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.
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.