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.'"

Comments

All bureaucracies tend this way...

[drinkypoo]

...at least, if they are successful. The purpose of a bureaucracy is to self-perpetuate, like any organism. It is powered by the enlightened self-interest of the employees within it. Every bureaucracy, if left unchecked, will seek to expand itself. Individuals within it may have morality but the organism as a whole does not.

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...

Re:All bureaucracies tend this way...

[drinkypoo]

This is interesting. I can't help but think of governments, which are the ultimate in large bureaucracies.

That is of course precisely what I intended to suggest. Spying is something every government does every day.

If success is a criteria for an organization to begin exhibiting "immoral" attributes, then is the key to prevent your government from acting immorally to make sure your government is not "successful"? And if that is the case, how does one define success for a government?

If you define success for the organization itself - not that which it serves, but simply that which is good for the entity - then it can only be through longevity, proliferation, and security.

If one uses the usual definition of a successful government, that would probably mean a happy (safe, well-cared for, healthy), thriving populace. But by your theory then, that leads to an immoral government, and so it is better in the long run if your government is not successful, and your people are unhappy.

Well there's [at least] two conclusions you could quickly and yet reasonably come to. One is that a government actually capable of serving its citizens wouldn't be large because the needs of the people do not include large government. The Federal Government of the USA is the largest employer in the nation, with Wal-Mart in the #2 spot. Does this really serve the people?

The other is that yes, the very existence of government leads to an immoral government over time, simply because it is a bureaucracy, and that's what bureaucracies do. They consolidate and preserve power.

Besides other possible conclusions there's a third view that lies somewhere in between; government will proliferate but if you force it to stay smaller then it more accurately serves the will of the people. In cases where the public does not agree on a course of action, and no one is being harmed, the government should do nothing. This is of course not how the system has worked over time. Law seeks to erase ambiguities but life is about them in a very real way and in any case is made up of them. Very few things are black and white in this world (newspapers stand out as a glaring exception. thanks, I'll be here all week.)

But unhappy people usually revolt and overturn the government, with the hope of installing a government that will make them happy (thereby restarting the cycle).

The problem is that not enough limits are placed on government. The constitution didn't explicitly say that anything not in the document can be shoved straight up your ass. Or that no amendment shall be passed which limits your rights. Only one amendment like that has ever been passed so far; prohibition. As we know, it was repealed. But there are occasionally calls for others and sooner or later one of them will pass.

Re:All bureaucracies tend this way...

[MyOtherUIDis3digits]

The other is that yes, the very existence of government leads to an immoral government over time, simply because it is a bureaucracy, and that's what bureaucracies do. They consolidate and preserve power.

And this is exactly why the forefathers included the 2nd Amendment. The explicit purpose of keeping "a well regulated militia" and preserving "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" was to keep the government in check with the threat of being overthrown by the people should the need arise. Thomas Jefferson estimated that this should probably happen about once every 20 years.

I remember when...

[hackstraw]

HP actually _made_ excellent printers.

Now, HP spys on its customers and competeters printer habits.

Their stock value should reflect this better.

This is depressing.

[jcr]

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

Re:This is depressing.

[drinkypoo]

I'd say that hiring Carly wan't the cause, it was a symptom of the company losing its way.

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.

Re:This is depressing.

[Manchot]

I'd say that HP sealed their fate when they spun off Agilent in 1999. Agilent does what HP was originally founded to do: to actually perform R&D, and to make test equipment that is widely used in R&D. It's no coincidence that a large majority of the insanely expensive equipment used in my electrical engineering department is Agilent- or HP-made. They went from being a company that actually does interesting things to being a company that manufactures commodities. Is essence, they moved from being a technically-oriented company to being a business-oriented corporation. In the former, there is actually a spirit of scientific camaraderie amongst the employees, but in the latter, it's a solely profit-driven work environment.

Re:This is depressing.

[jcr]

I hope that when HP craters, Agilent buys the name back from the receivers.

-jcr

More spying?

[ruiner13]

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?

Eastern District of Texas

[frinkster]

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.

No biggy

[popo]

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?

bureaucracy != corporate espionage

[Vellmont]

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.

The Quest for Knowledge

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> 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.

the news is that they got caught or outed

[SocietyoftheFist]

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.

Re:And yet...

[Technician]

I own a Samsung laser printer because it has linux support :-)

Tried a newer distro of Linux?

When I finaly retired Windows 98 and loaded Ubuntu on a machine on my LAN, it fould both my older HP printers just fine.

Personally I hope both HP and Dell fail

I am aiming that way quickly. My wife got a Dell printer with her new (not anymore) XP computer. We about fell over laughing when we saw the size of the print carts. We looked up the price of the replacements. They were the same price as the carts for the HP722c but were a quarter the size. We could not pick them up localy but had to pay S & H on top.

We figured to go ahead and install it and use it until it ran out of ink. This is where we got our second laugh.. It cam with drivers for Windows XP and Windows 2K. At the time none of the other computers on the LAN ran either of those OS'es. At the time we had a mix of Win98, Win 95, Linux, and an oddball Win ME laptop. None of them could use the new printer.

To add insult to injury, Dell had a very generous offer.. They would recycle my old printer for free including shipping, just pack it in the printer box and put on the shipping label. Yea right! I was going to ship their printer back for recycling when it ran out of ink, but they probably would pass it on to someone else as a new printer. We donated it to Goodwill instead. It's there if someone really wants it.

HP has very little to worry from Dell unless they put out a decent printer and make supplies easy to pick up at a good price.

I think Cannon will eat both of them for lunch if they are not careful.

Should have used genuine spies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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.

relabeling

[glsunder]

So is HP going to start relabeling cheapo lexmark printers now?

Agreed.

[zoomshorts]

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.

Actually

[Kankraka]

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.