Why HP Fell • Hacker News Board

Re: Why HP Fell

#101

Post by bsder » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

technobabble wrote: post #79

sk5t wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $25,000 category (okay, we make enough profit per sale to allocate a couple of hours of a real human to talk to you).

Re: Why HP Fell

#102

Post by tabtab » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

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".

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#103

Post by mrpippy » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

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.

> The Touchpad was only on the market for just over a month before being discontinued. Why do that?

Léo Apotheker.

Re: Why HP Fell

#104

Post by skrebbel » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #72

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”

So? Is reading books the only way to grow?

Re: Why HP Fell

#105

Post by madengr » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#106

Post by opencl » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #44

I was always surprised they let Microsoft come in and commoditise their business, why wasn't there an HP operating system to compete with Windows?

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#107

Post by mark-r » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #98

mark-r wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was…

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#108

Post by johnvanommen » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

repolfx wrote: post #59

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.

They borrowed more than the UI. Google hired one of the chief designers of WebOS to become the chief UI designer of Android (Matthias Duarte).

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.

Re: Why HP Fell

#109

Post by tabtab » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #78

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…

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.)

Re: Why HP Fell

#110

Post by johnvanommen » Mon, Aug 20, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #82

Annatar wrote: post #22

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…

WOW. I did not know this. And now NVidia is far more than a "gaming" company.