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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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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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.
"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.
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.