Slashdot Mirror
HP Is Now Two Companies. How Did It Get Here? (cio.com)
New submitter joshroberts3388 writes: If Hollywood wanted a script about the inexorable decline of a corporate icon, it might look to Hewlett-Packard for inspiration. Once one of Silicon Valley's most respected companies, HP officially split itself in two on Sunday, betting that the smaller parts will be nimbler and more able to reverse four years of declining sales. HP fell victim to huge shifts in the computer industry that also forced Dell to go private and have knocked IBM on its heels. Pressure from investors compelled it to act. But there are dramatic twists in HP's story, including scandals, a revolving door for CEOs and one of the most ill-fated mergers in tech history, that make HP more than a victim of changing times.
> They couldn't continue to sell instruments and equipment to the Military at sky-high prices, the business they were doing in the 60's became comodified
They also sold to coporate customers, who discovered that instead of paying thousands for an oscilloscope, they could pay hundreds for a plug-in digital board with far less precision and frequency range, but they _did not care_. HP disdained to enter the low-end instrument market, and couldn't maintain the formerly very high revenue stream as modern A/D converters improved. They could have continued in a much more modest way: few modern technicians understand that _the oscilloscope probe _matters_ and needs to be taken into account very differently at different fruquency ranges in your measurements, and the old HP instruments took their tuning for accuracy _seriously_ to preserve precision. Now? Good luck finding that switching power supply harmonic creeping its way into your motherboard and causing errors because some cheap vendor discarded the small, extra ceramic capacitors to save price and board space on their latest design.