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Why HP Fell

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Re: Why HP Fell

#71

Post by eropple »

madengr wrote: post #25
flyinghamster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 dro…

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#72

Post by selimthegrim »

anthonybsd wrote: post #51

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".

Her first husband said the only book she ever read was “Dress for Success”

Re: Why HP Fell

#73

Post by selimthegrim »

erikb wrote: post #40

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…

Is this company Intel, because I was working there five years ago as a contractor and this seems spot on.

Re: Why HP Fell

#74

Post by Spooky23 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#75

Post by dubbel »

mattkevan wrote: post #47

I never understood HP's acquisition and rapid scuttling of Palm. What a waste. The Touchpad was only on the market for just over a month before being discontinued. Why do that? WebOS had a lot of potential as a platform, to the extent that both Google and Apple subsequently borrowed major chunks of the UI.

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#76

Post by acdha »

reacweb wrote: post #10

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 terrib…

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#77

Post by timfoden »

Scarblac wrote: post #41
flyinghamster wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#78

Post by PaulHoule »

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: Why HP Fell

#79

Post by technobabble »

sk5t wrote: post #68
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #66

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 whic…

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?

Re: Why HP Fell

#80

Post by technobabble »

erikb wrote: post #40

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…

Based on your perspective, what can the company do to either prevent hitting the iceberg, or minimizing the iceberg damage as much as possible?
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