Comment Just another in a long series of misguided mergers (Score 5, Insightful) 53
HP has a very long history of buying companies only to unload them for cents on the dollar a few years later. Remember Palm and WebOS? Take a look at the HP Acquisition List on Wikipedia. Not many of those companies were good buys.
This was another of many issues that contributed to staff depression while I was there and continues to this day. We could see it was wrong, but could do nothing about it.
They used to be the company engineers wanted to work for. When I got to Pixar in '81, the engineers that had been at HP were still proud of having worked there. It's really sad what's happened.