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HP Accused of Spying on Dell
An anonymous reader writes "An ex-HP exec claims he was instructed by the company's management to spy on Dell's printer business plans. Karl Kamb, previously HP's vice president of business development and strategy, was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by HP in 2005, after he allegedly began his own company before leaving HP. Kamb, who has denied any wrongdoing, filed a countersuit in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas claiming he was fired because of shading dealings involved in the corporate espionage. From the article: 'As a member of HP's imaging and printing group's "competitive intelligence team", Kamb said he was in a position to know that HP senior executives signed off on a plan to pay [Former Dell Japan President Katsumi] Iizuka to obtain details of what Dell was up to. Iizuka turned over the information to Kamb and he passed it along to HP, Kamb claimed.'"
To see these organizations spying is not a shock. If you let them continue to grow they will each run up against each other and start trying to find ways to subsume the others. It doesn't really matter to the consumer since each one is pretty much the sum of its parts...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
HP actually _made_ excellent printers.
Now, HP spys on its customers and competeters printer habits.
Their stock value should reflect this better.
The HP we all remember from the 1970's is long gone. I'd say that hiring Carly wan't the cause, it was a symptom of the company losing its way.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I can't wait until the stories of Sony spying on Nintendo or Microsoft come out. You KNOW it has to be going on.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
In spite of more attacks, true or not, in the media on HP's image as an honest company, my prediction is their stock price will continue to go up.
Seriously, they spy on their own employees, they spy on other companies, how do I know they aren't spying on me via our office HPs? Who do they think they are, the Bush administration?
today is spelling optional day.
Wouldn't be an easier method to sell more to try not to overprice the ink for their printers than to spy on others business?
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Superb hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Just as an FYI, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas has become very popular of late for the "little guy" suing a big corporation. The juries down there seem to hate large companies ;)
A lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas is almost always associated with patent trolling, since the Eastern District of Texas certainly doesn't have much in the way of large cities, large corporations, or large R&D departments. Why it exists is a pretty decent question.
I own a Samsung laser printer because it has linux support :-)
Personally I hope both HP and Dell fail
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I heard from a dell rep that all they use in their offices are HP's.
I wonder how she feels about this issue or knew of it? Do you think she would have started this sort of action or was against it idea? I would guess that it was the incoming CEO's push to try and meet the expectations of the board. Until this settles out I guess we will never know how deep the rabbit hole really is.
Why are we pretending this is a big deal? The settlement (in millions) will still be less than the severance package of
a top executive. Neither company's reputation is in the least bit tarnished in the public eye, and the whole thing
will blow over (in fact, it already has). This isn't politics, its corporate America. Was it pathetic, wrong and lame?
Uh, Yeah. You new here?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
You're confusing expansion of a company into ever increasing markets with illegal behaviour. All businesses will try to expand to whatever capacity they can sustain. But that doesn't mean it's inevidible they'll engage in illegal behaviour like is alleged here.
I don't expect large companies to behave ethically (small companies maybe). They'll do whatever they like without regard to anyone else. I do expect companies to behave within the bounds of the law. They often don't of course, but my point is that illegal behaviour isn't a given for a company.
AccountKiller
> An ex-HP exec claims he was instructed by the company's management to spy on Dell's printer business plans.
Actually they were wondering if anyone at Dell had managed to get a printer working with Windows.
I worked at a telecomm equipment manufacturer and was looking for a document on a network share one day when I noticed some oddly named directories. The directories were available for me to view so I figured that if I had the correct permissions, I can go inside those directories. Inside I found technical documentation, trade secrets, etc... for the competitors products that wasn't supposed to leave the competitors campus. I pointed out to my direct manager that permissions probably should be changed on that directory.
It's unauthorized interloping. Kind of like pretexting isn't lying.
And I'm sure Kamb didn't steal company secrets, he merely relocated them to a more secure area.
FTA:
While still employed by HP, these former high-level employees and their co-conspirators covertly organised and began operating a competing business venture using HP's resources, contacts and trade secrets," HP claimed in court documents.
Inveterate Prevaricator:
/Inveterate Prevaricator
Competing busines venture? Compete is such a strong word... I prefer to think of it as a competition stimulation exercise
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I've heard of this before. It's called Forum, or Court shopping. In fact I've read that the recent lawsuit against spamhauswas a case of forum shopping.
AccountKiller
... that the HP executives were attempting to help the Bush Administration by screwing up even more than they do, thus making them look better in comparison.
Does this matter? dell printers are just other companies printers rebranded. Some of the expensive color laser printers are just rebranded zerox.
It all depends on what you mean by "spying." If you mean to aggressively pursue information using legal methods, then spying can be a reasonable and useful tool for a company to understand its marketplace. But it'ss not okay if illegal methods (e.g. pretexting) are used to obtain information. It's not clear to me from the article that there is even an allegation of HP having illegally spied on Dell.
Still, if a responsible business such as HP chooses to pay a third party for information, I see little excuse for it failing to carefully examine the means by which the information was obtained. From a very practical standpoint, HP should want such an examination in order to determine the quality/meaning/usefulness of the information. Further, because information gathering tactics can so easily take advantage of deceit (and too often do), it is incumbent upon a responsible company to explicitly advise against wrongful practices, and if you're HP's size, that advice should be documented.
But...ummmmm...HP doesn't seem to have such a defense.
*gasp* *shock* You mean Dell doesn't actually make their own printers?
Next thing you're going to tell me is that Dell doesn't actually make it's own processors or hard drives!
What?
My blog
Since most hardware is manufactured in China, industrial espionage should be treated with Chinese standards.
It would be interesting to get some former HP employees executed and their organs supplied ("voluntarily", of course, as in case of all the executed Chinese criminals) to the growing Chinese organ transplant business, aimed mostly for international clients.
HP should have learnt by now. It should have used the Genuine OEM brand spies. You might find cheaper replacement spies on the internet, but they leak eventually, and ruin it all.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
lol, I dont know who is more at fault;
n gled-web-we-weave.html
- the business exec for starting up a competing company and getting kickbacks while negotiating to sell a company he had an interest in to his own bosses.
- the wife, who obviously knew what was going on but acquiesced for 3 years until she found out her husband was cheating on her and decided to take him to the cleaners.
or
- the company, sweet old HP who used pretexting to access an employees private phone records but when this failed, stole the social security information from his employment records.
either way makes for very very interesting reading www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/25/hp_tv_kamb see that TV you are watching in the corner, who knows how it's development came about, who knew business was such fun.
Cheers,
Dean
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/oh-ta
So is HP going to start relabeling cheapo lexmark printers now?
The older HP lasetjets ROCK. A LaserJet III was, and still is, the
defacto brute force printer of the world. Sure they weigh a ton.
You can FEEL the quality.
That is why many companies still pay to fix them. They are built
rock solid. The new crap, is well, crap. Smaller toner cartridges,
worse performance etc.
Sadly, HP seems to be going the way of the dinosaurs. They make
cheaply built crap now, at premium prices. Thanks Carly. Yes, I
lay blame where it belongs.
Because HP has been buying the printers of the competition for years and checking them in thier labs... Disecting printers testing the dots and shades of the prints being done... I remember once talking to a guy in HP research who commented that HP had in its hands printers which did photos at an astronomical rate of speed... HP just wanted to release slow improvements to quality prints than sudden.. To keep the consumers coming back for the next best thing... Hard Drive makers have done the same thing.. They've had Terbayte Hard drives in thier labs since 1990.. The only thing that has changed is the Physical size form factor over the years...
I can see a reason HP would be quite interested in what Dell is doing with their 'brand' of printers. Every Dell printer I've ever seen is a Lexmark that's been re-branded with the Dell logo and a different ink cartridge and print head. Now obviously that printer is going to be using the same ink as the Lexmark counterpart, just with the cartridge modified a little bit to fit in the modified print head to stop you from just buying Lexmark ink. As far as I know, you can buy Lexmark ink and just switch the plastic tops on the Lexmark branded ink with the Dell top. I'm not sure if this works with ALL their ink, but a good majority of the older cartridges for sure. Now the interesting part. Lexmark doesn't manufacture their own ink, which explains why it's so expensive, but where do they get the ink from? HP. So HP makes the ink for Lexmark, Lexmark sells rebranded ink to Dell, and the sucker buying a Dell printer pays out the ass for his ink. HP is on the first rung on this ladder, the profit filtering down from Dell is probably pretty decent and HP probably doesn't really want to lose the share in that; so if Dell is changing things around in their printer market, HP is gonna want to be the first to know about it. HP will lose a chunk of profit if Dell goes with another manufacturer, or decides to start making their own line of printers from 'scratch', so one would think HP would need to know before hand what's going on, to prevent profit loss.
..."Intel Inside" stickers on Dell computers.
Companies spying on their own employees seems pretty draconian. But the kind of corporate espionage we're talking about here is commonplace. The book Spooked, by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, has some good stories about this stuff. You'd be surprised how much espionage went on in the frozen pizza market -- that oven-rising crust was a bigger deal than you realize.
I actually worked for a small graphic design company in San Francisco that tried it. It's pretty common in these kinds of firms for some of the designers to split off and start their own outfits. Those new companies naturally become competitors, and there's often all kinds of bad blood about who may or may not have absconded with whose Rolodex. In one case, my company actually hired a private investigator to pose as a phony potential client of one of these competing companies, with the aim of trying to trick the principals into letting slip that they were using privileged information to win clients. The fact that my company did this was never made widely known. The only reason the rank-and-file employees found out about it was because the private investigator got caught. Word spreads fast in an industry as small as the graphic design biz. And to put it in perspective, we were a company of about 45 employees. The competitor was even smaller.
Breakfast served all day!
Hell, it's not that hard for HP to spy on Dell! Dell's repair center is right behind HP's, we can turn around from our benches and hear shit!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
On the other hand, hiring Carly was exactly opposed to what needed to be done.
It may not have caused HP to slide into the toilet, but I'm pretty sure the hand on the lever was attached to one C. Fiorina.
The lever handler only changed when it got to Hurd. Now if they'd merge with NCR and drop the HP name, there might be some way to save both in one shot. Heck, it'd even have a chance at revitalizing the Indecision State of the Midwest.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It should be this.