Posted on 02/09/2005 5:20:07 AM PST by drt1
The corporate culture under Fiorina was not too friendly towards males over 40. She brought over a lot of the politically correct culture from AT&T and Lucent.
What's this I hear about Dell looking at buying out HP?
Wow, no more HP for you. Anywhere I've worked, I've always used HP Laserjets and they've been great. It's sad that the brand has fallen off like that. I plan on getting a Xerox Phaser for my business when I get that rolling.
Many, many HP employees are ecstatic today.
Well, she's a living example of the proverb, "Penny wise, and pound foolish."
Our contracting firm was hired (I gather) to make sense of their internal IT support. We did. Each month, we outperformed expectations, and were well-paid for it. The internal users were, as a rule, delighted.
But first Carly got the idea of laying off more and more of us. Then she got the idea of cutting our salaries by 33%.
Then she got the idea of sending ALL internal support to untrained, inexperienced, English-iffy-at-best folks in Canada and India.
And so now, instead of getting fixes immediately or soon after (and a smile on their face), their $60K/$70K+ a year employees are forced to sit on the phone, or wait days, for their fixes.
She's a warning to other American CEO's. I hope they hear it.
Dan
Competition from Canon -
I thought the original laser printer was a combination of HP's electronics and Canon's paper transport and toner technology from Canon's copiers.
I wonder if there has ever been a SERIOUS study on how PC affects productivity. Not a self praising PC study to affirm PC quotas.
I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that PC culture is bad for the bottom line.
How many people use the ink refil kits? They seem to go for 1/3 the cost of a new cartridge.
Haven't heard that one. Question, why? Dell is kicking but and doesn't need anything HP could bring to the table. That would be a big mistake IMO - Akin to HP's acquisition of Compaq in the Duh! Department.
The problem with refill kits are the cartridges actually have software built in to shut off after a certain amount of time, even though there is still plenty of ink left in them.
The market tells us everything we need to know about this. HP stock currently up 9%.
Addition by subtraction.
you are joking! no wonder I never seem to get the amount of printing out of my printer!
Did her job get outsourced to India like her whole company Hewlett-Patel?
Your kidding. That is just awful. I guess during the last year or so she probably would have to blame everyone for not working hard enough in Urdu or Hindi since she outsourced every American job she could. Apparently that wonderful move was suppose to "save" the company. Now I can't understand anyone on Hewlett-Patel's help line.
You know it's bad when you're thanking God for getting a Canadian, instead of the alternative. As I did, when I needed support as an external customer.
Now, FWIW, there's a gent from India on my current team, and he is the awesomely-smartest, nicest, most professional guy we have -- or a tie for it! The point in re Carly is outsourcing for cheapness over quality, not that [insert any group-name here] is incapable of excellence.
I'll never on my best day match my co-worker for overall excellence as an employee.
Dan
I have nothing against Indians, its just that the latest craze in managment world is outsourcing and nowhere in the argument is the work "quality" mentioned, and as you said, it reflects bad on the company.
I'm not certain if Dell's cleaned up their act but I found the Enterprise-Scale sales reps pretty uninformed and dishonest. The last conversation I had with one I was building a public-network backbone side-by-side with my business network backbone. It's a 21-story building and I was pulling a simple fiber system. We use Cisco 3500s for the business end but I just wanted some small, inexpensive fiber-switches with 4 to 8 10/100 ports. One of the Dell reps I was talking with swore up and down that no one made such a device and that I'd have to buy 16-port fiber switches at 1,200.00 a pop.
Funny thing is that no more than 30-minutes before I had that conversation I had bought 3 (KMI?) 4-port fiber switches at $200 a piece from Directron. That wasn't the first time they'd fed me a line of crap but it sure was the last time.
I've even blacklisted Dell.com on my firewall and spam devices.
If you go with Dell make certain you see the systems first: lately they've taken to making proprietary systems. Even the motherboards aren't swappable. That means you can't walk across the street and buy a new motherboard if a VPs system goes down and he needs it back NOW. You have to wait for Dell to show up with the replacement or install a new computer. If you use something like roaming profiles that's not too bad but any work will be lost from the last login.
When I took my current IT directorship we decided to upgrade most all of our computers. I made Gateway come out with a few systems I could take apart and examine....then we bought a core group of small form factor systems from them. The CD roms have failed on several of them but the systems aren't proprietary and they're easy to work on. They've also been dependable.
Now that the core workstations are in place, I just build any new system we need.
The big determining factor was certification of the platform for software by Rockwell Automation (Allen Bradley programmable logic controllers). Rockwell placed Dell's laptops at the top of the list. At the bottom were HP and Compaq. Biggest reason was some of the geegaws that are added to the operating system by some manufacturers which interfere with some of Rockwell's communications drivers. Although there have been problems between XP and Allen Bradley's PIC module (DH-485), but that is a Microsoft issue. Because of this, Windows 2000 Professional is a lot better. Dell was the only major supplier that would provide a dual boot to either operating system. Plus I have had Dells serviced in the past, the response time is excellent, anyplace in the US. Important stuff when I'm on a field service call to some pipeline compressor station out in the middle of nowhere.
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