David Packard Writes HP Epitaph 440
ewhac continues: "Today, he shared his thoughts on the merger in the form of a poster placed in the Stanford Theatre lobby:
Hewlett Packard
1938 -- 2002
R.I.P.
The Stanford Theatre still exists today only because of the employees of the Hewlett Packard Company. Without their achievements over the years, there would have been no foundation to purchase and restore this theatre.
Palo Alto might have had one more book store, or perhaps another restaurant. Architects had plans ready for a new "Casablanca Cafe" at this location when the Packard Foundation rescued the theater in 1987.
The Hewlett Packard Company was founded in 1938 in a garage on Addison Street only a few blocks from where you are now standing. Back then, the Stanford Theatre was showing brand new movies. In 1938 you could have seen Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday . You could have seen Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood . You could have seen Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, and Tyrone Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band . You could have seen Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You . You still can see these same movies at the Stanford Theatre. Our audiences know that they are truly timeless.
The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.
HP employees are now on a new ship, being taken on a new voyage. The company has even changed its stock symbol to HPQ to stress that the "old" HP is gone. For the sake of the surviving employees, of course I hope for a good outcome. But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.
David W. Packard
The Stanford Theatre Foundation.
"The San Jose Mercury News also has a short article about Packard's message.
"Editorial Content: HP's road to the merger has been the subject of much lunchtime controversy out here. As one of the "founders" of Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard has for decades been a highly respected institution who earned their reputation through solid engineering and research, and by creating a legendary workplace envied the world over.
"Especially in the Valley, people within and without HP came to feel as David Packard did; that The HP Way would survive management fads and fickle stockholders, and serve as a lasting example of How To Do It Right. But HP's current management has won the right to move onward; to where, no one is sure.
"Though the company is still there, the HP mythos and The HP Way seem to be gone. All anyone can do now is watch and see what happens next."
HP is going to be ok... (Score:4, Funny)
Scribbled at bottom: (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scribbled at bottom: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe they'll reverse-engineer themselves now (Score:2)
Oh boohoo (Score:2, Insightful)
I did (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I did (Score:2)
By the time Compaq bought them there was very little of the original DEC left; probably just VMS and the Alpha technology.
I felt like swinging past DEC offices to see if management had put up garage sale signs, but I think CPQ beat me to it.
Re:I did (Score:3, Interesting)
The solution was brilliant. We bought an Alpha/VMS solution. An engineer arrived, unpacked it, did the VMS install and configured it. Installed the database software. In total it took about 9 hours. We moved the database that weekend, and the users never even noticed. Uptime on that system averaged about 1 year. Mostly we took it down once a year to test and/or replace the UPS.
Later we were forced to buy a Compaq/Win NT solution. An engineer arrived and unpacked. Started the NT Install. Applied the service packs. Installed MS SQL. Ran the configuration tools and got a blue screen. Formatted. Installed NT again. Installed SQL. Installed Service packs. SQL blue screened. Installed SQL. Worked. Discovered that SQL couldn't handle clustering, despite written assurance that solution would allow clustering. Total time to get a working NT solution - 6 weeks. Server still needs to be rebooted about every other week. Still waiting on a rewrite of the software so that we can use the latest MS SQL that does support clustering.
Both solutions were bought from DEC/Compaq.
Re:Oh boohoo (Score:2)
Quite tasteful (Score:5, Insightful)
By tastefully posting a brief of his position and doing so without mud-slinging. Props to Junior.
Re:Quite tasteful (Score:2)
Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Insightful)
The loss of the "HP Way" could very well be a sad thing. The problem is, what way did HP have? Walter Hewlett, the staunchest foe, admitted that while he didn't approve of the merger he didn't have an alternative to offer in its stead.
Constructive dialogs must offer more than mere criticism. Alternatives need to be brought forward when the status quo isn't working.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Insightful)
They brought in $48.8 billion in 2000 (from their site). Why must people be so greedy as to risk a good thing?
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:2, Troll)
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of doing something well and steadily sticking with it aren't honored on Wall Street. You have to constantly grow. Sure, HP was playing in the Intel PC and server game, but it wasn't a strength. HP's single most important market was printers. HP could dump everything else and just sell printers, and they'd be a profitable company. But instead, they have to 'grow', which means spending lots of money on a merger and giving thousands of employees their walking papers.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:2, Interesting)
That, and the zillions of medical instrumentation, data acquisition, etc. products that they sold off as Agilent.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:2, Interesting)
Shareholders are taking a _risk_ when they choose to invest their money in a company like HP, rather than say in bonds. For that risk they expect a commensurate growth rate, not the status quo. If they wanted the status quo, they'd invest in T-Bills.
Not only that, but some of the biggest individual shareholders are the executives, so they don't just feel this as a secondary responsibility. It's how they're compensated, and that compensation structure rewards growth, not maintaining the status quo. Which is appropriate, given that's what the shareholders want.
That doesn't mean they have to be jerks, or cut people. But let's not lose sight of the fact that these companies are grown using shareholder dollars, and that if they failed to keep trying to grow, those dollars would not be available.
(Yes, you can hold a stock just for the dividends. But those stocks are generally priced much lower, because there is no expectation of the capital itself growing.)
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then they started buying stocks with the idea of selling them, and that eventually led to the Crash of 1929....
Tim
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:3, Insightful)
And I think HP's goal was to get bigger, so they figured Compaq was the best available target.
Given the growth slowdown in the PC biz, I suspect that they wouldn't have spun Agilent (AKA the real HP) out if they were making the decision today. Back when they did the spinout, Agilent's product lines were still growing and profitable, but growing way slower than the HP computer business was. Their logic at the time was that the Agilent slower growth rate was holding back HP's "true value", so the spinout was designed to goose HP's stock price.
Of course, then the computer market went in the crapper, thus creating the premise in my first paragraph that created the Compaq merger...
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:3, Insightful)
The space race, the arms race, the merger race. Companies go through with this because the business mantra of the day is "Go Big or Go Home". We've already pretty much seen the complete demise of the independant retailer, etc. Companies are terrified that if they dont get huge, their rivals will, and make lunch meat out of them.
Its a joke tho. We saw what happened to AOL/TW
AT&T / NCR deal (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlike Lucent stock , which zoomed up after the split then tanked almost totally, and AT&T which has declined a lot during/since the dot-com crash (though there've been a lot of ups and downs and huge acquisitions), NCR stock seems to keep ticking along - it's been in the 30s pretty much the whole time. Go figure :-). AT&T, in the Bob Allen years, had a record of buying or building computer companies and destroying them every couple of years.... I think we're finally over the habit, though we switched from that to buying access infrastructure companies around the world.
NCR, when we bought them, was an appallingly hierarchical company, about 10 management layers deep, even worse than The Phone Company ever was, that was trying to transition from building highly customized hardware and Motorola-based computers with proprietary funky operating systems into the Intel-driven world, about when that was starting to commoditize at the low end but still had product differentiation at the high end. Unfortunately, while their president Chuck Exley made all his stockholders happy by positioning this as a hostile takeover and thereby getting AT&T to pay three times what the company was worth, the price we paid was ultimately fatal to the long-term success of the purchase because the new AT&T-ified NCR would have to generate enough revenue to pay for the purchase cost, and the money just wasn't there. Maybe if we'd paid 1x or 1.5x it could have lasted a lot longer. AT&T did get blamed for a lot of the chaos that happened there that was a bit unfair - dealing with us helped them move out of their isolated little world and much closer to reality, and believe me, if AT&T in those days was closer to reality than you were, you were *really* out of the loop.... :-)
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am very angered about the poor treatment of Mr. Hewlett by the HP executives. It was not a dialog from the way I see it - it was the tail wagging the dog.
Many corporate leaders have have a cavalier attitude toward their shareholders and board members, a big mistake because board members see things on a higer strategic level, and, simply put, shareholders are the owners. If it is shareholders who own these gigantic contraptions, why is it that officers keep doing things against their interests?
There is a very big disconnect in corporate governance, and it is up to shareholders to become more educated in business matters and assert the power that they have. Hewlett is a hero for trying to assert this power, and he almost won.
The fact that he lost is not nearly as important as the fact that he fought in the name of rational and fiscally conservate shareholders.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a director and stockholder, it wasn't his job to provide an alternative -- that's what company management is for. His duty was to be sure management did a good job, on behalf of the company's owners. He said 'this is not a good plan' and explained why. He outlined alternative high-level strategies to consider; but he also (correctly) pointed out that he shouldn't try to step into management's role by crafting detailed plans. He took criticism for this, but he was 100% right.
HP's management systematically and laboriously dismantled the company's greatest strengths, and ultimately tossed the wreckage out the door. This was done in the belief that something was fundamentally wrong with HP that needed to be fixed, and that the fixing required a total reinvention of the business. Well, they won their point. The final nail in the coffin was the Compaq merger. We'll see if they can deliver on their promises.
But my interest is now academic: During this process, we sold all our family's HP stock, accumulated through options and employee stock purchases over 70 years. Many a tear was shed.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:4, Insightful)
When Fiorina was brought in, there were no less than 83 autonomous business units, which according to the HP Way, had the perfect right to refuse to coordinate with any other unit any more than they would coordinate with any external company. And because of the precious lifetime employment commitment, managers didn't have to answer to customers, either. If any company was begging to be dismantled, it was this one.
Now with Compaq, most of the gaps in the product lines are filled in. A stockholder can only hope that the new Compaq management can break down the internal barriers and make everything work together. A seamless set of products from handheld through mainframe is an awesome vision that no other hardware company can currently match -- not even IBM.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:5, Interesting)
Top-down businesses can be effective for a while, but they rarely innovate. It's a good model for a bank or a steel mill, not an R&D organization. You may feel that HP's "managers didn't have to answer to customers"; but if you talked to old HP customers, you'd find that's what HP managers did. By and large, customers loved their level of access to the labs, to the engineers, and to the middle managers who kept things going. The customers didn't drive this change, except perhaps customers like CompUSA and Best Buy, a very different story.
This is not to say that things couldn't have been improved, of course, especially through the roller-coaster of the 90's. But the picture of HP that you and Carly Fiorina draw looks nothing like the HP I remember.
My view is that the quick growth of the PC business during the 90's tech boom created unrealistic expectations in HP's executives, stockholders, and directors. Remember, they viewed Agilent's traditional businesses as useless old-tech baggage, to be discarded! "We don't want that junk weighing down our E-business rocket! If it can't produce 30% margins, who cares about it?" The thing that broke at HP was not corporate culture, but strategic vision. Strategic vision was lost. Strategic vision isn't a belief that everybody should march in the same direction, choreographed by the CEO. Strategic vision, for a giant organization, is conceiving and fostering a stable, evolving work environment where customers are served, problems get solved, and innovations get made over the long haul.
Well, this stuff is pointless. It's all been thrashed out here a thousand times. And the fat lady has finished singing. Now we just wait to see the reviews. I don't expect too much.
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:2)
In the postings I've seen, the company announced that the vote was unanimous, when it wasn't.
Certianly, WH didn't vote that way in the end. Perhaps initially he did, though I haven't seen any clear indication that even this is the case...
Perhaps you can provide some proof?
Cheers!
Re:Criticism without construction... (Score:2, Insightful)
Makes one wonder. I think everyone bought in to it initially, and when they saw the stock market/press reaction, some panicked.
of course he had an alternative.... (Score:5, Insightful)
HP has always prospered by moving into new product lines as their old ones became commoditized. By remaining a technology leader and treating their people with the highest respect, they were able to innovate steadily into new, high-profit product lines, without suffering too badly as they lost revenue from their older product lines. They were, in essence, built around obsoleting themselves, and hiring the best possible people to do so.
PCs are now a commodity. In years prior, HP would simply have exited gracefully from the PC business. Instead, they are buying a hugely unprofitable company to combine with their own unprofitable PC operations, in the hope that this will somehow make them money.
In other words, HP is moving into the commodity business; they are leaving behind excellence and embracing mediocrity.
Fiorina is destroying many lifetimes' worth of sweat, blood, and tears, apparently to further her own career. Instead of doing what is best for HP -- hunkering down and innovating their way out of the current technology slump, as they have done so many times before -- she is doubling the size of the company she runs to improve her resume.
And it's not going to work; HP is built around being excellent. Excellence is expensive. Their processes and treatment of employees won't survive a low-profit-margin environment. They are abandoning what they are best at, and trying to play Dell's game... without the enormous experience Dell has at doing so.
Good job, Carly... in a few years, we'll all be able to look back and see how you destroyed one of the finest tech companies on the planet, put thousands of high-paid employees out of work, and made millions in doing so. The shareholders may be a trifle unhappy, but you'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
(I'm not affiliated in any way with HP, but have friends who work there.)
interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
IAC, I'm not surprised he is sad to see HP go. Fuck, we are all sad. But there is some good to be found.
Remember our mutual enemy: Microsoft. And the enemy of our enemy is also our friend, in this case. In other words, Microsoft is a huge company. Only by creating a company huge enough to battle it (Linux is too small right now, but maybe they will get bought by HPaq!) may we triumph. It is the American Way.
HP and Compaq have already gotten themselves behind the Linux movement. Linus himself even suggested once that perhaps Linux should change its name to ComPHux, IIRC. This is great news for every true geek out there, and a Good Thing (tm).
Re:interesting (Score:2)
But all it will take is one judge to let Microsoft off the hook for them to once again be bulletproof. If Microsoft says to what is now the world's largest PC manufacturer "drop Linux or we'll triple your Windows licensing fees", how long do you think our enemy's enemy will be our friend?
It will be at least two and a half more years before the Justice Department will have the balls to stand up to MS. Until then, they're still one gavel-strike away from absolute power.
Re:interesting (Score:3, Informative)
Re:interesting (Score:2)
Re:interesting (Score:2)
lex -- lexical analyzer
Re:interesting (Score:2)
Curious, exactly what would you be purchasing to get Linux? Short of Linus' soul, one cannot simply go out and buy to own Linux whole. It is possible to purchase or develop a distriubtion of Linux, but not the whole shebang.
What would, perhaps, be interesting is to see HPQ purchase a Linux distro like RedHat, and leverage it to boost Linux, but given recent history that is not a guaranteed success for either Linux OR HPQ.
Just my $0.02.
Re:interesting (Score:2)
Re:interesting (Score:2)
He's doing neither, lex is also a unix command. He's asking if it was named in latin and if so how many other unix commands are also named in latin.
Exactly (Score:2)
Seriously...it all goes back to memes. The open source meme > proprietary software meme. I wonder what kind of meme would displace open source...?
HP's Been Going down since Agilent spinoff (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:HP's Been Going down since Agilent spinoff (Score:2, Interesting)
To me as well Agilent is the *real* HP. Remember, it all started back in '38 when Bill and Dave designed their first little gadget which was definitely neither a computer nor a printer. It was an RF Oscillator - test and measurement equipment.
The other thing that strikes me is the parallel to DEC: DEC used to be a great company as long as Ken Olsen was around. After he left the place things went down pretty fast. Same with HP.
Sans links (Score:4, Insightful)
This is particularly inappropriate considering the other current thread on news editing & munging.
Aside from that I'm glad to see Mr. Packard sharing his feelings. Did he need to use another means? No, this one was apparently quite effective.
Re:Sans links (Score:2)
Are they links to something irrelevant or offensive or biased?
Was anyone forcing you to click the links?
The readers in the lobby were obviously expected to know the people and the movies mentioned. The wider Slashdot audience will probably have heard of few or none of the actors or films.
What's wrong with supplying context unobtrusively? I moused over the links to confirm my suspicion they were IMDB links, but I didn't feel the need to follow them.
Links to background information from a respected publically available source looks to me like: No harm done.
Re:Sans links (Score:2)
strongly doubt these were posted on a lobby card with URLS embedded; nor does reposting the message with them gratuitously inserted add anything to the material.
This is particularly inappropriate considering the other current thread on news editing & munging
Nonsense. Those links are completely appropriate. My Perl books weren't originally imprinted with hyperlinks, but the fact that my cd versions of them are is a godsend. The whole point of hyperlinking is to be able to follow a side path through links and come back to the original content a little more knowledgeable. Why should someone who's interested in, say one of the movies have to go to google and search for a topic, when it's much easier, convenient, and meanigful to embed the links directly into the original content.
Re:Sans links (Score:2)
Re:Sans links (Score:2)
I found the "visual" link annoying.
It detracted from the reading. Bad enough that we loose the "visual" of the origional, but now have to suffer additional annoying things.
Perhaps we ought to replace choice visuals on that next chick or guy pick with URL's to explain what they're all about.
=Poster=
Sorry, perhaps you meant well, but I'm sure that many of us would disagree.
Just some food for thought - do we really need to be fed mush all the time. A quick google search would have turned up the references quickly in any case for those that needed or wanted them.
Thanks for the article, hold the links please!
Cheers!
Re:Sans links (Score:4, Interesting)
Possibly not; it was an indulgence on my part. While it may not have added anything to the material, I don't think it detracted from it, either.
There are a lot of twenty-somethings and younger who read Slashdot, who may have never even heard of Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Edward Everett Horton, or even Cary Grant (whose closest still-living analog might be Sean Connery), all of them great entertainers.
It also gives Packard's message some historical context. In January of the same year, Benny Goodman had his triumphant jazz concert at Carnegie Hall [bbc.co.uk]. On 30 October, Orson Welles plunged the nation into panic with his famous War of The Worlds broadcast [museumofhoaxes.com] . And just a few days later, Kristallnacht [mtsu.edu] took place, widely regarded as the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust.
So, no, I don't think adding the links was necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as the story's submitter, I'm biased... :-)
Schwab
Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
He's not saying anything about HP's products or technology, his business is a movie theater and his concerns lie elsewhere. He's lamenting the passing of an organization founded by his father, not a line of consumer and business electronics.
It's kind of like my highschool. It certainly wan't a great place, and won't be winning any awards for education. But I miss being there with my friends.
At least its not a bitter reply... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's Official: (Score:2, Funny)
; - P
How HP got started (Score:5, Interesting)
Mergers As These Bad For Consumers (Score:2, Insightful)
I think people are missing the point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
HP was simply not a company of printers and cheap consumer computers. Or at least, at one time, it was not. I am going to have to buy an extra calculator - they had amazing calculators, once you figured out how to use RPN. MY friend fell one day and broke the display on his 28S, and they gave him a new one. gratis!
They had amazing test intruments. The nicest ocilliscopes were HP. Sure, techtronix has some nice models, but the HP digital scopes kicked ass.
The laser printers were rock fucking solid. I have suffered through brother, samsung, toshiba, etc. I *never* had an HP printer give me trouble. Even the deskjets were not bad - for all those people out there who moan about them, what would they replace them with? Epson? Nice printer, as long as you use it constantly.
I was never fond of the computers, but in fairness, I have yet to meet a consumer machine that I like.
So it's not just the loss of a consumer computer company, although I know sometimes people at
Re:I think people are missing the point.... (Score:2)
It's kind of depressing -- Carly gets all sorts of recognition because she's the only female CEO of any major tech company...but she's an awful CEO.
On the bright side... (Score:2)
Secret Message (Score:4, Funny)
David Packard, using his superior brain power cunningly embedded a repeating hidden message in his poster (five times).
Using a complex mathematical formula, similar to the one used in the Bible Code, David has the last laugh.
I have decoded it here for you:
Hewlett Packard
1938 -- 2002
R.I.P.
The Stanford Theatre still exists today only because of the employees of the Hewlett Packard Company. Without their achievements over the years, there would have been no foundation to purchase and restore this theatre.
Palo Alto might have had one more book store, or perhaps another restaurant. Architects had plans ready for a new "Casablanca Cafe" at this location when the Packard Foundation rescued the theater in 1987.
The Hewlett Packard Company was founded in 1938 in a garage on Addison Street only a few blocks from where you are now standing. Back then, the Stanford Theatre was showing brand new movies. In 1938 you could have seen Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday. You could have seen Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood . You could have seen Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, and Tyrone Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band . You could have seen Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You . You still can see these same movies at the Stanford Theatre. Our audiences know that they are truly timeless.
The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.
HP employees are now on a new ship, being taken on a new voyage. The company has even changed its stock symbol to HPQ to stress that the "old" HP is gone. For the sake of the surviving employees, of course I hope for a good outcome. But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.
David W. Packard
The Stanford Theatre Foundation.
Re:Secret Message (Score:3, Funny)
"bite me carly bite me carly bite me carly bite me carly bite me carly"
I thought the joke would be funnier than that, actually. Here's hoping I saved you some time.
Cool hypertext. (Score:3, Funny)
Fiorina wanted for death of HP Way (Score:3, Insightful)
I would love to go back to the old HP, I suspect Carly will be gone before the end of 2003, all she wanted out of the merger was her massive bonus and raise and to layoff the 15,000 employees who best understood what the HP way was. She will do this and more and find that her synergies will never quite add up to what she hoped and by 2005 hp will look like it did a year ago.
Sad what a BOD/EC and CEO can do to a company, HP sent me dozens of proxies to vote on the merger, but I have yet to receive a proxy of the March Vote on the BOD. This time next year, we can welcome Walter and hopefully a few other intelligent folks to the board and get back on track.
The HP Way: A story about David Packard (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of the good, progressive things we have cherished about the hi-tech world, such as its egalitarianism, informality, and respect for doing the right thing came directly from these two men.
Why change that which makes a profit? (Score:4, Insightful)
HP closed their Calculator Research lab, yet it was making them a profit with each new model of calculator released. Yah really smart that one, closing a PROFITABLE part of your business.
The lady who is now in charge of HP, it says her mission goal is to "Make HP into a innovative internet company."
Uh WTF??
Internet companies suck, period. You make a printer you sell a printer and you have yourself a profit. Guarn-friggin-teed.
Hell I think that this is one case where some CONSERVATIVE management could actually have came in handy.
Imagine the PHB's conversation for awhile if you will;
PHB-1: Are we making any money?
PHB-2: Yah tons of it.
PHB-1: Ok, lets keep on doing what we are doing and make even more money!
Compared to what seems to have actually happened;
PHB-1: Are we making money?
PHB-2: Yah tons of it.
PHB-1: Ok then lets completely restructure the company go through a big merger close down our operations assloads of profitable sectors and go with something completely new and untested!
And people wonder why I have such disdain for business majors. . . . .
Re:Why change that which makes a profit? (Score:2)
The Register reckons it was the fault of Sircam. Carly got infected and the worm sent along an e-mail to Michael Capellas with the subject "Hi! How are you? I sent you this file in order to have your advice" and attached was a file with the name HP_Strategy.DOC
I fell off my chair laughing, but it seems almost plausible given the alternatives...
Not quite the HP way... (Score:2, Insightful)
While I am not sure that the new company will exhibit the same "Way", I do not see anything preventing new startups from using this method of operations.
As I understand it, parts of this "Way" have been used in other companies. There has been much talk of the "Apple Way" which encourages people to try new things.
We may never see another large company that works the way HP did. If so, I think the world will be a poorer place. On the other hand, as companies are looking into more and more Open Source projects, I suspect that the philosophy of Open Source will propigate into other parts of corporate operations.
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
Well well (Score:3, Insightful)
I only buy compaq notebooks lately, since they're easy to fix/upgrade/maintain if you get the right line. HP laptops? I never considered... I've tried half a dozen other OEMs for PC laptops, but never HP. It seems looking at the sells figures I wasn't alone.
As for backend systems and consumer desktops it's not even close, Compaq is #1 b/c of their branding and deals with PoVs like rat shack. HP should've made better products at better price points. BTW I only use IBM for my workstations, sorry guys. I wouldn't mind a nice Proliant however if we weren't locked into Dell at work.
I'm sorry Packard, but even Carly is right sometimes.
Re:Well well (Score:2)
I can't speak toward HP's more recent offerings, but the HP Omnibook 800CT I own is easily one of the most wonderful things I've ever had the privilege of owning. Sure, it's dog slow (166MHz Pentium) compared to more recent laptops, but it'll be a long time before I part with it.
It's no one thing, but a bunch of small details that made me fall in love with the thing:
The machine isn't perfect -- the keyboard is sticky, the display could be higher-res, and the BIOS "hiccups" occasionally -- but the number of things HP did right make it so gosh-darned nice that I'll probably still be holding on to it ten years from now.
I had the privilege of meeting one of the designers of the machine. He says it was the last such machine HP designed in-house. Everything after that was farmed out to OEMs. Too bad; a machine like this with a modern CPU and display would rock.
Schwab
Original HP (Score:2, Interesting)
The real HP became Agilent a couple years ago. I heard that when preparing for the split HP determined that the PC portion of the business would not survive a name change (which means all they had to offer in competition was name recognition).
HP is alive and well and out of reach of Carly, it's just known as Agilent now.
(And no I don't work for HP, I work for a competitor.)
Re:Original HP (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, if by "clone market" you mean the market of selling "IBM-compatible PC's", you left out a small step there, i.e. the step where they got into the computer business before there was a "clone market" (heck, before there were "IBM-compatible PC's").
They had a line of 16-bit minicomputers dating back to the 1960's, and other lines of computers such as the HP 3000's, the original 68K-based UNIX boxes, and the PA-RISC boxes (running both UNIX and the MPE OS from the HP 3000's; they used, as I remember, binary-to-binary translation to allow both native 32-bit PA-RISC code and the old stack-based 16-bit HP 3000 code to run on the PA-RISC 3000's).
Summary (Score:2)
HP merged with Compaq and changed the symbol. The old HP Way did good things. I don't think the HPQ way will be good because the HP way was.
WTF? That made no sense at all. If HP employees did good things, presumably that should not change at all with the same employees working for pretty much the same company with a different stock symbol.
This will probably get modded down as a troll by those who disagree - oh well, I'm karma capped anyway.
Regardless of your opinion of whether the merger is a good thing or not, this letter is nothing but FUD. He spends a lot of time talking about how the Stanford theater is great and how great the old days were but completely fails to connect that to the merger or the name change being bad.
Sentimentality, Blue-light specials & hypocris (Score:3, Insightful)
So... two struggling companies with ineffective, clueless CEO's come to the only decision that'll keep them in a position of power for another year or so..
The deal was masqueraded in bunches of buzzwords and double-speak. They claimed it would allow them to leverage all sorts of synergies for their customers. Of course, they never told their customers exactly how the joining of two alike companies would be beneficial. We were just suppose to trust Carly and Mike that it would. They even tried to coax Wall Street's blessing by saying that the merger would allow them to (gasp!) compete with IBM and its Global Services Division! Goodness knows that was so very re-assuring to the thousands of HP customers who were left in the dark for months and who were lied to about the e3000 line of servers.
So now, Compaq and HP shift from the HP Way to something more akin to the Woolworth Way, which goes something like this: let's sell as much crap as we can, as quickly as we can, before we go under!
There have been a lot of Slashdotters comment negatively about David Packard's eulogy for the HP Way. I've seen numerous comments that say it's just a company, not a religion and other such rubbish. But for tens of thousands of HP employees, the HP Way was as much a part of their lives as religion. It gave them a sense of belonging, a sense of security and a sense of honor, all at the same time.
This week, one man and one woman have succeeded in absolutely destroying the lives of tens of thousands of people, all in the name of corporate profits and non-sensical words like "synergy."
Take a minute to respect that and to think about that, because a very unique and wonderful chapter in American business history was just closed.
R.I.P (Score:3)
The Stanford Theater (just barely on topic) (Score:3, Insightful)
(It's actually a serious criticism I've got of market forces these days: far from being an engine of diversity, they seem to be driving the United States toward a rather boring and bland monoculture. I look at changes in Palo Alto, and I can think of a dozen bad losses, and one gain, and that's the result of a non-profit organization...)
But anyway, if you happen to be hanging on the Bay Area peninsula for any reason, definitely check out the Stanford Theater on University Ave. With any luck, you may get to see Edward Everett Horton and/or Eric Blore.
(One complaint though: David Packard is a little too tasteful for my tastes. Silicon Valley needs more bad SF movies. I want to see a Roger Corman festival. )
Re:Bulletin Boards circa 1920 (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
These companies are being killed/bought/monopolied out of business by the "new" corporate America that cares only about executive and shareholder enrichment. The new corporate America that will fire 6,000 employees on Monday and give "retention bonuses" to "talented executives" on Friday.
There was honor in the way HP did business, an honor that is all but forgotten today; replaced with shameless greed and profits at ANY cost. Nothing is sacred in the cult of Carly Fiorina.
Polaroid. HP. The list will get longer as once good companies are ass-fucked to death by the pirates of the new corporate America.
honor (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, something else then (Score:2)
How about this? Shafting your employees and ripping a company up without a pretty clear, concise, and well-defined goal is a bad idea. You kill worker morale, you lose customer confidence, and you (as in any reorganization) are going to be losing money for a while. As a matter of fact, the only people that are likely to benefit from this merger *may* be the shareholders of HP (which I really, really doubt...Compaq is a godawful acquisition), and, of course, the execs, which get nice merger bonuses.
Frankly, I think the entire idea of executive bonuses for execs in strategic decision-making positions should be tossed in the trash. It biases the exec to do a job that will make them money, not that will help the company. If the board of the directors wants to vote to give a specific person a nice fat bonus for something exceptional, great.
HP's demise is important (Score:5, Interesting)
It may be a bunch of rubbish to you, but it's not to the people who built HP over the years. HP pretty much got the Silicon Valley ball rolling. They did it the right way - Hewlett and Packard didn't even know what they were going to build when they started the business. It took them several years before they focused on office and computer technologies, but they were built on the notion that inventive, hardworking, principled people can do great things.
The success of HP and Intel and Apple led to a concentration of creative energies that built more of the technologies you and I take for granted than I could list.
Sure, there are a ton of needs that are of much greater importance than building a company. But this isn't just about multimillionaires, this is about thousands and thousands of people over the years who worked at a place they could believe in. They didn't feel like they were fleecing the public. They were proud of what they were producing. They were happy that the company they were working for took care of them.
I'd say that's pretty important. But I guess I'm not being cynical enough.
Re:HP's demise is important (Score:3, Insightful)
As for the 'HP Way'- it was about innovating and taking care of employees. Until the last decade, HP never downsized, for example.
Re:HP's demise is important (Score:2)
Invest in things w/more longevity than a corporate enterprise - and don't act surprised when they end.
If he really thought HP would last 'forever' he is not too bright or has a serious lack of historical knowledge.
When people invest their lives in a company - they are investing it in the wrong place. Sure you need a job and you should provide honest work in return for honest pay. I do it everyday. But my job is not my identity and it is not my life. If my current employer tanks- I will move on.
or to sum it up in an even simpler way (but once most people read this they will pigeon hole me (somewhat ironic) and not listen to anything I have to say)
"The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord stands forever"
.
investment in work (Score:2)
Family and relationships are vitally important, and I think that to have a balanced life, these things have to take precidence over work. However, we spend a good 1/4 or 1/3 of the best years of our lives at work.
Since that's the case, some people choose to embrace work as something with intrinsic meaning. You seem to be advocating not getting emotionally involved in your current place of employment, which is an approach that makes sense for you.
But for some people, work needs to have meaning. These people form strong bonds with their coworkers, they enjoy collective endeavors, they believe that if they work hard with the other people in their organization, they'll all be rewarded.
I have done the 60-70 hours/wk for the cause type of work before. I enjoyed it at the time, and it provided me with many benefits. But the things that matter to me have shifted, and now it's rare that I put in more than 50 hours a week. But everyone's sense of priorities is their own, and I find it difficult to disparage people who put a lot of hard work into something they believed in.
Re:HP's demise is important (Score:2)
Long gone are they days of company loyalty to it's employees. Gone are the days where building something was worth it. Where pride in those accomplishments too precident over profits.
Even the Japanese companies who virtually guarenteed their employees a job for life have laid people off [wsws.org].
Wake up and smell the coffee people. We live in a disposable world now. If it breaks, replace it. Don't fix it. If you don't want it any more, throw it away.
The only people that matter are the investors, and they only care about the bottom line. Not how you got there... Not what the journey was like, just where you ended up.
Companies used to accuse employees of being job jumpers, and only being concerned about there salaries... Well, now it's the only way to survive.
HP/Compaq is only the latest visible instance of this trend.
Someone mentioned DEC in these threads. Did you ever hear HOW DEC laid off it's employees? They called them on Sunday night and told them not to report to work on Monday morning. Appearently, Sunday dinners became a silent even where people JUMPED when the phone rang.
It's not personal. It's just business.
Re:HP's demise is important (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies are important. Companies give people places to work, and make money. Good companies give back to their communities, and companies that do this well are rare and shouldn't be taken for granted.
While it's all en vogue to be anti-globalization, it's probably not in anyone's interest long term to be purely anti-commercial. Companies that inspire loyalty from their employees by helping them build neat things are few and far between (rather than buying their loyalty with stock options, ala Enron).
There are good companies and bad companies. Just like people. HP happened to be one of the good companies. We'll see if that spirit is gone now.
What I find interesting... (Score:2, Informative)
is that several of my friends who work in the trench at HP were very much against the merger while another friend at HP (upper management and gets to ride in the plane with Carly) was for it. Don't know what that tells you, but there is a definite fragmentation between employees and management. Time will tell, but the fragmentation is hard to overcome.
Second thing... Feel bad for the many good employees at Enron and Arthur who really had no say in the demise of their companies AND lost their jobs. I'd rather receive a call like the DEC emplyees did than spend endless nights awake wondering if/when/where the second shoe would drop. Just reaffirms the advice that everyone should have 3-6 months of expenses banked away. I finally got there and have never been sorry (well, I had some nagging thoughts during the dotcom stock craze about missed opportunity, but not now). No, it wasn't easy... but I sure sleep better.
Re:HP's demise is important (Score:2)
They were happy that the company they were working for took care of them.
Large corporations don't take care of their people out of altruism. They treat their people well because if they didn't people would leave or demand more money to stay. It's (usually) good for the bottom line to treat your people well, since high turnover rates and high bonuses and salaries cut directly into the bottom line. While the founders of these companies may have genuinely cared about their employees, when a corporation grows beyond a 100 people or so, it becomes impossible for the upper management to become personally connected to the rank and file. When that happens, they treat the people below them like the guy they cut off on the freeway. And often, when the next generation takes over, they grew up with money and didn't start out poor like their father, the founder. This further adds to the disconnection.
So before you get all patriotic and teary-eyed about the company, remember that they were a big corporation before the merger, and they're still a big corporation after the merger. And they're looking out for you only so long as it's in their interests. Take care of yourself and the true friends you've made working there all those years. Because you better believe that the company won't hesitate to ax you in a moment's notice if a financial consultant tells them to.
Re:The real HP Way (Score:2)
...
The HP you lament was dead long ago
Maybe it's still around, but it's called Agilent now. We've been looking at their automated optical inspection systems. Awesome, but extremely expensive. Truly in the H(igh)P(rice) tradition...
The old HP made instruments and test equipment, not PC's. It treated its employees exceptionally well. It stayed in the forefront of technology while building the highest possible quality into its products. It would service them forever. (I've used 25 year old HP oscilloscopes, they still worked fine, and aside from the great size and weight were still as good as analog scopes ever got.)
And the old HP had to charge premium prices, of course. That sort of quality and service costs money. The HP way also ran up the payroll costs, although I suspect it costs much more to treat your employees badly so the best ones leave. However, I think the great working conditions, topnotch work force, and premium products and service sort of go together -- I wouldn't feel good working where the corporate goal was to make the product as shitty as possible without losing too many customers, and if they raised my pay I'd just save it up until I could afford to quit...
The real HP Way, #2 (Score:2)
You forgot to mention products that almost never install correctly on the first try.
Also, troublesome printer software, that even HP tech support tells you should be used.
Re:The real HP Way (Score:2)
You do realize that the print heads are contained in the cartridge, saving you from having expensive head replacements as often as with the Canon cartridges? Oh, and the HP's hold more ink.
If you disagree with HP's engineers and don't want to replace the print heads every time you run out of ink, use a refill kit.
As far as "Shitty PC's" and "Disposal (sic) Printers", that's what the market demands. No company makes any money mass-producing the PC's that the geek crowd wants, that's why we build our own. Incidentally, my friend is still using my Deskjet 500C that's nearly 10 years old.
Re:You want to know what HP used to mean?? (Score:3, Informative)
HP3000s were Really Funky Mainframe-like Things. The Unix-based machines ran HPUX, which was almost exactly like Unix, but had really bizarre ideas about how RS-232 should be dealt with, and I spent far too much of my career for a couple years haggling with it and with drivers for HP printers.
On the other hand, remember when HP printers came with manuals that actually told you what the escape sequences were so you could do anything you wanted, not just 'how to tell Microsoft Products X/Y/Z that you have an HP printer?? That's because they were written by engineers for engineers, so you could actually understand what the equipment was doing and how to use it. Nobody writes manuals like that any more, unfortunately.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Interesting)
Have fun in your Brave New World.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:2)
Corporations should not, as a rule, be anthropomorphosized by mourning their passing or by promising unconditional loyalty. However, HP is (alas, was) one of the exceptions to that rule. HP is dead, long live HP...
the HP Way (Score:2)
Every HP product I've owned was absolute junk. I had my CDR (7000 series) replaced *3* times before it went out of warranty. Each lasted about 3 - 4 months before it would only produce coasters ... cost me easily 200$ in cds (this is back when they cost 2 - 5$ each)
My HP printer worked when it felt like it. It made these noises like the bow of a ship buckling as it was printing, still worked if you didn't mind being gouged 30$ for an ink tank. Convienantly after its waranty was up, whatever was making the noise gave out completley... printer dead.
I'm on my *third* HP scanner, the first two died. 90 day warranty my ass. First one, just stopped working one day, electrically dead ... second one, mechanical failure, it made a chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk sound the innards ground to bits one day, also conveniantly out of warranty.
My *expensive* HP computer at work, the on board sound card just *died* one day. Never has worked since ...
This is what the death of the "HP way" means to me, less bullshit products. At this point I've basically sworn never to buy another HP again.
Re:Excuse me, (Score:3, Insightful)
If he is right, HP will probably be a dying company. One that was great fun to work for from all accounts. It had upper-management that required respect for the employees and that rolled downhill...all the way to the lowest rungs of the company.
As Eccl. in the bible says...
I paraphrase.
"It's all been done before. You'll never REALLY do anything new. But the one thing you can have some solace in...Your work. Do a good job, and take pride in it."
HP allowed many to do that, while also working for someone else. That's a rare treat in todays mega-corp world.
That's why we're sad to see HP change and the old way die. Perhaps it's inevitable, but still sad.
Cheers!
Re:Little question... (Score:2, Informative)
/zl
Re:Little question... (Score:5, Informative)
To quote from a Previous Article [slashdot.org], "The [HP Way] is not socialism or workers' rights, but rather the management mentality. If you know you can fire like crazy, you are more likely to hire like crazy. If you are reluctant to fire, you will also have a more long term outlook on hiring and expansion. If a project needs cutbacks, you will have the attitude of needing to find a new project for the current staff, rather than cutting back in a hurry and losing all that expertise, then later hiring like crazy and trying to integrate new staff."
I've got family that worked for the photo imaging department at HP for a really long time before retiring. What I hear from him is the same thing... a large amount of job stability that results in higher than normal employee loyalty and retention.
Re:What a load of self-indulgent claptrap! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What a load of self-indulgent claptrap! (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But there are companies, and there are companies.
All too often these days, people think anything goes in the name of profits, and that's all there is to a company. Making money. Full stop. Do whatever you can within the law to screw maximum profits out of your customers, get maximum profit from your employees, the only thing that matters is the bottom line.
Not all companies are like that. I expect one thing that upsets David Packard is that the 'HP Way' contained many humanitarian principals which have now been cast aside. Now the merger has taken place many thousands of people are probably going to be made redundant. I expect making people redundant would have kept the founders of HP awake at night. To the current administrators of the HP empire, employees are just numbers that have to be juggled to maximise profits.
Re:What a load of self-indulgent claptrap! (Score:2)
I sure don't understand how those shitty printers came out of the same company.
Re:HP Way (Score:2)
i wholeheartedly agree, my first job dealing with HP was adminning a HP1000 RTEA system, i lucked into the job when my boss left and they asked me to try to hold down the fort till a replacement could be found, i was far underqualified for the position and in way over my head.
I poured through manuals like a madman and did my best, but honestly it was the great service from HP that allowed me to get by. Funny thing was, about a month later i was doing the same job as the guy i replaced better than he had done it, and managed to keep the job.
If it wasn't for the great guys at HP that got to know me on a first name basis for a few weeks there, i could have never done it. I'm still gratefull to those guys to this day.
Re:About Apple. (Score:2)
But don't go giving him an altruism award anytime soon...I believe it was only last year that Apple gave him a private jet (quite a few millions), and recently that they gave him quite a few more millions in stock options. The $1 salary is a cute quote, but doesn't mean much.
Re:I say: HP repent (Score:2)
First spinoff: Carly Fiorina. Who'll give me a plug nickel? Who'll give me a green stamp. Ladies and gentlemen the auction for this fine item of American corporate management expertise has begun and bidding starts at one S&H green stamp or 2 crackerjack boxtops ... what am I bid?
Full many a industrial giant could restore or ensure their longterm profitability with a similar move: spin off your upper management as a crack consultation firm. Or a shroom consultation firm --whatever their hallucinations most closely resemble.
HP repent.
Actually... (Score:2)
Re:Grim (Score:2)
I remember lusting after HP test equipment as a teenager, and that one of the great things about the Army was that they had lots of cool HP tools around for me to use -- and they issued me a lovely HP scientific calculator, too.
I always liked Tektronix scopes better, though.
I think HP lost it when (now) Agilent stopped being the heart of the company. Oh, well.
- Robin
Re:Who died?? (Score:2)
We will find HP on the dung heap - and you sir will need to find some crow to eat!
(Or perhaps I will, but I doubt it - just remember - you thought the merger was "good")
Cheers!