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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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 forget, do we like HP or hate them? Or do we like them but hate Carly?
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.
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
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.
Thanks, HP! ;)
Intelligent Life on Earth
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.
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.
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 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
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.
On CNBC, a brief blurb, which frankly is astonishing given the relative secrecy IBM pursues.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
She has been referred to as 'The Angel of Death' due to her track record at Lucent/ATT.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
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?
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...
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."
I was under the impression it was still being developed? At least we still get the regular patches...
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
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.
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-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
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.
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