HP Kills Off Utility Data Center

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HP Kills Off Utility Data Center

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday September 30, 2004 @07:50PM from the whitepapers-to-obits dept.

pacopico writes "HP's much hyped and highly-regarded UDC system has gone the way of the dodo. The Register charts the technology's demise and points to the few other reporters who covered UDC's end. Spent some time at HP checking out UDC and am sad to see it go. Ahead of its time to be sure."

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These sentences by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 19:53 · Score: 1

Spent some time at HP checking out UDC and am sad to see it go. Ahead of its time to be sure.

Have no subjects.
Typical post-y2k demise by mirko · 2004-09-30 19:57 · Score: 0

Since around 2001, companies have been workind even harder to restructurate their activities, layoff staff and relocalize projects and services.
This one is just another of these.
Of course, it's HPaq so we might feel it differently.

--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
1. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by tomhudson · 2004-09-30 23:31 · Score: 1
  
  No, typical Carly Fiorina crap.
  Remember, when she was originally asked to explain the concept, she uttered a bunch of buzz-words. When pressed, she said that they were still in the "process of defining all its features".
  In other words, she's clueless. That might have been fine when she was appointed (l999) during the dot-com boom, but it makes the title of this http://www.bookfinder.us/review9/1591840031.html Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard really ironic.
  The only question in many people's minds is, when is HP going to change this: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.htm l,
  Well, there IS another question - when are they going to ship printers with a full cartridge (ink or toner). They've got to rediscover that customer satisfaction is the key to long-term success.
2. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by MemoryDragon · 2004-09-30 23:39 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Customer satisfaction in pre Fiorina times definitely was the cornerstone of HPs success. HP always was more expensive than the competition, but you got really what you paid for. Printers, which were expensive, but literally lasted forever. Calculators HP was king there with products which represented the best you could get at that area. Same goes for the workstation, which were top notch quality. A processor line, which rivaled with the best (PA-RISC), the list is endless. They asked for high prices, high prices were paid, because the customers knew, they werent let down by the design and durability as well as the company behind it.
  
  Well, nowadays, HP rivals with Dell and others by putting out mediocre PCs. There printer division still is the cash cow, but given the circumstances, they will lose the market in the long term to Canon. Their laser printers already are rebranded Canon printers. PA-RISC dead on the altar of the almighty Itanium. The merger as usual basically cost the best heads in engineering on both sides which either were gone or fled because their friends were gone. HP nowadays is a pale shadow of what it used to be.
  
  Either they go back to their core strengths, reinvent themselves in a totally different field, like IBM did, or they go the way of the dodo. Btw. they are currently trying to make a quick buck by being one of the outsourcing providers. But HP is one of the biggest outsourcers themselves, so why shall customers trust them in this regard? There are others which dont just play middlemen.
3. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by tomhudson · 2004-10-01 00:11 · Score: 1
  
  Yep. In the "old days", when you hefted something made by HP, you could feel that it was more than just a pile of cheap plastic, with every piece made as thin as possible, ready to break if you looked at it the wrong way.
  Seems everyone is becoming allergic to putting too much value into their products except the japanese car manufacturers.
  We had a discussion at work the other day, and the general concensus was that we'd rather drive a jap car with 150,000 km on it than a north american car with 75,000 km on it. The Ford Focus with the door latches that rust shut within a year or so, defective fuel pump design, etc., are a prime example of crap passing for engineering.
4. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by MemoryDragon · 2004-10-01 00:23 · Score: 1
  
  We had a discussion at work the other day, and the general concensus was that we'd rather drive a jap car with 150,000 km on it than a north american car with 75,000 km on it. The Ford Focus with the door latches that rust shut within a year or so, defective fuel pump design, etc., are a prime example of crap passing for engineering. Thats basically what you get if you work for the shareholder value instead of having satisfied customers. In the end you get none of both.
5. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by Lisandro · 2004-10-01 00:33 · Score: 1
  
  Absolutely true. The old HP Laserjet line of printers is still very valued; i've seen some places selling models years old with prices comparables with new ones. And if you ever used one, it makes perfect sense: those printers simple refuse to fail. They are a better value than a new model.
  
  And currently, HP printers (which are indeed their main cash cow) are horrible. Their inkjet printers, much like Epson and Lexmark, suck and are basically throwaway consumables - the insanely high price of the ink doesn't help either. I haven't played with their new Laserjet line but have hear nothing but bad rap about them.
  Right now, Cannon is the only printer manufacturer that has a decent low price inkjet model. I have one where i work and never gave me an issue. Ink could be cheper though.
6. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by MemoryDragon · 2004-10-01 00:50 · Score: 1
  
  Dont tell me, I have one of those old ones (4m) at home. This thing basically is unbreakable and also built to last because with every toner change basically every mechanical part is changed with it.
  
  I would call it the tank of laser printers, very expensive back then (around 4000 USD when it was bought around 10-15 years ago) but still going fine and probably for another 15-20 years. This thing was the reason why I bought lots of HP stuff afterwards, but not anymore. If I compare this printer "tank" with the newer stuff (which in fact is just rebranded Canon) I can say there is a night and day difference in durability and facturing quality. But its not like the newer printers have become so much better in this regard.
7. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 01:21 · Score: 0
  
  Speaking of printers - when I was in college as a 1st year (1993-1994), my parents got me a laser printer, the HP LaserJet 4P. God only knows how expensive it was, but they rationed I was on scholarship so the money they'd set aside for college was still going to be spent "on college."
  
  That thing took horrific abuse, and served as a network printer to my entire hall, and stayed in equally demanding service for three more years. Thousands upon thousands of pages and more than a few toner cartridges approperated from the university labs later, I returned it to my parents when I graduated, along with my old P5-200MX.
  
  And I still regret it - I've since burned though 4 inkjets of various declining quality and 2 laserjets which just don't have the same rugged staying power. I've finally setted, reluctantly, on one of the cast-off commerical jobs.
  
  I took my family home back in April to visit my parents, and amid all the embrassing stories from my past, saw my old computer, silently powered up and printing out IRS tax forms on the 4P, happy and sharp at 4 pages per minute as ever. =)
8. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by nolife · 2004-10-01 01:44 · Score: 1
  
  Although I have a 4plus at home that still chuggs along great, I believe the peak model model for value and durability was the 5si. IMHO, it went downhill from there. I helped deploy many model 4200s recently and they are way to cheap feeling. Some of the plastic pieces (doors, flaps etc) were pulled from the unit by simply removing the shipping tape attached to them.
  
  --
  Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
9. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by adapt · 2004-10-01 01:48 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I had a French computer magazine from 1985 that tested hardware ruggedness by dropping the computers off desks, and then off windows. The HP Vectra was the absolute winner. The baby would boot after being dropped from the 1st floor (without screen :) This is trivia, but it's useful trivia when you remember the "care" that some cleaning ladies put in their work...
  
  I also want to add that my 181000 km Nissan Micra stills drives better than a Ford, and needs less maintenance.
10. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by TheLink · 2004-10-01 02:43 · Score: 1
  
  People like Carly are in it for the bonuses, perks and the golden handshake when everything goes sour. One of those "Professional CEOs".
  
  Customers remember bad stuff for years. In contrast, shareholders can't seem to remember past the last quarter or two.
  
  Whereas the odds are better for a "long term view" if the leader is one of the Founders, or has worked his/her way up.
  --
  
  Too many replies beneath your current threshold
11. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by mwood · 2004-10-01 02:50 · Score: 1
  
  Take a look at Insight before dismissing all of HP. Every once in a while Dell asks us how they could make OpenManage better and I tell them, "make it work as well as Insight!"
  
  That said, I have often wondered what the heck HP is doing in the computer business, and why they sold off all the bits of the company which were "the real HP" to us old-timers. What's left is a bunch of divisions that used to be independent businesses, all making things whose creation central management had nothing to do with and probably have no sympathy for. That's bad for business.
12. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by mwood · 2004-10-01 02:56 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, I remember a story. An HP salesman had come to a school to promote their calculators. One kid asked, "when will you bring your prices down in line with TI?" The salesman picked up the product, wound up and threw it as hard as he could. It bounced off a wall, clattered across the floor, he picked it up and showed that it still worked. "When they can do that," he said.
  
  I have no idea whether the story is true, but that's the kind of reputation HP had in the old days. What kind of reputation are they building for the next decade?
13. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by MemoryDragon · 2004-10-01 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  I just wonder if there ever was any single printer of the 4 or 5 LJ series which ever failed. I have yet to encounter one.
  All I know is that the toners are still sold (some refurbished some new) to a cheap price. So there must be many still living. I think they probably will live to the next atomic blast.
  
  Judging from my 4m at home, this thing is solid metal from the outside and every part which can break during normal operation is exchanged at every toner exchange.
  
  I don't think this thing even can break if you dont misuse it heavily or one of the integrated electronic components give up.
14. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by IgnoramusMaximus · 2004-10-01 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  I just wonder if there ever was any single printer of the 4 or 5 LJ series which ever failed.
  One of my customers has one (LJ4) which started to paper jam after only a few milion pages (not sure how many because the counter rolled over or something). They had two so they took the one with less usage and are using that now for the main invoice printer (10-20 pages an hour). The other one will get fixed and probably will last another decade.
15. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by AuMatar · 2004-10-01 05:22 · Score: 1
  
  I can believe it. I saw a demo here for why we need to build cheaper printers. A 200 pound man stood on an old design, while it was printing. The print came out fine.
  
  --
  I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
16. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by ceswiedler · 2004-10-01 05:24 · Score: 1
  
  Yep, I bought a 4MP ('personal' size with the postscript option) a few years ago for about $200. I had to replace the toner soon thereafter (which cost almost as much as the printer) but I expect both the toner and printer to last forever. Since it's Postscript, getting drivers for it is trivial.
  
  One interesting thing (maybe this is true of all laser printers) is that the lights in my apartment flicker noticeably when I print. It's an old apartment, I guess the power to my building is a little flaky...
17. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by mwood · 2004-10-01 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  Ah, I understand. "Brother sells its customers a new unsatisfactory printer every year -- we need to decrease quality until we can do that too! Our legendary reliability is killing sales."
18. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 07:25 · Score: 0
  
  I'd have to agree with you about the 5si...it's a tank. The main problem with the 4 series isn't the reliability, it's the paper curl. Even the follow-on, LJ4000 has curl problems, but the 5Si and 5000 series use a different paper path and thus produce much flatter output.
19. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by descubes · 2004-10-01 08:34 · Score: 1
  
  This can't be true. Didn't you hear that story of the HP support person getting a call from a customer with a broken PC.
  
  Support rep: "OK, switch your PC on, and tell me what happens".
  
  Customer: "There's smoke coming from the hole on the right side".
  
  Support rep: "Hole? Which hole? This model doesn't have a hole on the right side"
  
  Customer: "Well, it's broken now since it fell downstairs. That's why I called you".
  
  Support rep: "Are you telling me that you are calling because your PC doesn't work after falling downstairs?"
  
  Customer: "Yes"
  
  Support rep: "I'm sorry, I'm afraid this is not covered by your support contract".
  
  Customer: "What? Why not? My HP calculator fell a number of times, and it still works!"
  
  I cannot voucher for the authenticity of this story. This might be an urban legend for all I know. But it exemplifies the kind of stories about HP we had in the good old times...
  
  --
  -- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
20. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by descubes · 2004-10-01 08:53 · Score: 1
  
  Yet another story about calculators. When HP launched the 10 series (HP10C, HP11C, HP12C, HP15C, HP16C), it started with a 1 year warranty. Then 2 years. Then 5 years. Then lifetime. And then, they started giving them away for free with practically every kind of high-end gear they sold. "Buy a cartridge of ink, and get an HP-15 for free", that was their marketing at the time.
  
  Someone at HP told me that the reason was that HP always built a fixed percentage of additional machines for support. They'd never try to fix a calculator, they'd simply replace it. Except that the 10's never died. Ever. So the support stock started piling up... and up...
  
  Well, again, I don't know if this is true. The following, however, I know is true, because this is personal experience. I once lost an HP-15C on a road while biking. I heard the noise, and went back to look for it. I didn't see it right away, and I ran right over it. It still works to that day.
  
  My brother had an HP-28. He was working on some sort of fun, long-running math program, which he debugged while cleaning up something. Some slashdotters probably know the feeling. Well, he heads for lunch, and mistakenly pushes the running HP-28 in the water. Needless to say, he's rather alarmed when he comes back and sees the poor HP-28 underwater. But the calculator still ran fine, running the program happily. I don't know if that qualifies as watercooling... It turns out HP had made it totally waterproof.
  
  OK, yet another story. I had a 48 later (you can still find a few programs I wrote out there). At one point, I noticed that you could switch the calculator on with the batteries out. It would run for a short moment (maybe 5-10 seconds max). So I decided to know how little electricity it used. It took me a 6-digit ampere-meter to figure out. Off the top of my head, it was in the 50 micro-amps range.
  
  ---
  
  --
  -- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
21. Re:Typical post-y2k demise by jp10558 · 2004-10-01 12:04 · Score: 1
  
  I have to disagree here re Epson. They have always been rather reliable printers - I only have problems when I use really cheap 3rd party inks. I still do though, because Epson will replace the printer free during the first year, and I never have problems after that, up to ~4 1/2 years on a printer. Not bad for a $120 inkjet, using $5 cartridges.
  
  The only thing I don't get is why they don't do whatever it is they do at the fix it factory that lets the printer work great with any crap ink for years in the first place rather than having everyone return the printer once in the first year...
  
  Maybe I'm the only one who does - 4 printers along now between myself and my family - been using exclusively Epson since 1998.
  
  --
  Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
HP woes... by ndykman · 2004-09-30 19:58 · Score: 4, Insightful

This is really unfortunate. This technology had real promise, and I hate to see cool ideas that have commerical promise being shelved in favor of...

Okay, for what. Seriously, HP. What the hell. I worked for you as a summer intern in 1997 at HP Labs. I had a good job there. You had lots of smart people who cared. It seems like you had a future, you had plans. What happened to you?

Is Carly is what happened? I'm sorry all the good people their have seem to been let go (laid off) or retired (instead in getting laid off). I feel bad that you couldn't stay.

It seems to me you are hell-bent to take every chance you have and ruin it. You have a lot of riches in talent and idea, and you just seem to toss it away.

Wake up and smell the air around you. You need everything you have to go toe to toe with IBM. Choice is good, remember that, and stop killing good ideas left and right just, well, because?

I still have hope. I really do. But I'm worried, because the more successful IT companies we have, the better we all do.
1. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:03 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger. The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.
  
  If however you still want to work for a company where the HP idea and the HP way live on... head over to Agilent Technologies. They aren't perfect, but it's probably a good thing for everyone there that they were spun off. It's also clear to anyone that has to work with HPaq or Agilent on a daily basis that Agilent is the only one of the two retaining any of the things that made HP a decent company.
2. Re:HP woes... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · 2004-09-30 20:35 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger.
  The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.
  
  It is pretty well known that Carly replaced a huge chunk of HP management with Compaq management. I guess she was thinking that it would be a way to loosen up the inertia and make the company as a whole more receptive to whatever her grande plans are.
  
  But as someone who was, pre-fiorina, on the inside and now spends a lot of time looking in on HP from the outside on behalf of my clients, I'm hard pressed to think of a worse way to handle integrating the two companies. Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.
  
  I think the Hpod is a perfect example of this stupidity - HP's own LOGO has one english word in it, "invent" and yet HP did zero inventing with the Hpod. She and all the compaq deadwood seem bound and determined to make that logo (which was adopted under her reign) a lie by outsourcing all the inventing as well as manufacturering, etc.
  
  Oh well, at least HP is such a behemoth had she suck corporate blood for at least a few more years and the company will still have a chance of recovery. Just as long as she doesn't put a pistol to its head before she leaves.
  
  --
  When information is power, privacy is freedom.
3. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:51 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  HP seems to be trying hard to kill everything of substance that they ever had in Carly's attempt to be a low-cost-Dell-clone company.
  No more PA-Risc.
  No more Alpha.
  No more Itanium Workstations
  No more open source (except for lip service)
  No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
  No more HPUX.
  No altavista when they bought CPQ.
  No more Vision
  No more Hewlett Packard name
  No more Walter Hewlett or Packard involved.
  Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.
  Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.
  I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&Co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest heros of silicon valley.
  If you want to save the thing, people should really bring back Walter Hewlett to the board and make him Chairman. At least he understood what his father's company stood for.
4. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 21:08 · Score: 0, Interesting
  
  Hmm,
  
  I admit, I have yet to RTFA, but I am wondering if the cost of the people doing the research is whats so damned expensive, or is it some kind of government taxation that one must pay to do that kind of research, or is it the cost of the materials? Where does all the money go?
  
  The reason I ask? We have no shortage of Free and Open Source Software developers, heck, one might say there are too many. Can't travel too far on the intarweb without running into one of those advocates. But, I haven't met anyone who does the hardware stuff with the hopes of making a low-cost, non-proprietary videocard or soundcard, or anything. Is there such a group with hardware in mind, like we have the FSF and all that?
  
  I'd imagine that what makes a software project thrive the way it does, the ability to recruit and organize people from all over the world, would be a problem in the hardware field (you'd need to actually be there, in person for most of that stuff).
  
  Now, like I said, I haven't RTFA, yet... maybe some of my questions are answered there, or in the "Similar Stories" links that all News Sites have...
  
  Anyway,
  Just a thought
  
  X5
5. Re:HP woes... by Hobadee · 2004-09-30 21:13 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  I was a big fan of the HP/Compaq merger. I still think it was a good idea. HP's management pre-Carly/Compaq was getting a little too entrenched in old habits. (Basically, just playing it too safe - not taking nessasary risks) When Carly came in, she shook this up a bit - as was needed - however, she shook it up too much. I also find it funny how, when HP's (internal) merger fight was going on, Hewlett (?) was fighting against it because he wanted HP to go in the printing and imaging direction (consumer electronics). Carly however saw past this. Now though, Carly is headed mostly in the CE direction (HPod, etc...)
  
  I think its time we went back to Hewlett and told him that, while the Compaq merger was a good thing, we still need him and some of the older HP ways. (Well, ideally, just "The HP Way")
  
  --
  ...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
6. Re:HP woes... by murdocj · 2004-09-30 21:48 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Best that I can tell, she took the very same people that were responsible for COMPAQ's death spiral and put them into position to do exactly the same thing to HP.
  
  It's weird, same thing happened to my company. We (and a bunch of our competitors) were bought out by a dot bomb that proceeded to loose somewhere in the vicinity of $150 million in 3 years. It was a pretty good trick, given they had bought a bunch of profitable companies.
  
  Then the whole mess was bought out by another company that was supposed to be a smart, well-run organization... and they left the same people in charge of our division. How the hell can people have any sense at all and do that kind thing?
7. Re:HP woes... by AuMatar · 2004-09-30 21:56 · Score: 1
  
  There's a few. The problem is this- software can be replicated for free. Hardware can't. You could probably round up enough people to make open source hardware designs, but the cost of testing those designs would be prohibitivey expensive. In the hundreds of thousands to millions.
  
  --
  I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
8. Re:HP woes... by jcr · 2004-09-30 22:00 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Give it a couple of years.. Agilent will buy the HP name back from the recievers.
  
  --
  The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
9. Re:HP woes... by csteinle · 2004-09-30 22:02 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  It would be worth it just to not have a company name that is an anagram of genital.
10. Re:HP woes... by AuMatar · 2004-09-30 22:05 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Working on the inside- the Compaq merger was aa hideous mistake. HP took its first quaterly losses ever as a result of it. The culture has died- forget about the HP way and the rules of the garage- we took Compaq's management, compaq's employee treatment, Compaq's raise and bonus system (we need to hit target numbers that they refuse to show us. Amazing how we never hit them).
  
  What did we get from it? Well, we became the numbebr 1 PC vendor- for 2 quarters. Dell then overtook us and has held it since. Not that we really got any use of it anyway- PCs are a commodity, we make barely any money from them in good quarters. Servers? We killed the Alpha, and we aren't doing so great in the low end server market. High end Compaq wasn't a comppetitor. Services? Our services division is yet to pull a profit. In fact, most quarters the only division to make a profit is the printer and ink division.
  
  Basicly we sold the corporate culture down the drain, fucked up the balance sheet, devalued the stock, all for nominal to no gains. Profits are the same as they were pre-merger, on twice the revenue. We're woring twice as hard to run in place. Hewlett saw the mistake she was making and tried to save the company, its too bad she bribed Deutchbank at the last minute to squeak through.
  
  This is why you don't put buisness and liberal arts majors in charge of an engineering company. They don't understand the buisness. So they turn it into something they do know- they move to compete in low margin commodity and consumer electronics markets like Carly has done.
  
  RIP HP. You were good while you lasted.
  
  --
  I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
11. Re:HP woes... by Spoing · 2004-09-30 23:35 · Score: 2, Insightful
  This is why you don't put buisness and liberal arts majors in charge of an engineering company. They don't understand the buisness. So they turn it into something they do know- they move to compete in low margin commodity and consumer electronics markets like Carly has done.
  
  Some of the best coders and tech business people I've ever delt with were liberal arts majors. Grind your axe on another stone.
  --
  A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
12. Re:HP woes... by halowolf · 2004-09-30 23:42 · Score: 1
  
  No more HPUX
  I aint going to shed any tears over that loss... Having worked with HPUX, I was quite relieved that we moved to Solaris, at the time that is.
13. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 01:29 · Score: 0
  
  So which of your coder and tech business people are "in charge of a engineering business"?
  
  I have nothing against any major..
14. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 02:25 · Score: 0
  
  Aw, that makes for good laugh. We pre-merger compaq employees think the hp management mentality has taken over. Where we don't invent anything but gadgets (printers and pda's). You and I will be hurting once Dell starts to take over the printer space.
15. Re:HP woes... by SDF-7 · 2004-10-01 02:31 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  "No more HPUX"...
  
  That link is just about 11.0 going into "support only" mode this year, and end-of-life in 2006. Hardly surprising since 11i v1.0 (11.11) has been around since 2000 to replace it... [not to mention 11i v2.0 for IPF and PA this year, with 11i v3.0 upcoming].
  
  That's like saying that MS has done away with Windows as a whole just because they want to stop supporting Win98.
16. Re:HP woes... by Spoing · 2004-10-01 02:41 · Score: 1
  So which of your coder and tech business people are "in charge of a engineering business"?
  
  Are you asking for names, a stack of resumes, or a discription of what they do exactly? (I'm not going to go through the trouble...unless you've got work for them (USA, DC - Baltimore coridor mainly; a couple will travel if worth it though most don't want to and none need to!).
  --
  A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
17. Re:HP woes... by mwood · 2004-10-01 02:59 · Score: 1
  
  What technology *is* UDC, exactly? I followed a couple of links but couldn't find anything to explain why I should want it.
18. Re:HP woes... by mwood · 2004-10-01 03:01 · Score: 1
  
  Sounds like the disease that killed DEC, then spread to Compaq, is now chewing happily on HP. Sad.
19. Re:HP woes... by Distan · 2004-10-01 03:14 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Hey AuMatar,
  
  It sounds like you are trying to hang in there. There is no disgrace in moving on. I was at HP for twelve years and thought I would be a lifer. I finally realized that enough is enough. I walked out the door and haven't looked back.
  
  The "secret targets" for bonuses was absolutely mind-boggling. The only time I saw a bonus from that scheme was the quarter before the merger, when she tried to buy our votes.
  
  Under Bill and Dave, profit sharing was "profit sharing". Any person with half a brain could look at a quarterly statement, pull out their calculator, and find out what there bonus would be to the penny.
  
  I don't swear lightly, but Carly can rot in hell for what she has done to what was once a flagship of engineering capability. One has to wonder what she has on the board, because they should have cut her goldbricking ass free years ago.
  
  To show how much concern the new HP has for the brand, it was announced just a few days ago that my new company has purchased the right to bring certain products to market and ship them under the HP name. We will design, manufacture, package, distribute, and market something that the consumer will only know as "HP". The old HP would have seen hell freeze over before selling the rigth to control of the quality of products bearing their name.
20. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 03:34 · Score: 0
  
  That's because Carly is a cunt...make no mistake about it.
  
  (This should be +5 Insightful!)
21. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:04 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  HP has often shipped third-party products under the HP brand, and has also manufactured products for third party (even rival) companies to ship under their own brands.
22. Re:HP woes... by Jeff+DeMaagd · 2004-10-01 04:09 · Score: 1
  
  Invent on the HP iPod was pretty stupid. I think the point of the invent term was suggesting that HP products could be used in creative endevours, but with iPod being a pure entertainment product, it doesn't fit except for branding.
  
  I thought Compaq had some pretty good hardware and designs, and HP did too. I've had a Compaq SP700 dual Xeon 500, a Compaq W6000 workstation, I own a couple W8000s and a light Compaq business laptop. I've been buying the ATX-based DeskPros, which have been indispensible as light servers.
  
  I've been pretty happy with all of these products, and the fact that HP / Compaq still even has downloads available for my DEC Alpha Personal Workstation is very helpful, they seem to keep their diagnostic & downloads up for products that are older than my oldest computer.
23. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:31 · Score: 0
  
  I agree about the HP culture or the demise thereof. I left HP almost a year ago now. At that time it seemed as though Compaq was the one that had bought HP, not the other way around.
  
  However I don't know that this can entirely be blamed on that. HP has been known to devise killer technology, but then fail to market it.
24. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:53 · Score: 0
  
  Obviously the person making comments of HP management has to be affiliated with someone in HP management or of those less intelligent. Clearly all VPs and higher level corporate clowns coming form AT&T that I have had the displeasure of meeting for ALL have taken fortune 500 companies and turned them into fortune 900 companies. The Compaq Management has gone to other companies and if people would look a the reduction in revenue at HP you will find the exact growth in other Services companies. HELLO HP is down right Giving the competition its bread and butter While the upper CEOs and VPs stuff their pockets off the blood sweat and tears of previous generations endeavors in creating a top level company. So far as I am concerned anyone who comes into a corporation with as much success in the services and Servers and systems as Digital then Compaq NOT HP, and states "We have to retrain and change customers behaviour" has no clue on Customer focus or Service. Hearing things like Adaptive enterprise is a load of garbage as well as any self respecting IT manager knows you design a road map to keep up with changes in technology and if you don't then go pack garbage in a truck because you don't belong directing an IT infrastructure. Signed sick and tired of being sick and tired... posted anonymously for good reason Bye... Research prior to comments is always good practice. See keywords [Lucent, stock reorts then HP stock reports see years 1994 then 1996] then follow the numbers and draw your own conclusions...
25. Re:HP woes... by Mattintosh · 2004-10-01 05:03 · Score: 1
  
  One has to wonder what she has on the board
  
  Her mouth. 3 guesses as to what part of the board it's on, and the first 2 guesses don't count.
26. Re:HP woes... by Firethorn · 2004-10-01 05:25 · Score: 1
  
  It's not a new thing. My Dad used to work for a feed company. They were a medium sized, but profitable company. Their nich: They would custom make feed for special purposes. With them you could test the grass, and have a custom supplimental feed made up. Include medicines, etc. They offered all sorts of standard high-quality feeds as well. They survived by being able to charge more for the feed, but the ranchers/farmers made more too because of superior growth. This was insured because the local managers and sales staff were well qualified, on the ball.
  
  Then they were bought out by a larger company, which proceeded to strip all control away from the local managers & staff, end the custom feed lines. Guess what? They lost customers, and started loosing money just like the parent company. Dad's working for a heating/cooling company now.
  
  --
  I don't read AC A human right
27. Re:HP woes... by HiThere · 2004-10-01 06:45 · Score: 1
  
  And you don't want to hear what my wife thinks of the last HP printer we bought. It seems that when you are printing sideways it unpredicatably (so far) inserts blank sheets of paper in the middle of jobs, making double sided printing impossible. We need to do this twice a year, so we're willing to go to a bit of extra effort to do so, but this...!!
  
  Copymat will be pleased with the new business.
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Gone but not forgotten by modest+apricot · 2004-09-30 20:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

While it may be gone, it won't ever be a total loss as long as HP learned something from it. Maybe something about more cost efficient technology, or maybe being more wary of the hype that comes with shiny new things.
To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:12 · Score: 5, Interesting

It's to bad to see technology like this die.

I know it's not going to happen, but it would be nice if HP would just release it as open source software instead of just letting it die off.

That way they could stick a couple designers on it, who would otherwise probably be fired, and see if anybody would like to pick it up. (hint hint Redhat)

The reason stuff like this tends to go, IMO, is that even though it's good software, nobody is in the position to pay for something that they don't need. However by letting people play around with it and modify it to suite their specific purposes there is a chance that new life could be breathed into it and then HP would be in a possition to benifit from it, since they are the people with the most expertise with the software.

Of course that sort of thing is very unlikely, but I am just sayin'. You know?
1. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:57 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I know it's not going to happen, but it would be nice if HP would just release it as open source software instead of just letting it die off.
  You forget that HP is so opposed to open source that it appears to have walked away from it's $470 million (what they paid) open-source-based software group out of fear of offending their proprietary software vendors. I think they'd sooner sign over the patents to MSFT than release it as open source.
2. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by AuMatar · 2004-09-30 22:08 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Not going to happen. We went from supporting OSS somewhat to having to jump through 5 levels of management to release anything. We wanted to release a small programthat was totally tangential to our main buisness and had no competitive value- we couldn't. Even to USE open sourcee officially requires 3 or 4 levels of managers now (if you do so officially- most of us don't bother to).
  
  --
  I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
3. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Spoing · 2004-09-30 23:38 · Score: 1
  
  HP also released substantial chunks of OSS to support printers. HP printers, for sure, though the code can be reused for other printers if anyone cared to do so.
  
  --
  A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
4. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 01:35 · Score: 0
  
  UDC relied on multiple copies of Openview Network Node manager and Openview Operations. There was a cultural battle within HP where many thought that UDC should be part of the Openview Group, but apparently there was resistance from other quarters.
  
  Openview Operations for Unix is an extremely pricy product (and certainly out of the realm of possibility when talking about OSS) and the Openview Group within HP had refused for a long time to give any sort of price break to UDC. This meant that the product was far, far more expensive than it needed to be.
  
  If HP's Openview Group and the UDC group worked together, the price would've come down substantially. Remember, one copy of Openview Operations is approximately $70,000. The last I heard, UDC required 5 copies.
5. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 03:57 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  How was this modded interesting. Bluestone was never open-source, and it got canned because it could not compete against the app server offerings of BEA, Oracle, IBM, Sun and MS. It was too little, too late for HP.
  
  And HP has a Linux division, it has major contributors to the Linux kernel, it open-sourced some of its code (with the wrong licence (GPL) but for good reasons IMO (to avoid creating yet another licence)).
  
  Don't kid yourself with IBM. IBM is helping Linux because it is a good way to attack its competition (it really helped put AIX back on the map, because they market Linux solutions but end up selling AIX).
6. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by fred+fleenblat · 2004-10-01 06:12 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I wish there was a legal requirement that "abandonware" be automatically converted to open source. There's no cost to the company really, just stick a tarball on an ftp site.
  
  In cases like this, it allows customers to fix and upgrade to meet their own needs and preserves their investment. Over time, this could shift some of the balance in purchasing decisions away from big companies that are seen as stable and supporting their products for the long term over to more bleeding edge risky companies. Some customers demand source escrow in their contracts for their own protection, but I think it's time that this became the default for all contracts and that the source go public.
  
  Same thing should apply to music and book copyrights. If you can't purchase a copy of an out of print book from a publisher or get a CD of a treasured old recording, you should have the right to just make a copy yourself, since the publisher has effectively waived his interest by ceasing to publish.
7. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-02 06:47 · Score: 0
  
  Even to USE open sourcee officially requires 3 or 4 levels of managers now (if you do so officially- most of us don't bother to).
  
  I call BS. Our (HP) product uses 3 or 4 OSS pieces and we never had to ask for any permission. Of course we have taken care of picking products with compatible licences (mostly by avoiding GPL). We are just in the process of picking another piece (instead of developing it), and trust me, we mostly looking at OSS solutions (both for price and ability to modify reasons). But we previously licensed a closed-source visualization package because it was cost effective. No religion here.
  
  As far as requiring approval to open-source stuff, there is a board to examine such requests, with known OSS contributors as members (e.g. Mosberger-Tan).
  
  From your post you are either not working for HP, or your management chain had to deal with OSS zealots that would be a risk for business if left to their own judgement (read more interested in the OSS religion than in what makes business sense).
Sounds like Loudcloud? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:31 · Score: 2, Interesting

Yeah... great idea, just like loudcloud was. Of course companies would rather not have their own data. Heck, they the whole outsourcing trend suggests they don't want their own employees either; so why not put all your data somewhere else. Personally, what I think killed these ideas is that everyone trusted their corporate data to gmail accounts.
Not.
Seriously, these ideas made no sense, because good data management is a competitive advantage that good companies have over bad ones. If you had a company, why would you like to fund the datacenter your competitor is using. Duh.
Improper Marketing by foobsr · 2004-09-30 20:39 · Score: 2, Insightful

In the end, it was the massive price for a UDC installation that culled "the vision," bucking the age-old adage that customers will buy anything with a fancy enough ribbon.

Translated: "Marketing was incapaple of addressing potential customers properly, after being reluctant to finance research on the issue".

CC.

--
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
1. Re:Improper Marketing by jaques · 2004-09-30 22:03 · Score: 1
  
  Also the technological challenges were significant, with no real solutions to the problem of large scale resource allocation. I've heard them talk of a 'magic number' of machines they could manage (3000? - they were closed mouthed about it) before the system was unworkable. They're vision was for 50,000, but they were mostly focused on a economically inspired centralised managment system, which wasn't gonna scale, IMHO. The technology behind 'Utility computing' (HP) (or 'Autonomic computing' (IBM) or 'grid computing' (academia)) is not developed enough IMO to be solid and cost effective at the moment. Give it 5 years. (disclaimer - this is the focus of my PhD)
  
  --
  Jaques
Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 20:45 · Score: 5, Insightful

HP seems to be trying hard to kill everything of substance that they ever had in Carly's attempt to be a low-cost-Dell-clone company.
No more PA-Risc.
No more Alpha.
No more Itanium Workstations
No more open source (except for lip service)
No more Bluestone software (based on open source.
No more HPUX.
No altavista when they bought CPQ.
No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name
No more Hewlett or Packard involved.
Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.
Hewlett and Packard built one of the greatest companies in the history of Silicon Valley; and Carly managed to tank the thing in a couple years trying to pretend she can be a Michael Dell commodity-vendor.
I wish they'd just change the name to Carly&co to stop trashing the inintials of two of the greatest hheros of silicon valley.
1. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by jcr · 2004-09-30 21:56 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I agree with most of your post, but why knock them for ditching the Itanic?
  
  -jcr
  
  --
  The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
2. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 22:14 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  No more calculators.
3. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 22:32 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Back when EPIC was being designed HP was an equal partner with Intel on some concepts that were quite visionary in CPU designes.
  The first working silicon of this bleeding-edge R&D was the not-horrible-but-not-great Itanium/Itanic.
  Just because that first implemention wasn't earth-shattering, it doesn't mean the whole concept was a failure. What this product family needs is R&D people with the vision that the old HP team once had to iterate on and refine the design. A HP dedicated to this cool architecture would go a long way to finally delivering on the benefits of VLIW. If left to intel, they'd happily kill it - why rock the x86 monopoly boat if they don't haave to.
4. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 01:00 · Score: 0
  
  Because they were trying something different? Not that I like Itanium at all, but at least it is a different offering than the standard desktop PC.
5. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by miller701 · 2004-10-01 01:16 · Score: 1
  
  HP seems to be trying hard to kill everything of substance that they ever had in Carly's attempt to be a low-cost-Dell-clone company. No more PA-Risc. No more Alpha. No more Itanium Workstations
  As much as I loved Alpha, was there a big enough market to create new fabs to keep up with Intel and AMD? As noted in a previous discussions, Itanic servers are still around.
  No more Vision NO more Hewlett Packard name No more Hewlett or Packard involved. Seems to me that last one triggered when it all started falling apart.
  Amen to that.
6. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by mwood · 2004-10-01 03:18 · Score: 1
  
  If you have a good product, and you actually go out and present it to people who could use it, you can sell enough to keep it going and make some money. Changing the CPU under what people are doing is a really hard sell, I'll admit, but the various companies that had the AxP at one time or another never even tried, so far as I can tell.
  
  Having a great product is not enough. The buyers have to know it's great, and sometimes that means you have to go out and tell them about it.
7. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 03:33 · Score: 0
  
  I agree with most of your post, but why knock them for ditching the Itanic?
  
  The Itanic is a POS.... but for the customers that bought the snakeoil, it's a pain to have to migrate to another vendor.
  
  It's not a sales issue, it's a support issue.
8. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:02 · Score: 0
  
  Have you ever written a line of code on an Itanium machine (and I should say Itanium2
  since Itanium (1) was really a development vehicle) ?
  
  I, for one, would love to see Mac OS X Server ported to Itanium.
9. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:12 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  Who are you working for ? Are you a competitor or a Fiorina victim ? You certainly seem to have an axe to grind.
  
  The MS patent attack memo is bullshit, it was 2 years ago and HP is still contributing to open-source. E.G., who wrote the EFI bootloader that 90% of the Linux users will employ in a few years ? HP (well Mosberger & Eranian).
  
  HP-UX is alive and HP is investing for its success (not enough maybe, but that's better than it was). Tru64 is being killed, which may be unfortunate but makes perfect sense if you look at the respective market shares.
  
  Altavista had lost the game years ago. I stopped using it even before Google appeared.
  
  Alpha had about a 5% markshare and dropping (while PA-RISC had around 30%). It had to die, no matter how good it was technically. And, between us, it wasn't _that_ good. DEC was full of engineers in awe of their creations but without an incentive to ship. Ah they were good at marketing _to geeks_, that's why ppl still worship products that just didn't work (e.g. FX!32, very neat product but nowhere as good as what you'd think by reading ppl praising it.)
10. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:14 · Score: 0
  
  The first working silicon of this bleeding-edge R&D was the not-horrible-but-not-great Itanium/Itanic.
  
  Itanium (1)/Merced was mostly an Intel design. Itanium2/McKinley was in good parts designed by PA-RISC people. It shows.
11. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:18 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  HP was in serious trouble before Carly came along. It was full of form-over-substance dinosaurs ('technical contributors') who hadn't done diddly in a decade but retained their positions in the way of people doing the real work. There were endless meetings, and the power to halt progress was in the power of the many, whereas the power to make progress was in the hands of the few. If someone didn't like what you were doing, or what you were doing first, they could call a meeting of 'their army' versus 'your army' to hash it out for half a day. In this meeting, every invitee felt he or she had to say something...especially if they had nothing to say. The 'HP Way' was so badly abused that it wasn't even funny. It began to feel like you had to get signoff from the guy who cleaned the toilets to change a line of code.
12. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by jcr · 2004-10-01 20:13 · Score: 1
  
  I, for one, would love to see Mac OS X Server ported to Itanium.
  
  Well, that makes one of you.
  
  -jcr
  
  --
  The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
13. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-04 19:01 · Score: 0
  
  Just an investor who lost some money in HP, and guy who knew a couple of the board members an didn't like they way they kicked Walter Hewlett off the board. I think the board's vision was very shortsighted and sold short most of former-HP's strengths.
I'm confused... by hugesmile · 2004-09-30 21:27 · Score: 1, Funny

I forget, do we like HP or hate them? Or do we like them but hate Carly?
1. Re:I'm confused... by khaidar · 2004-09-30 21:36 · Score: 1
  
  I feel nothing....
2. Re:I'm confused... by Vo0k · 2004-09-30 21:38 · Score: 1
  
  Dislike but still hope.
  
  "It used to be such a fine company! Nowadays they try really hard not to be evil, but they fail hopelessly. We wish them best of luck at their attempts, but for now, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, HP!"
  
  --
  Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
3. Re:I'm confused... by Umrick · 2004-09-30 23:57 · Score: 1
  
  I think we like the memory of what HP was, and hate what it has become. Every division has suffered.
  
  Their PCs, printers, and servers are all a shadow of what they were. Feels like the entire line has been taken over in quality by the Presario line. They've replaced all-in-ones with units that don't have a fourth of the capabilities. New PCs that break in odd ways and their support has no documentation for (machines labeled 'HP Compaq' on the front). Bad news all around.
  
  Sad to watch a former tech leader become a "also-run" fading star.
Nice company motto by r_j_prahad · 2004-09-30 21:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

So this is what HP means by "Invent"? In just a few short years, I have waved sayonara to their medical instruments division, their measurements division, OpenMail, MPE/iX and the HP3000 line, and now UDC. Not to mention tens of thousands of people, many of whom I used to work with.

I'm too depressed to continue. I only wish our country had the balls to fight treason like this.
1. Re:Nice company motto by danheskett · 2004-10-01 00:17 · Score: 1
  
  I only wish our country had the balls to fight treason like this.
  I feel the same way that you do, but remember, the changes in HP's stategy have been board-approved and shareholder approved.
  
  My personal opinion is that the board at HP got the idea that diversity is a goal instead of a side-effect of healthy policy. Carly had what many consider an unimpressive start in business, selling what was essentially commodity products. She never believed in the HP Way. And her company is quickly tanking.
  
  But, really, this has nothing to do with the country. This is the misguided actions of a few with power.
2. Re:Nice company motto by The-Bus · 2004-10-01 01:12 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  "I'm too depressed to continue. I only wish our country had the balls to fight treason like this."
  
  Don't worry, something is being done about it. It's just not coming from the government.
  
  --
  Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
3. Re:Nice company motto by zulux · 2004-10-01 03:30 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  sayonara to their medical instruments division, their measurements division, OpenMail , MPE/iX and the HP3000 line
  
  Samsung bought OpenMail off of HP - after HP decided to kill it. Samsung ran OpenMail and liked it so much.. ."they bought the company."
  
  Samsung will happily sell you a copy.
  
  Samsung Contact
  
  --
  Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
4. Re:Nice company motto by haggar · 2004-10-01 04:06 · Score: 1
  
  You forgot one: PA-RISC. RIP.
  
  --
  Sigged!
5. Re:Nice company motto by Shadowlore · 2004-10-03 12:33 · Score: 1
  
  If you really want to stop this kind of activity, put an end to the corporation. Businesses should not be treated like people; immune to nearly everything. You can be for business, indeed even big responsible business, and against the government dealing out special protections to them.
  
  --
  My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
There are people behind the technology by descubes · 2004-09-30 21:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

Several comments lamented the loss of a great technology. I couldn't care less. There are men and women behind this technology, several of them close friends of mine, and that's the real problem here. For them, obviously, but also for HP. HP loses a really large pool of talented engineers. That's another great blow to the morale of the engineering community at HP. If something like UDC can go belly up in a matter of weeks, who's next?

--
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
1. Re:There are people behind the technology by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 22:06 · Score: 0
  
  Interestingly, the poster above seems to work for HP. And he apparently knew about the loss of UDC (unless there is some other "red-hot" project that HP is cancelling). And he apparently was not too pleased about it.
  
  What is this "Integrity Virtual Machine" thing? Does anybody know?
2. Re:There are people behind the technology by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:15 · Score: 0
  
  The technology affected many - thousands directly, hundreds of thousands indirectly - people.
  The team - well, that's what they get for pooring their heart out into a closed-source solution. With an open source solution, they could continue developing and selling it even if the partner company stops caring.
3. Re:There are people behind the technology by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 15:39 · Score: 0
  
  What is this "Integrity Virtual Machine" thing? Does anybody know?
  
  http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/76971-0 -0-0-121.aspx?Jumpid=virtualization_081604/Linux
  
  I believe that indeed Christophe was referring to someone who was working on UDC. If that's the person I am thinking of, it's someone who had enough balls to sponsor Chrisophe while he worked on the VM idea.
Another botch-up from HP by a.different.perspect · 2004-09-30 22:16 · Score: 1, Insightful

I predicted this would happen. Everyone - including myself - believed that UDC had massive potential. It was just never marketed the way it should have been. HP's engineers are top-notch and have developed stellar products, but their execs never put too much faith in their innovation and only catch on when other products from other companies of the same kind become successful. By then, it's too late.
As an IBM On Demand consultant by LinuxHam · 2004-09-30 23:15 · Score: 3, Funny

Thanks, HP! ;)

--
Intelligent Life on Earth
1. Re:As an IBM On Demand consultant by icke · 2004-10-01 03:23 · Score: 1
  
  This discussion has disintegrated into HP bashing and has not at all commented on whether there is business need for a utility/on-demand/adaptive architecture. What's really driving it? Taking cost out (shared resources) or business agility, virtualisation and globalisation. Where would you place bets on this and what are the implications. And one of the players I think are creeping up on the quiet are Cisco. Huge market share. IOS creeping ever up the "stack" and obviously distributed, secure, service-oriented. Quite what the difference is between a blade server and a Cisco chasis with "cards in it" has yet to be explained to me. Oh and IOS is not open-source. O.
2. Re:As an IBM On Demand consultant by LinuxHam · 2004-10-01 14:40 · Score: 1
  
  This discussion has [..] not at all commented on whether there is business need for a utility/on-demand/adaptive architecture
  
  That's because most /.ers would have no idea what we would be talking about if we had that discussion here. I've said for years that if there's a place on the web that's like /. but attracts more (employed) IT consultants and folks in the trenches than high school and college kids, I'd like to know where it is.
  
  Yes, while we have forged a great relationship with Cisco (I consult at one of the first sites to deploy Cisco directors, and we're about to deploy IBM's SVC - the Cisco blade version), this is a "pipes vs water" discussion. Cisco doesn't make servers. They route data. Do one thing and do it well. Unless they suddenly decide to package some kind of whittled-down servlet engine to enable ebiz environments for the SMB market, I think they'll leave that game to those who have been doing it for nearly a decade. Its not like its a concept that's still in its infancy and the direction is still being decided. Blade servers are full Intel or RISC servers in a micro-pizza box configuration with custom connectors and not much more. And who knows, maybe one day a vendor will release blade servers designed to plug into a Cisco chassis with 10Gbit networking. Hard to do failover across core routers that way, but hey, its a thought.
  
  Finally, yes, there is a huge business need for On Demand. Of course, its difficult to get into preaching about On Demand without being labeled a "marketdroid", "shill", or "parrot". On Demand is much more about business consulting that IT consulting. Its about rediscovering what your business was born to do. Its about collecting and organizing all of your corporate data and using open architectures to invent new ways of looking at that data, and selling views of that data back to your business units -- the consumers of that data. Its about stripping IT out of the ivory towers (leaving just the business functions behind) and using open methods for selling it back to the towers in useful new ways they've never dreamed of before - gaining new insight into and linkages with other related divisions, their customers, suppliers, and business partners. When my family asks what kind of work I do, I usually explain that for the last 20 years, computers have been used to take jobs away from people. Well, for the next 20, I am helping to develop new business processes that were never previously possible due to the "processing limitations" of human beings.
  
  Check out what I've been getting trained on this summer: Virtualization Engine Its a manager for your ebiz environment that tells you whether or not your stated business goals are being met, and uses ARM instrumentation to tell you where your sequence is underperforming. Its really quite amazing all the technologies that have been brought under the VE umbrella. And unlike HP, our product manages ebiz apps running on RISC (pSeries and iSeries) and Intel, across AIX, i5/OS, Windows, and Linux on all those platforms. The mainframe has had incredible levels of workload management for years and is being incorporated into this strategy. I hope this answers some of your questions or clarifies some things for you.
  
  --
  Intelligent Life on Earth
Wake up and smell the coffee by Mr_Silver · 2004-09-30 23:28 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yes it's a shame it has been killed off but had you read the article you would have seen:
Hard as it to believe, HP's grand wrapping of the smartest severs, storage, networking and software products on the planet could not find enough buyers.
So it was good technology, but they couldn't find enough buyers. So it was losing money. What do you propose they do with technology that no-one wants to buy? Keep it running and losing money just because it's "cool"?
You bitch about the music industry and their outdated business model yet it seems like this technology has an equally flawed one too (that is, no-one wanted to purchase it). Yes I'm being harsh, but unless I get any more facts I'm inclined to believe that Carly killed it off because it was losing more money than it was making.
Microsoft have enough cash in the bank to allow nearly all of their departments to make money - not everyone else has this luxury.

--
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
1. Re:Wake up and smell the coffee by birder · 2004-10-01 00:08 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  They couldn't find enough buyers because it didn't do what buyers wanted. They deviated from the design in 2.0 compared to what 1.x promised. The first release had some good stuff that just need a bit more management around. Then in version 2 they went a different direction.
  
  We listened to them but there was no way we would of spend millions buying into UDC they way it was turning into.
  
  What it boiled down to is the stopped listening to what customers wanted to began tell them what they needed.
2. Re:Wake up and smell the coffee by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 00:57 · Score: 0
  
  Let me first say that I don't really know what in the hell this all does. But the register article has a quote saying that customers never really bought all that was required to make it work. It seems to me that although this might have been good technology, it didn't scale down or have a good entry level starting point. Most of the companies I've seen want to see how things will really work before making a major commitment involving major money. When you need all or nothing to really see this work, it's no surprise that people weren't jumping on the bandwagon.
3. Re:Wake up and smell the coffee by diamondsw · 2004-10-01 02:41 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  What it boils down to is the business models are flawed.
  
  Customers are led to believe costs will be lower in a UDC/ODC. However, think about it - the hosting company has just taken on all of the risk of hardward procurement. To cover the risk, it has to be baked into the costs. Otherwise, what happens if you board a customer who has very low utilization? They don't pay much, and you can't recover the cost of the hardware. Thus costs are higher, and it violates customers' expectations - they dont sign. Furthermore, many software licensing schemes are incompatible with a UDC/ODC - they're based on total size of the host platform, and don't take into account utilization, partitions, etc. That adds cost as well. And then there's a lot of technology to make it all happen, but no amount of good tech will fix such a flawed business model.
  
  It's too expensive and is marketed horribly. That's why it died. Now it's up to IBM alone to prove this will work...
  
  --
  I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Carly = Chainsaw Al by Old+Telco+Guy · 2004-09-30 23:43 · Score: 0

In my opinion, Carly is the reincarnation of Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Same process, same results.
1. Re:Carly = Chainsaw Al by plopez · 2004-10-01 04:48 · Score: 1
  
  She has been referred to as 'The Angel of Death' due to her track record at Lucent/ATT.
  
  --
  putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
2. Re:Carly = Chainsaw Al by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 06:31 · Score: 0
  But at least Al Dunlap (of Sunbeam fame, IIRC) was consistent.
  Carly's thought process:
  
  gee, let's be #1 by buying big companies.
  
  ok, next, let's be #2 again by cutting all the stuff we bought
  
  ...
  
  dont profit
  
  doesn't even sound like a strategy. It sounds like "please don't fire me yet, I have a Newer New plan".
OT by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-30 23:47 · Score: 0

You, sir, are an ass.
Um...what was this? by sgant · 2004-10-01 00:05 · Score: 1

I'm a tad slow on the uptake I suppose, but I read the article by Ashlee Vance at the Register and while she was trying to be cute and clever, she didn't really explain just what the hell the UDC was.

Was it a server product? Was it a service? Was it an exhibit at HP ala Epcot Center or something?

All I got from her article was that it was kinda cool, yet not really cool. Innovative, yet not really. Marketed yet not marketed. And that customers didn't want to buy it...probably because they didn't know exactly what they were buying?

So please, someone enlighten me!

--

"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
1. Re:Um...what was this? by Mr.+No+Skills · 2004-10-01 01:25 · Score: 1
  
  I thought this was funny too. The article talkes about this being hyped for years. As someone that buys HP and works with a lot of large HP customers I would have thought I would have heard of this before. All news to me. http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=UDC turns up three hits, this one and two that seem unconnected.
  
  If a business plans falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it create a loss?
  
  --
  Sleep is for the Weak
2. Re:Um...what was this? by kevinank · 2004-10-01 04:31 · Score: 1
  
  Utility Data Center (UDC) was a combination of software and hardware designed to be extremely agile in forming new network topologies. The idea was to be able to point to any N machines and network attached storage devices, and physically rewire them into a new network topology appropriate for some problem. When the task was complete they would be put back into the resource pool to be allocated to the next project.
  
  Many of the software and hardware parts of UDC will continue to be developed even after the UDC Business Unit is shut down. It is just the need for a hyper-expensive hardware resource pool sold as a unit that failed to develop a viable business plan. UDC overestimated CIO willingness to rent IT hardware, and failed to engage with managed services. On the other hand, CIO's were also unwilling to make the couple of hundred million investment that a UDC cost -- the system wasn't deliverable in digestible size chunks.
  
  --
  LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
UMI was actually in the news this morning by gelfling · 2004-10-01 00:22 · Score: 1

On CNBC, a brief blurb, which frankly is astonishing given the relative secrecy IBM pursues.
I didn't know either... by zogger · 2004-10-01 00:38 · Score: 2, Informative

...had to go look it up, so far nothing in the thread indicated what it was. It appears from a google search to stand for "utility data center" , some sort of universal server/data/format whosis that can be used on the fly, cross platform, washed the car, walks the dog, etc, all while providing enterpise level clients the rich experience they need in order to maintain customer satisfaction and increase profits...whatever. Maybe someone better in the know will take pity on us and give a better idea of what it was.
1. Re:I didn't know either... by WuphonsReach · 2004-10-02 04:04 · Score: 1
  
  That was always my impression too of the entire "UDC" sector. And if your product is too difficult to explain to the average manager, it's simply not going to sell.
  
  (My personal, mostly uninformed, take on it is that it was a way to lock customers in to HP-only solutions while sounding "open". IOW, same wolf in a different set of sheep skins.)
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
what do you propose HP should have done? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 01:02 · Score: 0

should they have continued the project even though it was losing money? companies that don't scrap unprofitable ventures can't last. it's beneficial for everyone at HP, including those that were on the team, that money isn't thrown away on something that isn't working. it may casue a few people some temporary pain, but if something isn't sustainable, it's better to kill it than let it slowly drag the whole company down.
Ahead of its time to be sure by Mr.+No+Skills · 2004-10-01 01:33 · Score: 1

Ahead of its time to be sure.

I believe this is a common thread throughout much of HP's history. Handheld computers, electronic survey equipment, desktop laser printers. HP has been a company that produced wonderful new products. I think cancelling some of them before the market developed, to watch someone else fill the void, is probably part of the history too.

--
Sleep is for the Weak
why knock them for ditching the Itanic? by dpilot · 2004-10-01 03:42 · Score: 1

Itanium is the son of microchannel, in a way.

Microchannel was 2 main things - it was a technical improvement on the ISA bus, and it was a way to hold the clones at bay. The industry saw that latter issue, and was able to work around the former.

I can allow IA64 to be better than X86, though I don't consider the extreme amount of funding to have been justified by the results, but it was also managed to stave off cloners, in an even more extreme way than microchannel.

At least microchannel could be licensed. All of the IP for IA64 is held by a separate company, and then licensed back to HP and Intel. That way none of the HP or Intel cross-licenses release any of the IA64 IP. The IP holding company couldn't actually build an IA64, because it no doubt depends on IP from other companies. But that's OK, because IA64 is only built by HP and Intel, who *are* cross-licensed. An interesting one-way sharing mechanism, far more sinistar than microchannel ever thought of being.

IA64 deserves to die may times more than microchannel did.

--
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
1. Re:why knock them for ditching the Itanic? by MemoryDragon · 2004-10-01 06:35 · Score: 1
  
  Intel probably did this, because they already have cross licensing contracts with Via and AMD and probably a bunch of others. The Itanium as I see it, should have been the death blow to AMD and others in the x86 arena. Although the concept is interesting, from this angle I am glad that they failed.
Another one down by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:12 · Score: 0

Once you've been on the inside of HP's systems software labs, you tend to wonder how they made it this far.
I had the fortune (or misfortune) of being part of the group that HP inherited from AT&T/Novell Unix Systems Labs. Probably one of the greatest collections of -NIX OS talent on earth.
Unfortunately, when HP hired the engineers they also brought over most of the stumblebums with "Bell Shaped Heads" whose brand of management showed that, even with a monopoly, you can fail.
That aside, those stumblebums fit right in with the paralyzed-by-consensus-building folks at Cupertino and Ft. Collins who turned HP-UX into the mess that it is today.
Customers might like it, but making in as reliable as it is costs three times what it should. Simply because it's a kludged-up mess of BSD code and architecture with System V code piled on top. Getting anything done in it was nigh-on impossible...which explains why the neanderthal BSD file-system dominated the OS long after other UNIXes had moved on to journaling filesystems.
Though I've been away for a few years, I believe HP-UX is probably STILL laboring under separate buffer caches for program virtual memory and file system buffers. Fixing that was a technical no-brainer, but a political impossibility...entranched 'Technical Contributors' would have to learn something new.
The NJ labs group soldiered on, doing a great deal of maintenance that nobody else wanted to do, and leading the 64-bit port, supposedly the flagship project. When it was done, what did Carly do?
Fired all of the engineers, that's what.
Nearly EVERY ex-AT&T/Novell manager was offered a nice job in Ft. Collins or Cupertino. Nearly NONE of the engineers with multiple decades of UNIX experience were offered anything. By then I was well out of there, but it was heartbreaking to see the waste of such a concentration of -NIX skill.
Right at the very moment when Linux was hitting the mainstream. Nobody ever had a better potential Open Source lab than HP Florham Park.
Score two for Carly in New Jersey. She was part of the Board which artificially ran up the Lucent Technologies stock values, leading to a massive collapse which left thousands out of work.
'The HP Way,' 'Invent,' and so on...all myth in the 21st century. As a company, HP has ossified, and is being run by dinosaurs who only relate to other dinosaurs. p.
Re:[Offtopic] MP3 player for NT? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 04:18 · Score: 0

Use Winamp 2 n00b
What happened to HPUX? by johannesg · 2004-10-01 07:42 · Score: 1

I was under the impression it was still being developed? At least we still get the regular patches...
1. Re:What happened to HPUX? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-02 06:51 · Score: 0
  
  Yes, it is, don't trust what you read on Slashdot.
AC Kills Off Ugly Colors by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-01 13:49 · Score: 0

http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/0 512225