in the name of profits, and that's all there is to a company. Making money. Full stop. Do whatever you can within the law to screw maximum profits out of your customers, get maximum profit from your employees, the only thing that matters is the bottom line.
Not all companies are like that. I expect one thing that upsets David Packard is that the 'HP Way' contained many humanitarian principals which have now been cast aside. Now the merger has taken place many thousands of people are probably going to be made redundant. I expect making people redundant would have kept the founders of HP awake at night. To the current administrators of the HP empire, employees are just numbers that have to be juggled to maximise profits.
...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
A concept currently out of favor.
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.
Did he really put a bunch of URL's to imdb into his poster? NEAT. :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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.
i wholeheartedly agree, my first job dealing with HP was adminning a HP1000 RTEA system, i lucked into the job when my boss left and they asked me to try to hold down the fort till a replacement could be found, i was far underqualified for the position and in way over my head.
I poured through manuals like a madman and did my best, but honestly it was the great service from HP that allowed me to get by. Funny thing was, about a month later i was doing the same job as the guy i replaced better than he had done it, and managed to keep the job.
If it wasn't for the great guys at HP that got to know me on a first name basis for a few weeks there, i could have never done it. I'm still gratefull to those guys to this day.
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...
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
Shitty PC's
...
The HP you lament was dead long ago
Maybe it's still around, but it's called Agilent now. We've been looking at their automated optical inspection systems. Awesome, but extremely expensive. Truly in the H(igh)P(rice) tradition...
The old HP made instruments and test equipment, not PC's. It treated its employees exceptionally well. It stayed in the forefront of technology while building the highest possible quality into its products. It would service them forever. (I've used 25 year old HP oscilloscopes, they still worked fine, and aside from the great size and weight were still as good as analog scopes ever got.)
And the old HP had to charge premium prices, of course. That sort of quality and service costs money. The HP way also ran up the payroll costs, although I suspect it costs much more to treat your employees badly so the best ones leave. However, I think the great working conditions, topnotch work force, and premium products and service sort of go together -- I wouldn't feel good working where the corporate goal was to make the product as shitty as possible without losing too many customers, and if they raised my pay I'd just save it up until I could afford to quit...
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?
I'm not sure how HP got into the printer business -- but the HP way started to die when they did. Their reputation was based on high-quality test instruments. For over half a century, if you wanted the best instruments regardless of cost, or wanted to make sure it would last 25 years (really!), you bought HP. As far as I can tell, that company is still alive and well -- even though it has the amazingly silly name "Agilent". We've got over $1 million worth of HP 3070 board testers running in this building right now, and we might be buying Agilent AOI soon...
I sure don't understand how those shitty printers came out of the same company.
"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
Overpriced (read price gouging) ink jet cartrides
You do realize that the print heads are contained in the cartridge, saving you from having expensive head replacements as often as with the Canon cartridges? Oh, and the HP's hold more ink.
If you disagree with HP's engineers and don't want to replace the print heads every time you run out of ink, use a refill kit.
As far as "Shitty PC's" and "Disposal (sic) Printers", that's what the market demands. No company makes any money mass-producing the PC's that the geek crowd wants, that's why we build our own. Incidentally, my friend is still using my Deskjet 500C that's nearly 10 years old.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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.
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
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.
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
It's generational. To many/most Slashdot readers, HP has always been a printer and computer vendor.
I remember lusting after HP test equipment as a teenager, and that one of the great things about the Army was that they had lots of cool HP tools around for me to use -- and they issued me a lovely HP scientific calculator, too.
I always liked Tektronix scopes better, though.
I think HP lost it when (now) Agilent stopped being the heart of the company. Oh, well.
- Robin
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!
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.
Just remember your words in 24-36 months.
We will find HP on the dung heap - and you sir will need to find some crow to eat!
(Or perhaps I will, but I doubt it - just remember - you thought the merger was "good")
Cheers!
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.
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."
Shitty PC's
Overpriced (read price gouging) ink jet cartrides
Disposal Printers
etc.
The HP you lament was dead long ago.
I must agree with you about the printers, ink cartridges, etc. and that the HP I lament is long gone.
The HP I lament is the company that made all the wonderful test equipment I used in the 70s and 80s. They made the workstations I used in the 90s. But the personal computers, printers and accessories they made recently seem to have been built by a vastly inferior outfit. Their merger with Compaq simply hastens the downward spiral.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
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.
(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. )
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.
Exactly.
/. have never seen the *real* HP so many of us remember fondly. They haven't seen HP quality. They haven't seen HP support.
The vast majority here a
At the last place I worked we were still using 9825 calculators as GPIB controllers. They'd been in use since 1982. Most of them have never had the cover removed. The ones that had to be repaired, we could still get parts and support 15 years after they stopped making them.
All that is gone.
Banned from moderation 01-27-2002. Fuck you too
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
Maybe long ago in Internet time, but just 10 years ago they still had a reputation for quality and engineering excellence, a reputation they built up over 40-50 years that was pissed away in less than 10 by the new management (as someone else said maybe Agilent now carries the torch now). You can precisely trace the rising shittyness of their products with the growing influence of Carly and the new management team. Sad....
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.
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 ====
I don't think anyone was reading this post on slashdot because they were interested in movie history. If this was posted on a old-movie-buff website, I would more understand the links.
It's true that one doesn't have to follow the links on the page. Nevertheless, they are still distracting. And they are distracting from the main point of interest for this audience: the change in the corporate culture of a pioneering tech firm.
We wouldn't be interested in this speech if it weren't about the recent HP Compaq merger..
Hyperlinking is a useful tool. And in this case it was used poorly.
Packards remarks were clearly aimed criticizing the new HP Compaq. They are only incidentally connected to the old movies linked to in the post.
Adding the links do nothing to help give additional meaning to Packard's remarks. It was a short and graceful speech that is marred with the hyperlinked transcription.
I guess we can go back and forth on this for a long time. Could you tell me how any of those links actually helped in giving a better understanding to Packard's speech? Please be specific. If you can't, then I think it is fair to say that the links are useless, and worse, distracting.
evanchik.net
> You do realize that the print heads are contained in the cartridge, saving you
> from having expensive head replacements as often as with the Canon cartridges?
That's exactly why it's a horrible design--such a design made sense five or more years ago, when printers were more expensive than they are today. However, economies of scale and less profit-taking with the thinner margins of today means that printers are so inexpensive that it isn't worth putting the print heads in the cartidges. Let's say that adds $10 to the price of each cartidge pack--$15 if you'd be willing to use generic cartidges. So, for each 10 cartidges you buy, you could have bought a new $150 printer. Since the average printer warranty lasts a year, it comes down to a simple equation. Do you use 10 or more color cartidges a year with your $150-range printer, or 20 or so with your $300-range printer? If so, then you're paying a premium for HP's print-head cartidges which could have bought you a whole second printer.
The only advantage I can see to this print-head-in-the-cartridge design is if you *rarely* use your printer, and want it to last as long as possible without replacement. If you frequently replace cartidges, however, you'd be better off saving the "HP tax" which could easily add up enough to pay for a replacement printer if the heads on the one you have get gunked beyond repair.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
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