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."

Comments

HP woes...

[ndykman]

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.

Re:HP woes...

[AuMatar]

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.

Could they please stop calling it HP1

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Typical post-y2k demise

[MemoryDragon]

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.

Re:Wake up and smell the coffee

[birder]

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.