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HP Kills Off Utility Data Center

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."

10 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:HP woes... by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · 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.
  2. Re:HP woes... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  3. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by AuMatar · · 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?
  4. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    No more calculators.

  5. I didn't know either... by zogger · · 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.

  6. Re:HP woes... by SDF-7 · · 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.

  7. Re:Nice company motto by zulux · · 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.

  8. Re:To bad they don't just rerelease it as OSS. by Anonymous Coward · · 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).

  9. Re:Could they please stop calling it HP1 by Anonymous Coward · · 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 · · 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.