Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
...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.
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.