All of the big computer manufacturers in the 1970s faced challenges in the transition from minicomputers to microcomputers. Probably Digital Equipment Corporation was the saddest case.
A review circa 1980 of minicomputer development at DEC indicated their belief (probably shared by many in the industry) that there was not going to be room for such a diversity of architectures as there were in the minicomputer age and the 1980s would wind up like they did, dominated by a few chips like the 6502, Z80 and 8086.
As it was the 1980s were a minefield. With hindsight one could imagine that DEC could have come out with a 32-bit microVAX-based PC circa 1985. (With hindsight I don't think anybody thought that it would take another 10 years for 32-bit OS to be mainstreamed) I'm sure they thought about that, but it was certain that such a product would have taken a bit out of the existing VAX business and not certain that it would have caught on.
That doesn't excuse Carly Fiorina for the later problems at HP. Remember that Carly Fiorina was involved with fraudulent accounting at Lucent in 1999, personally I lost a few thousand bucks overnight when Lucent restated its earnings in 2000. Thanks to Carly, a proud American innovator (the former Bell Labs) got bought by a European bastion of stagnation.
If justice worked for the elite, Carly would have done time in prison and certainly wouldn't get put in charge of another company, but unfortunately there is no justice, and she got a chance to run another American innovator into the ground. At least she demonstrated how tone deaf Republicans can be by thinking her experience qualified her to run for president.
Re: All of the big computer manufacturers in the 1970s faced challenges in the transition from minicomputers to microcomputers.
Indeed! Predicting the future is hard. Only Warren Buffett can financially "prove" he has any skill at it, and he doesn't personally even claim such ability (instead following a set of principles laid down by Benjamin Graham, but often ignored by academia).
PC's eventually became a commodity business anyhow, and HP wasn't cut out for commodities. Commodity businesses usually flow overseas where labor is cheaper anyhow: it's not US's bag. Microsoft made its fortune on OS's and tricking companies into entrenched software "standards", keeping it from becoming a commodity. But HP was a hardware co., not software.
HP were better off as an R&D lab and "nerd tool" maker. Stay with your strength. Warren Buffett also notices that companies that deviate from their core strength tend to suffer. Do one thing and do it well. Transitions of focus can happen successfully, but are rare. Don't bet against the patterns of history unless you want to suffer the patterns of history also. (Apple is arguably an exception, but that's another long topic.)
At school (1991-1994), we had HP and Sun workstations. The HP were nicknamed the toasters because they were hot. The Sun were beautiful beasts. After power failure, we regularly had problems with Sun, never with HP. When we were downloading games from the net, it was easy to compile them on Sun, but was always a nighmare on HP (non standard includes, libraries, ...). I think HP is excellent about hardware, but terrible for software. I often see the similar problem for car makers: good cars but with a terrible computer.
In the mid-90s I worked for a software vendor which supported most of the “open systems” Unix flavors along with Windows, DOS, VMS, etc. There were individual C files which were thousands of lines long, almost all #ifdefs working around buggy C compilers.
GCC was often preferred even at a performance cost because it wasn't worth figuring out some quirk of the HP, Data General, SCO, etc. C toolchain, especially because the pricing models of that era often meant that it cost tens of thousands of dollars just to setup the same environment that a single customer had.
In the 90's and early 2000's Sun machines were pretty much the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.)
I worked at HP during this time helping software vendors port to HP-UX. I also spent some time on the side compiling open source projects for fun on HP-UX and then pushing the required patches back to the project's owner.
the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.
I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.
In the 90's and 2000s, Sun machines might have been a kind of default for deploying new software, but they certainly weren't the default for developing it. By 1998, you'd be getting a much better machine from Intel than you could get even in the same ballpark cost as from Sun. If you did work on a Sun workstation, you probably did it grudgingly (except that they had a really good C++ compiler for the time).
The companies I worked with primarily developed on the systems customers used. You really want to see the issues on your tier1 platform as you develop. Linux was not tier1 at that time.
This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.
I always though of them as a hardware company having seen their name on laptops, but they did have their own brand of Unix and I am currently working on a CDN originally written by them.
That was solved in the newer versions of aCC. I had no issues compiling most contemporary code all the way ‘till 2014 when I finally retired my private HP-UX server infrastructure. For particularly badly written software, there was GCC on HP-UX.
I don't understand what that would have to do with anything, as long as you made a PSF SD-UX "gcc-runtime" fileset with libgcc_s.so.1 in it. That's what I did, worked just fine.
Our customers required being able to build our product with the system compilers managed by their IT.
GCC was only accepted by customers with Linux installs.
Asking GCC to be available in any sort was not an option for other customers. In fact was a deciding factor why we got some contracts back then, as we always cope with whatever they had.
They've been getting better lately, at least where I've used Sony as I realize their portfolio is huge. The PS4 software is quite nice and very stable - leaps ahead of what xbox has done. Sony is also a huge contributor to Android and has one of the nicest phone OS's on the market.
Sony Xperia X is one of the few smartphones which runs Jolla's Sailfish officially (Sailfish X). The successor of Maemo/MeeGo and a decent, Linux-based alternative to Android.
I dont know about HP before the late 90s, but I have been working in some form of tech for 15 years now, and I have developed an aversion to any HP product. Seeing that logo fills me with dread and anxiety. Early on it was dealing with printer drivers, and explaining to users that you don't need the full install to use the device. Then it was painfully navigating HPSM. Then test driving the HP Stackable Switches which we bricked on the first attempt to update. Now it's HPNA, which I fear I'm going to be forced by management to port a bunch of scripts to.
I have known many other people in all levels of IT that have felt the same way.
I've gone both ways. Pre-90s, HP in my head brought to mind solid pieces of equipment with good engineering. You could back over a HP-41CV with your car, and it would still work (or at least I wouldn't be surprised; never tried). I'd blindly buy a piece of HP kit if the specs said it would do the job.
Then over the years my mental image gradually changed. HP printers weren't reliable workhorses over the complete product line anymore. Then the Windows drivers got bad. Then the inkjet cartridge bullshit. They effectively quit making calculators. Then Carly, then...and now I'm in your boat, where the HP label is equivalent to "made in China, and not the good China, the bad China that uses slave labor and cuts every corner it can find". I now actively avoid HP products.
The MBA types often come in and milk a company's good reputation for short-term profits. After the reputation is milked dry, they take their wad of cash and bail out. Similar happened to IBM's consulting division when they strongly enforced short-term profit goals. Customers got nickled and dimed, and stopped renewing contracts. Good reputations are hard to come by, don't blow them for a quick high.
You'd have to go back to the early-mid 90s for bulletproof printers that never complained and did not require (or even encourage) installation of horrible software. HP also made good oscilloscopes, gas chromatographs, and the like, but of course those weren't shiny enough to keep on making.
Technically the HP division for oscilloscopes and ee equipment still lives on via Siglent/Agilent/whatever name they're calling it now.
Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's? Was it to cut down on bureaucracy, or to "reinvent" the company for the digital age, or something else?
> Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's?
Profit, but no growth.
All the manufacturers of test equipment have the same issues: the number of people who need test equipment is effectively fixed and costs are mostly all customer support.
So, there is this gulf from the <$1000 category (no customer support--we have a forum, maybe, and it is probably in Chinese) to the >$25,000 category (okay, we make enough profit per sale to allocate a couple of hours of a real human to talk to you).
The test equipment and medical/chemical diagnostics business was spun off into Agilent in 1999, and Agilent then spun out the test equipment a few years ago.
Keysight Technologies is now where they live on.
Or to save the crown jewels from going under with HP the IT conglomerate. I guess a mature IT and consumer mass market requires different corporate structure, scale, and growth compared to ee and chem lab equipment.
Back in the mid-90's I had an HP 486 PC and printer (can't remember the model number) that both worked pretty well, all things considered.
Now we have an all-in-one HP printer/fax/scanner/copier that gets me closer to that scene in Office Space than any device I've ever owned. The obscenely overpriced cartridges don't last. It takes forever to warm up. The list goes on and I'll never own another HP product again.
The original HP Laserjets (up through at least the III) were indestructible marvels. I also had a Deskjet 720c that was nearly perfect, I used it until the drive belt shredded after many years of good service.
I had to track down a bug in an application once. It turned out the bug only happened after you printed to an HP printer - the driver changed a critical floating point flag in the processor and never restored it.
Ah, yes, the floating point bug that set the FP error handing to "software" instead of "hardware". Of course, no one thought to inform the application software side of the house, so you were one divide-by-zero away from an application crash because the FPU said "not my problem anymore". You could fix it with a liberal sprinkling of _fpreset(), assuming your language/environment allowed that option.
To be fair, HP wasn't the only one that had that bug. My SWAG is that there was some common library that a lot of drivers used, including HP, that fiddled with the FPU and never set it back.
The application I worked on was quite popular, and I can guarantee our customers used every printer that was out there. The HP was the only one that exhibited this bug.
I'll up your anecdata with the fact that I worked at Microsoft at the time, and was trying to track this one down across a wide variety of print drivers for the product I worked on. Though HP was the most egregious (IIRC, they all repro'ed), others exhibited the bug.
But, doesn't matter, it's long since been fixed regardless of who did or did not have the bug. :-)
As someone who despises printers (that scene from Office Space was one of the most cathartic moments of my life), I mostly agree. Except that the x360 I have running Linux is by far the most satisfying instrument for work I've ever owned, by far. I hate what they've done with pretty much any other line of branding they have, but that bit of hardware was damn well done.
I despise everything HP, but their lineup of laptops from the past year has been pretty good. I love my HP pavilion 15T power.
Got a 4GB GTX1050, HQ series i5 and an SSD in a laptop for ~$600. Hasn't given me any problems so far.
my only complaint is the difficulty of getting the right drivers for Linux. But it worked eventually.
Oh god. HPSM. I totally forgot about that. One large company I worked for used that to file routine IT tickets when it seems like it was a ticketing application for the telecom industry. They must have had some of the best salespeople of all time.
WebOS was amazing for its time (even though the hardware was mediocre at best).
I joined HP in order to fight Googles and Apples hold on the mobile OS market. Everyone can join the winning team, but I wanted to join the underdog.
Then they dropped it before I even officially started. Pretty sad, even though I found other cool projects to work on, not much had the same potential to turn around the whole company imho.
The most tragic and ironical sales I've ever witnessed. 99$ Firesale of touchpads made them an instant success, people were buying them at 300 or above the following monthes.
When I worked in engineering at T-Mobile, the Danger Hiptop was the device that all the engineers loved. At the time, Duarte worked for Danger.
He left Danger to go work for Helio, then Helio was acquired. He left Helio to go work for Palm, and then Palm was acquired.
Oddly enough, the team that wound up doing the OS for the iPod was in the mix during this timespan also. They pitched a product to T-Mobile, but T-Mobile wound up going with a competitor. So Pixo wound up selling their wares to Apple, and the rest is history.
Source: I am a former employee of T-Mobile, HP and HPE.
It was a magical time. I wish I'd taken more pictures. I had no idea that these guys would go on to create Android and kinda change the world.
At the time, I honestly thought it was all a bit silly TBH! "Why would I want to take a picture with my phone when I have a perfectly good camera?"
"Why does Paris Hilton have her pictures stored on OUR servers, doesn't she know that's a security risk?"
Fun fact - all those pics, from all the customers, were stored completely unencrypted. They were uuencoded for some reason, but if someone wanted to, they could've hoovered up every last file.
I was working the day that Paris Hilton had her account hacked, that was not a fun day. It was looking like some heads would roll, and then it turned out the hackers exploited her account by simply guessing her password. The initial fear was that someone had penetrated the network.
Gassée's problem is that he sees everything through an Apple-tinted lens. There's almost no subject that he can't turn back to his comfort zone of talking about Apple.
Here we're promised an alternative account of why the conventional story of HP mismanagement is false, and end up with a lot of handwaving and 'Apple starting' as an inevitable explanation for HP's decline, despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the intervening period.
If Apple had never gotten out of the embarrassment that was the Performa Era with a multitude of largely similar but wildly different priced computers, Apple would have gone the way of HP and divested itself of different business units until nothing of value was left.
Instead Apple focused, got its shit together, and did something important. HP could have done the same, knuckled down and fixed the fundamental problems with their company, but instead they decided to throw away all their babies and drink the bathwater.
The problem is not that Gassee sees everything through the Apple lens, but that very few companies have been like Apple and maintained focus. Tech companies, ironically, often fail from their wild success: MySpace and Yahoo! being two notable examples.
Once they have all this money they start to do lots of stupid shit and ultimately lose their way.
Microsoft was on track to do this, but they seem to have sobered up. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably fail if they can't regroup and rethink their purpose. One day some telecom will buy Facebook with pocket change and we'll all go "Yeah, well, saw that coming."
with a multitude of largely similar but wildly different priced computers
As an aside, they seem to be headed back in this direction once again, with what appears to be 5 different-but-essentially-the-same phones coming out on the market this september.
And a whole bunch of wildly priced desktops and laptops that don't seem to consider anything but the bottom line.
That's the trap. If they want to succeed they have to accommodate a wider range of use-cases but not without complicating the product line-up.
The problem is that phones are a way bigger deal than computers. If they made but one laptop model it'd be ridiculous. Having one or two phones isn't a big deal. Twenty or, like Samsung in its heyday, two hundred is a problem.
> Instead Apple focused, got its shit together, and did something important.
Don't forget that Apple would never have got there without making a deal with Microsoft for cash in exchange
for support for MS Office on Mac for 5 years. Also Microsoft got a bargain, since for $150M they were able to point to a competitor in the face of accusations of being a monopoly.
Hard to think now that Apple came so close to complete and utter failure that $150M was enough to get them back on track. By launching new Macs they were able to generate enough cash to eventually get them into the iPod, iPhone etc. which turned their fortunes around completely.
Re: despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the intervening period.
Indeed. Apple got lucky 3 times: the first was that the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was written for Apple II first, out of sheer happenstance. It was a blockbuster that propelled hardware sales. Apple II's were otherwise considered too expensive.
Second was a boom in "desktop publishing" which saved the Mac. Macs were far more expensive than CPM & PC's per processing power, and the nice GUI alone wasn't enough to justify the price for most consumers in the early years. However, desktop publishing, a field that didn't really exist when the Mac was built, took advantage of the graphical nature of the Mac and jolted its sales. (If Amiga had better coddled desktop publishing software co's, Commodore may have also survived.)
The 3rd was the return of Steve Jobs. Apple would probably have sank without him.
It would be tempting to blame Carly Fiorina and she exemplifies the cult of CEO, short term thinking, no solutions beyond wall street focused cost cutting, financial engineering and layoffs, no accountability and exiting with golden parachutes with no damage to their finances or reputation. This while the company loses long term viability, sheds talent, focus, and burns,
Robert Nardelli, former Homedepot CEO is also a similar instance of CEOs making bad decisions with little push back and accountability and exiting with reputation and big bucks. Neoliberalism and a fawning media and 'economists' propping up whatever narratives vested interests push has to shoulder the blame.
No company can survive short termism and a string of wall street focused CEOs. HPs decline hastened under her 'reign'. They folded from hardware, were content to sit on printer revenues and DRM and focus on 'services'. None of these have scope for innovation.
As someone who was with HP since before the Compaq merger, and having drifted to a spin off, I do miss the old company. The “HP Way” was given importance at least in many of the groups I worked in. The rules of the garage [1], open door policy, skip level meetings, etc., were known even to new employees.
The culture fostered by the managers of those times (later displaced and kicked out steadily after the Compaq merger and the disastrous EDS acquisition) was what kept people around while the CEOs were busy burning the company down. That culture is still intact in some small pockets.
Top management since the times of Carly, Mark (a one trick person who couldn’t do anything other than cut costs by selling and cutting everything), Leo and then Meg were mostly clueless on running such a large company that had the capability to create integrated solutions — HP had PCs, laptops, printers, printing solutions, PDAs, phones (briefly), tablets (briefly), software, services, security tools, networking devices, storage devices, servers with PA-RISC/Itanium running HP-UX to servers with x86 running Windows/Linux)...I’m sure I’m missing many more product areas of HP since Carly’s time and later.
I still dream that HP could do better as one company with many products in different areas. But management styles that worship Wall Street and look only at their bonuses can’t handle that.
The story does not seem very convincing to me. The split between lab instruments and computers - may actually help fix the next problem. The disregard of consumer products - partially fixed later when they managed to sell large numbers of printers and not only business laptops.
So maybe the big problems did start around Fiorina's time after all.
Also, past the LaserJet 5, their printers started taking a nosedive in quality. In my own experience at work, the 1000 didn't last long before it started spewing toner all over the page, and the 4550N, a gigantic color laser with extremely expensive consumables, did likewise.
Don't get me started on their inkjets. Nothing like an all-in-one that won't even let you SCAN when it decides to "expire" a costly printhead.
I made the mistake of buying an HP printer a few years ago. What a user-hostile piece of junk.
Apparently their ink cartridges are region locked – the first time a cartridge is inserted the printer is permanently set to the cartridge region. I didn't realise this until it rejected the ones I'd got to replace the starter pack.
Even though I'd bought it from a big UK retailer it had shipped with US cartridges, meaning it wouldn't work with any UK HP ink.
HP's support's response was basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Their determination to protect revenue by putting stupid roadblocks to buying cheaper HP ink from abroad meant I just bought third-party ink with unlocked chips. They never saw another penny from me on that printer and never will from anything else.
I haven't had an HP printer for a while, but I HATE my neighbors' HP printers. They're constantly screaming at max signal strength on almost all 2.4G WIFI channels with their wireless direct printing.
What's a brand of printer that doesn't sell the printer at a loss and then has you pay through the nose for tiny cartridges of ink? I made the mistake of buying a Canon once and now I'm looking for a new printer.
What's a brand of printer that doesn't sell the printer at a loss
Brother B&W laser printer. You want color? Go to Kinkos. That's what we do at our house, at least. It is rare that the printout really needs to be in color, so rare that I can't remember the last time we actually went to Kinkos to print something. And Brother makes a solid printer. Consumables prices? Dunno, I change the toner so rarely. I do remember that the last time I bought one, they were so cheap that I bought two instead of the one I planned.
If you don't do a lot of photo printing I'd highly recommend getting a laser printer. Far more reliable than inkjets, never dry out, and the toner is cheap. I got an $80 black and white Brother nearly a decade ago and it still works fine. These days you can get color laser machines under $200 and the toner remains far cheaper than ink cartridges.
The other way to avoid paying through the nose for tiny ink cartridges is to get a printer with refillable ink, i.e. Epson's EcoTank branded models or one of the many third party refillable cartridge solutions. But these always end up drying out and clogging if they're not used frequently enough.
I second the laser printer for people who only print occasionally. I have a cheap Samsung ML-1710 laser printer. Bought it for under $100. Unfortunately neither Apple nor Foomatic include drivers for it any longer so it's become a doorstop. If anyone knows where to find a working driver from a reputable source I'd love to know.
Interestingly, this is to some degree an Apple problem. Microsoft has no problem supporting printer drivers from Windows 7 (or before) in Windows 10, or Windows XP drivers in Windows 7. It's so very Apple to regularly throw out history.
I was able to get a Ricoh 250SF (all-in-one color laser with fax) for under $200 last year. It is an overbuilt and heavy tank with slight driver unfriendliness but I have no complaints with its superb print quality, ability to scan to a USB drive/Samba share/email, and good support on Win 7/8/10 and OSX.
Brother also has halfway decent Linux drivers, depending on the model. We have one in the office. It's mostly OK, except I can't un-confuse it about letter versus A4, and it won't duplex. But at least it doesn't lock up hard when I send it print jobs, like the Canon does.
I asked myself the same sort of question a couple of years ago and ended up buying an Epson L355.
This printer has ink tanks on the side that you refill, and tubes going to the print head. The ink refills are way cheaper than normal "attached-to-the-print-head" ones on a price-to-volume-of-ink basis. Also there's no way for the printer to tell whether or not Epson branded ink was used.
The only problems I have with it are:
(1) it's WiFi seems to drop the DHCP lease after it auto-powers off, so I fix this by telling the router to always give it a fixed address, otherwise the PC's that saw the printer before can no longer talk to it, and
(2) over time the odd "pins" on the print head get gummed up, and you have to run the process to fix this through a number of cycles to fix them all.
I've had an Epson Workforce 845 for many many years and it's been an excellent printer, and I buy the aftermarket ink usually. Even though I use it nominally, I don't think it's an ink hog like the other big names..
> What's a brand of printer that doesn't sell the printer at a loss and then has you pay through the nose for tiny cartridges of ink?
You can't tell by brand (at least company) because all the manufacturers do it at the low end, because the dynamics at the low end of the market make it a losing strategy to do otherwise.
My policy regarding HP is the exact opposite. It's so far the easiest I've ever seen in terms of setup on Linux and the trusty b/w laser has spewed out thousands of pages by now without toner change.
Odd, I've gotten to the point where HP printers are the only ones I trust. I've had issues with just about every other major manufacturer of printers, but my HPs always held up like tanks. The only issue I've ever encountered with them seems universal among all inkjets. Namely that the ink cartridges seem to dry out if you don't use them often, even if they ought to have a lot of life left. Perhaps I've just had a lucky streak with HP? My personal nemesis brand for printers is Lexmark.
I'm with you on this. My Lexmark was great as it worked with Linux- until it crapped out and became useless. Now my HP (inkjet) is pretty dependable. Disclaimer: I don't print very much.
Ditto. I’ll never buy another HP product. They are now the purveyors of garbage computers and printers. The mid 90’s printers, scanners, and Apollo workstations were the pinnacle of quality. The 85xx line of test equipment was even beyond that. I don’t think something like those would even be attempted now.
The true HP is Keysight, though they have quality issues now.
The tile floors were to find small parts when dropped, and minimize dust and static electricity. The computer jockeys were in the wrong.
In the 90s, HP engineers used to visit our offices, just to see how we used their gear. Printers, large format plotters, workstations, networking, etc. They'd cold call me, arrange visits, hang out for a while.
I'd see how they take our feedback and improve their products.
I don't think I've loved another brand as much as I loved HP, back in the day.
The HP Spectre 13 is emphatically not garbage. Beautiful machine, great screen, good keyboard. If the keyboard was a little better, and if their support was a little more sane, I would still be using the one I traded in for a ThinkPad T480.
Agreed. It’s classic “Innovator’s Dilemma” stuff right up until the Fiorina era which was just wanton destruction for the sake of being seen to do something but having no idea what.
HP was like West Coast IBM, complete with the paternalistic (although a different style) culture and history of fat margins.
The problem is that they started acquiring things too late, and bought mostly crap that didn't have a big moat around them. IBM exists because they made smart sales 50-60 years ago that are still returning value to the company in the form of maintenance, services and complementary sales.
HP chose unwisely and bought into legacy platforms that weren't as sticky.
Does whatever form of "HP" still actually manufacture laptops, or is the name just licensed out now? Haven't followed or looked at HP laptops in forever..
I'm working in a company that is exactly in this same position, that HP was in apparently around the 80s. The thing is that these big companies one or two generations after the founders are mostly staffed with people who know nothing else. They did their university internships in this company, they wrote their final thesis in this company, and now they work in this company. Of course that makes them super loyal, but that fact also makes it impossible for them to see that the company as a whole is currently colliding with an iceberg. I mean, it will probably still exist in 50 years and make a lot of money. I even own stock in my company because I believe it's strong. But it's quite unlikely that 10-20 years down the road it will still be the powerhouse it is now. The market is not continuing as it used to, but the company can hardly turn its course. People are not even recognizing that fact and confidently continue on the same path that worked for their mentors in their corresponding youth.
I don't think there is anything that can be done, honestly. There are reasons for the current way of decision making: keeping the people in power who have been in power since the beginning. If the way of work changes, then also the leadership will change. And the current leadership isn't that fond of such ideas.
I'll keep an eye on how well behemots like Microsoft or Saudi Arabia can really change under new leadership and build my hope on what I'm seeing there.
As much maligned as COMPAQ's acquisition of DEC was, you have to remember that DEC's enterprise side was still printing cash to the tune of something like a billion dollars a year.
Intel, for example, ran every single fab line on VMS at the time. There were other customers with similar requirements and monetary outlays when they needed something reliable.
Considering this, you have a business that you can simply milk for cash profit for 10-20 years as it slowly winds down.
The fact that HP couldn't figure this out is a gigantic failure of management at the board and CEO level.
My HP Zbook at work is the worst laptop I've ever used.
Most of the time, telling it to shut down doesn't do anything except kick you back to the login screen (seems like a bug with ACPI, not Windows).
Behavior with the Thunderbolt dock is abysmal. Simply plugging it in does not work. In order to get my monitors and peripherals working through the dock consistently, I have to boot the machine while disconnected, log in to Windows, put the machine to sleep, connect the dock, then power it back on using the power button on the dock.
The fans run loud enough wile idling that I have to keep this thing tucked under my desk so that it's not blasting in my left ear.
HP didn't fall because of bad luck, or failing to adapt to a changing market. HP fell because they make worthless crap.
Perhaps HP’s biggest sin is how they ditched their super-cool, PA-RISC high quality workstations and servers, how they charged premiums for the hardware and the software, how one couldn’t get HP-UX, its compilers or even the mirroring software unless one was an approved HP “strategic partner”... while a busted-ass, barely good enough, cheap, intel-based PC tin bucket was eating their lunch.
The interesting thing is that a single executive had a large share in killing both HP and SGI as major players. Richard Belluzzo was the guy who decided that HP should switch from HP UX on PA-RISC to Windows NT on Itanium, and then moved to SGI to preside over the decision to turn SGI into a Windows reseller and gave the SGI 3D graphics team — which at the time had a legendary reputation — to nVidia along with their patent portfolio.
Yep, I've studied this in great detail as I was very personally affected by it: it's always the same people who were the root cause of this. Sun Microsystems was the only company which stuck to its guns and continued with UNIX, sometimes in direct competition with the Microsoft corporation, because the engineers fought for their life's work like crazy, ultimately resulting in illumos today, so it lives on.
Scott McNealy, bless his heart, was the only executive openly willing to testify in the case against Microsoft versus NetScape: none of these other "executives" had the balls to testify for fear of making Bill Gates angry.
It was always the same set of people hopping companies, selling their bullshit and ruining them. Now we have an inferior operating system on inferior hardware, total chaos in virtualisation and cloud, low salaries and bad working conditions, in good part thanks to them ruining these UNIX companies.
SGI engineers designed and implemented mind-blowing stuff: inst(1M) software management subsystem is still lightyears ahead of any other, even today, and how long has IRIX been out of production?
HP had an interesting portfolio from their Digital and Tandem acquisitions also including the Alpha processor and of course Tandem's non-stop OS. I imagine the pairing of those two by porting non-stop to the Alpha or bringing non-stop's features into Ultrix might have at least kept them a niche player.
Having said that HP, Digital and Tandem weren't alone in losing marketshare to Linux on commodity hardware, or for that matter Linux on HP hardware itself. Imagine if HP had read the tea leaves and created Red Hat themselves instead of losing enterprise linux to someone else. HP is awash in lost opportunities.
I'm imagining hp workstations with razor-thin margins running HP-UX beating the cheapest PC at brick and mortar stores feature-for-feature, value for the dollar, with tons of multimedia and productivity software preinstalled, since hp hardware had phenomenal multimedia capabilities.
That should have happened with all UNIX vendors but it didn't because the managers believed that they could charge premiums. They managed to brainwash even their engineers so they couldn't see the danger. I used to argue not only with Sun salesmen about this, but even the engineers would defend the price premiums.
We all know how that ended. I have the curse of being right about the wrong thing.
The Mercury and other software acquisitions were so poorly handled. There was solid software there, plenty of good engineers and consultants, but R&D was underfunded. Sales turned into a revolving door, customer support had no training, and partners (who actually understood the products, customers, and had the expertise) were mistrusted. Sad all the way around.
Over time, these hardware companies grow or die. Their products have to get cheaper, hopefully due to economy of scale. Company management never wants to kill the old products with new ones, plus it's pretty hard to guess exactly where to go.
Everyone eventually falls off the treadmill.
Years later, of course, management has amazing 20/20 hindsight.
I've worked for successful software start ups, and I've worked for Hewlett Packard.
Here's what I noticed:
In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America.
By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.'
IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract.
At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.
Everybody at [Big Software Co] knows the software is buggy and bad, but the client doesn't, [Big Software Co] just hopes it works well enough that the client doesn't reject it outright or refuse to pay.
While [Big Software Co] works out the kinks in it's software at the clients expense it blames the failures on implementation problems user error or whatever it can to keep money coming in while it fixes the software. [Big Software Co] hopes that the client eventually sinks so much money into the software that they can't leave and also X months into the deployment it works just well enough to keep them on the hook.
This pattern repeats over and over and over again in almost every industry. You see this same type of thing in construction too, where [Big Construction Co] deliberately underbids to get the contract, then runs up the cost WAY beyond what anybody expected over time, the municipality, or whomever contracted with them can't leave as they've already sunk so much money into [Big construction project] that they can't cancel and have nothing to show for it.
This is almost SOP for every giant company in every industry anywhere, often times these companies are so big that the left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing so to speak, as the two are separated by so many internal layers / business units or whatever.
The only reason people get into bed with these giant companies is that whoever is signing the cheques on the buy side irrationally feels that [Big Software Co] can actually deliver because they are so big.
There was WebOS. Which I felt was really ahead of its time. But an OS takes time to develop because of the chicken and egg problem. Once Hurd was fired it no longer had C-level interest. They sold it to Samsung, who renamed it Tizen. The UX designer went to Android. And the engineers were scattered across the mobile ecosystem.
That was 20 years after Windows came on the scene.
Parent poster was wondering why 1980s/1990s HP let Microsoft commoditize hardware (courtesy of IBM). I think the answer is the same as for IBM: old management who couldn't see the revolution coming. After 40 years of Cold War, where the business landscape had been more or less stable and consistent, people struggled to conceive the notion that fundamental shifts could happen.
I do wonder if WebOS had a chance. There was so much overhead in the UI I’m not sure it would have gotten to the point where performance was good enough before it failed anyway.
Today it wouldn’t be an issue, but in ‘09 or ‘10 it was non-trivial.
Great UI design though. I’m still amazed how long it took for others to steal the card metaphor and some of the other great features. Like the Touchstone. We’re finally living in that world most of a decade later.
I still haven't seen anything as fluid to use on mobile as webOS. Android Pie gestures still don't do it justice. I thin in 2018 we finally have the hardware to see the true potential of webOS but it's too late.
They dumped it because of Apotheker. This was Hurd’s project and once he was out they firesaled the whole line. It didn’t even have enough time to make a sale.
That’s when I HP was in real trouble. Instead of pursuing new markets in mobile they retreated back to PCs, printers, and services. They were trying to grow into a market o it’s way to stagnating.
There was an HP operating system, HP-UX that ran on all of their workstations. They even made their own line of CPUs for a while, until Microsoft and Intel gutted the whole RISC/UNIX workstation market by massively undercutting their prices.
As well as a live fleet of about 30 units, we have about 5 HP Probooks at work in different states of dismantlement; they fell apart or broke in various mechanical ways and are cannibalised to sustain the working ones. In my previous role we were a Dell shop and the XPS laptops were much more reliable by comparison.
They've been building laptops with failure prone fans since I bought one with Windows ME on it 15-16 years ago. Other manufacturers don't seem to have this problem.
Agreed. It's hard to find data, but based on knowledge of many IT departments, HP corporate-line machines (not the consumer line and not necessarily the small business line) are among the highest quality pieces of computer equipment I know of. So often when I've had to dig in, I found smart, careful engineering down to the smallest details. Also, they publish extensive, detailed, easy-to-find, and accurate specs, which is unfortunately rare.
The results are that they last forever, well past when the user would like something newer and shinier. There's a 12 year old laptop not far away that, after maybe 5-6 years of heavy use, is in perfect condition other than one USB port (IIRC).
Currently at an HP Elitebook 8750W, and quite happy with it.
Only complaint is that it's most comfortable in a dock: The fan and heat sink exit at the top left (where I used to put a water bottle before I had this heater blowing on it), and this side becomes uncomfortably hot to use the integrated keyboard and trackpoint/touchpad.
I swore off ever buying HP products after I bought an HP Envy with a year warranty and exactly after one year, the hinges wouldn't work. I still used it but just at home, until the hard drive had a catastrophic failure and I lost everything.
Along with board and ceo problems, the they were fighting a battle on two fronts for computer sales. The kush high end server market was undercut by the rise of linux while they floundered with Intel on IA64. All the other proprietary unixes fell in this time too. Meanwhile Dell was undercutting them for consumer PC sales.
Typing this on a new HP EliteDesk (corporate shitbox) that came with a frigg'n chiclet keyboard. Yes a POS chiclet keyboard, with stickey keys, that probably cost $1 to manufacture. This is how far HP has sunk.
Fortunately my Unicomp keyboard will be here soon.
I remember shortly after Compaq disaster, Carly Fiorina pioneered this initiative called "Adaptive Enterprise". She went on CNET to do an interview about it. The interviewer kept asking her to explain what "Adaptive Enterprise" meant and she danced around the question talking about synergies and such. That's when a lightbulb went up in my head "This woman is a Category 5 moron".
Not a "Category 5 moron", but a Category 5 PHB (a Dilbert reference). Marketers and clueless boards love them: they glue together buzzwords and fad memes that sounds important, powerful, and modern to the ill-informed.
Most of us have low tolerance for corporate bullshit, but please don't turn that into a personal attack. That's a low impulse which encourages others to go lower.
Even if you're right, there are plenty of such execs out there, and the presence of one at the top is as much an effect as a cause.
Does anyone know how to make the annoyingly large Medium top-bar, and "open in app" button (hovering over the article) on mobile go away without installing anything?
No, I don't want to install your bullshit app [0]. Stop wasting the real-estate at the top of my screen.
And at the bottom of the screen, they often have another floating bar, asking if I'm ok with cookies. (Of course, the website loads just fine without me having clicked 'Ok', so either they're asking permission for something that does nothing, or they're asking permission only after having done it.)
(Just spitballing, as I've a dumb phone...) Can't you copy the script, and change the url of an existing bookmark? Or sync your laptop's bookmarks with those of your smartphone?
If you have one of those browsers with builtin DOM element inspection/editing, you can make it go away by deleting the respective item. A bit cumbersome ...
Personally I just stopped reading medium articles. They seem to be aggressively making their interface anti user that it's on my mental black list now.
A review circa 1980 of minicomputer development at DEC indicated their belief (probably shared by many in the industry) that there was not going to be room for such a diversity of architectures as there were in the minicomputer age and the 1980s would wind up like they did, dominated by a few chips like the 6502, Z80 and 8086.
As it was the 1980s were a minefield. With hindsight one could imagine that DEC could have come out with a 32-bit microVAX-based PC circa 1985. (With hindsight I don't think anybody thought that it would take another 10 years for 32-bit OS to be mainstreamed) I'm sure they thought about that, but it was certain that such a product would have taken a bit out of the existing VAX business and not certain that it would have caught on.
That doesn't excuse Carly Fiorina for the later problems at HP. Remember that Carly Fiorina was involved with fraudulent accounting at Lucent in 1999, personally I lost a few thousand bucks overnight when Lucent restated its earnings in 2000. Thanks to Carly, a proud American innovator (the former Bell Labs) got bought by a European bastion of stagnation.
If justice worked for the elite, Carly would have done time in prison and certainly wouldn't get put in charge of another company, but unfortunately there is no justice, and she got a chance to run another American innovator into the ground. At least she demonstrated how tone deaf Republicans can be by thinking her experience qualified her to run for president.