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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
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
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!
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
"Dura lex sed lex" -- an old legal maxim meaning the law is hard but it is the law.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
Umm, if by "clone market" you mean the market of selling "IBM-compatible PC's", you left out a small step there, i.e. the step where they got into the computer business before there was a "clone market" (heck, before there were "IBM-compatible PC's").
They had a line of 16-bit minicomputers dating back to the 1960's, and other lines of computers such as the HP 3000's, the original 68K-based UNIX boxes, and the PA-RISC boxes (running both UNIX and the MPE OS from the HP 3000's; they used, as I remember, binary-to-binary translation to allow both native 32-bit PA-RISC code and the old stack-based 16-bit HP 3000 code to run on the PA-RISC 3000's).
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!
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.
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. )
HP3000s were Really Funky Mainframe-like Things. The Unix-based machines ran HPUX, which was almost exactly like Unix, but had really bizarre ideas about how RS-232 should be dealt with, and I spent far too much of my career for a couple years haggling with it and with drivers for HP printers.
On the other hand, remember when HP printers came with manuals that actually told you what the escape sequences were so you could do anything you wanted, not just 'how to tell Microsoft Products X/Y/Z that you have an HP printer?? That's because they were written by engineers for engineers, so you could actually understand what the equipment was doing and how to use it. Nobody writes manuals like that any more, unfortunately.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks