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HP Seeks to Block Competitor From Revealing Its Pricing

Posted by timothy on from the whaddya-mean-the-price-tag's-showing? dept.

Matt Asay writes "On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's 'confidential' pricing. CNET has posted the letter, which indicates that HP doesn't want its pricing revealed, but which doesn't question the veracity of the pricing (which, not surprisingly, is 82 percent higher than the open-source vendor's). Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage. Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money, but presumably feels that it can justify the high prices. Why try to hide the pricing information?"

1 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sad. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been a software developer at HP for a little while since my previous employer was aquired. The amount of sales propaganda bullsh*t we get fed is rediculous.

    HP has an online 'garage' thing where staff are supposed to submit ideas in the hope that their ideas are supported and developed. It's aimed at the technical staff to 'foster innovation', and yet the ideas are judged on how much money they can make HP and how fast. Nothing to do with making the world a better place, despite what their propaganda (like "the HP way") spews.

    It should be noted that I view the average slashdot poster as a naive socialist hippie compared to myself, but maybe HP could do with some of that...

    My impression of HP is that it's a massive hypocritical money-grubbing sales team.