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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."
HP is going down the tubes due to a combination of Carly and the Compaq merger. The Compaq managment mentality has certainly taken over.
If however you still want to work for a company where the HP idea and the HP way live on... head over to Agilent Technologies. They aren't perfect, but it's probably a good thing for everyone there that they were spun off. It's also clear to anyone that has to work with HPaq or Agilent on a daily basis that Agilent is the only one of the two retaining any of the things that made HP a decent company.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?