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Posted on 08/12/2012 1:55:01 PM PDT by Hojczyk
Hewlett-Packard Co. appears to be at a point of no return. Either Meg Whitman fixes everything wrong with the company or we may see the end of H-P.
Thus we are about to witness the greatest comeback in history, which will set Whitman up as one of the greatest chief executives ever, or we’ll witness the incomprehensible.
The incomprehensible is the end of the progenitor of the entire Silicon Valley mythos. This is THE company that began in a garage and allowed other companies to begin in a garage, all in the Palo Alto- Menlo Park area.
Yes, like a monument to abject failure, Solyndra stands out on the road. All part of a dead love affair with all things green.
This is what happened to suck the energy out of Silicon Valley. Elsewhere most of the world’s lesser venture capitalists were throwing their funds into MEMs (micro-electrical-mechanical systems). The Silicon Valley boys were going after trendy “green” inventions.
Billions of dollars that could have been used to create the next generation of integrated circuits or a unique new real technology invention instead went into green dead-ends. This includes batteries and battery cars as well as solar with ideas such as Solyndra.
When the Chinese came in with older solar technology that was simply cheaper, none of our new ideas could compete, if they ever could. It was over instantly.
The green thing began with Obama and the emergence of numerous green funds, many looking for government handouts. The ludicrous appearance of Al Gore as a venture capitalist working with Kleiner, Perkins highlights the errors.
After witnessing what has happened in the last few years, especially with H-P, I do not have high hopes.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
That’s okay—I made that HP purchase long before you recommended them here! ;-)
Ironically,shortly after Carly Fiorina took over HP, she received an award at a manor international conference on technology management. I was in the audience in Portland, OR when the award was given.
Just goes to show that you shouldn't be too quick to make awards.
Alive and IBM's worst nightmare. I subscribe to Cringely's RSS feed. :) (And own a couple of his classic videos)
LOL! What's this? I'm still using a DV6000 I bought back then and never heard of this.
Their lower price laptops specialize in (1) broken ribbon cables between computer and screen (2) broken power supply wire/plug. This is NOT high-tech stuff, folks! It’s planned failure.
Two of my kids had each of those happen. Gets a bit old. My daughter’s Asus is smooth sailing so far.
My work laptops (high end) are solid. Never had a mechanical or electrical failure.
I’m still waiting for them to figure out decent software for their printers. At least the ones I’ve had. It’s stone-age irritating.
Well, in a while it will be HPC. China.
Yep
that’s a decent deal
Used to work for a contractor packaging their ink cartridges 5 years ago.
I could not believe the waste and inefficiency.
Bureaucracy gone wild.
Plant’s closed down now and it’s done in Mexico.
OTOH love their desktops, great value.
HP-s malaise started at least as far back as the early 2000s, when Palm and Blackberry were showing the merger of computing and cell phones - Palm got spun out of 3Com in 1999-2000, HP could have scooped it up but didn’t. Apple’s iPhone hits the market in 2007 and, belatedly, 2010, HP finally buys Palm.
What had HP done during that time? It bought EDS; as if it was mimicking IBM’s successful transformation, from a computer company to a global computer services company. HP needed it’s own vision and it’s own business model - not IBMs.
If HP wants the rest of the idea they can pay me for it.
Having Carly Fiorino at the helm of the company didn’t help any.
I hope Meg can save HP. Their Proliant servers are the best Intel based servers in the industry. And their switches are pretty spectacular too.
Mark
“broken power supply wire/plug”
Yep. That’s been the case for at least 15 years
with HP laptops, and it’s mostly HP brand laptops prone
to that particular problem, which as I’m sure you know
is so expensive to fix that you might as well just buy
a new laptop anyway.
And yeah, their printer software is a total nightmare,
with close to a dozen useless or near useless shaky
background processes installed for each printer install.
After 2-3 HP printers crap out and get replaced with the
next HP model, you’ve got 30 background programs running
because of course no one ever uninstalls anything, even
if they could figure out how, particularly after multiple
printers have been installed because it’s impossible to figure out
which background processes belong to which printer. HP
printer software has probably done at least at much damage
to PC productivity in the world as malware! I try to steer people away
from HP printers as well for that reason.
Thank you. I thought so too.
I agree with everything you just said.
HP was the “dream” company to work for as a EE. Their quality was top-notch, their ideas were solid, their product catalog was known as “EE porn” in the 70’s and 80’s.
They had computers, but they didn’t see themselves as a “computer company.” They were a tech company that also did computers. The HP-1000 and HP-3000 lines were well regarded in technology and business markets, respectively. Their calculators were second to none, and most engineers of my age bracket would sooner fork over their reproductive organs than their HP calculator. “From my cold, dead fingers” would be a fitting description of the loyalty of engineers to their HP calculators.
Then the company’s board of directors thought they had to get politically correct and recruit a woman. They chose one of the high-profile women at Lucent. A bimbo named Carleton Fiorina, who had no background in technology. She was just a female face in the middle of organization of a stunningly inept spin-out of AT&T called Lucent.
HP wasn’t Lucent. Most of the tech industry was never like Lucent. Lucent had layers upon layers upon layers of management, most of it useless, but no one manager could do anything terribly destructive because they were mostly hemmed into very small fiefdoms that could not take down the entire company.
HP’s board plucked this bimbo with a BA degree in medieval history and MBA’s in... whatever the hell MBA’s do (I’ve never met one that was worth the powder to blow them to hell) and put her in charge of one of America’s best examples of a tech company. HP was started by two electrical engineers (both Bill and Dave were Stanford EE’s from the era of F.E. Terman, who is like a demi-god of EE-dom in the US), run by engineers, grown on the ideas of engineers. HP was first and foremost, an engineering company. Perhaps the only other company I can think of that was as engineer-oriented was DEC in the days of Ken Olsen.
In two short years, she killed everything that was good about HP - before she embarked on the “stupid-on-steroids” idea of merging with Compaq.
I got a call from a friend at HP Labs in Palo Alto the day she was sacked. He told me that engineers were “dancing in the aisles between the cubes! You should see this, man... it’s like something out of Dilbert.”
When this bimbo decided to try running for Senate, I did everything in my power to make sure that people who didn’t know tech knew she was a flaming moron who deserved defeat, even if it meant that a Democrat remained in office. The woman is a menace who should be exiled to an island where we never have to hear from her again.
I had the crap computer. I just got rid of it. Never buy a HP again.
Fantastic analysis.
My husband started working at HP in 1976, in PA with LED R&D.
Then went to San Jose, stayed through the change to Agelent then LumiLeds.
He put in 31 years and except when Carly was there loved everyday.
He told me when she was canned, the Es started singing “the witch is dead”.
When McCain was running I thought, OK maybe he can win, but then he picked Carly as his financial adviser (well you don’t want to know what I said)
HP was an icon.
And its that simple Carly killed them.
I still have my 12C. My husband bought it for me the first year it came out, he put an ap on my IPhone for the 12C last year, but I still carry the 12C when I need a calculator.
Yeah, I knew Dvorak back in the day. I could tell you stories, but not in a public forum like this.
Always thought that the Cringe Man did a better job.
Roger that. It's a tradition with HP.
Whenever I talked to HP engineers when I finally got to the Valley, I couldn’t point to a better bunch of people who had their heads in the game, yet weren’t full of themselves (like Apple) or were just plain a-holes (Oracle).
I remember my buddy telling me about the “ding dong, the witch is dead” refrain too.
Fiorina is a horrible joke. Her ability to become a GOP-backed candidate in California without anyone in the party yelling “WHAT THE HELL ARE WE THINKING!? Get this bimbo OUT OF HERE!” was what finally exceeded my patience with the GOP.
The GOP is a party of country-club back-stabbing SOB’s and conservatives should form their own party and leave the GOP to die. Because we’re never going to get anywhere if we’re fighting on two fronts.
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