Why HP Fell
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
A review circa 1980 of minicomputer development at DEC indicated their belief (probably shared by many in the industry) that there was not going to be room for such a diversity of architectures as there were in the minicomputer age and the 1980s would wind up like they did, dominated by a few chips like the 6502, Z80 and 8086.
As it was the 1980s were a minefield. With hindsight one could imagine that DEC could have come out with a 32-bit microVAX-based PC circa 1985. (With hindsight I don't think anybody thought that it would take another 10 years for 32-bit OS to be mainstreamed) I'm sure they thought about that, but it was certain that such a product would have taken a bit out of the existing VAX business and not certain that it would have caught on.
That doesn't excuse Carly Fiorina for the later problems at HP. Remember that Carly Fiorina was involved with fraudulent accounting at Lucent in 1999, personally I lost a few thousand bucks overnight when Lucent restated its earnings in 2000. Thanks to Carly, a proud American innovator (the former Bell Labs) got bought by a European bastion of stagnation.
If justice worked for the elite, Carly would have done time in prison and certainly wouldn't get put in charge of another company, but unfortunately there is no justice, and she got a chance to run another American innovator into the ground. At least she demonstrated how tone deaf Republicans can be by thinking her experience qualified her to run for president.
Indeed! Predicting the future is hard. Only Warren Buffett can financially "prove" he has any skill at it, and he doesn't personally even claim such ability (instead following a set of principles laid down by Benjamin Graham, but often ignored by academia).
PC's eventually became a commodity business anyhow, and HP wasn't cut out for commodities. Commodity businesses usually flow overseas where labor is cheaper anyhow: it's not US's bag. Microsoft made its fortune on OS's and tricking companies into entrenched software "standards", keeping it from becoming a commodity. But HP was a hardware co., not software.
HP were better off as an R&D lab and "nerd tool" maker. Stay with your strength. Warren Buffett also notices that companies that deviate from their core strength tend to suffer. Do one thing and do it well. Transitions of focus can happen successfully, but are rare. Don't bet against the patterns of history unless you want to suffer the patterns of history also. (Apple is arguably an exception, but that's another long topic.)
Which then got bought by Nokia, a Nordic bastion of...something.
But on HP-UX 11 we still had a version of aCC that was a mix between ANSI and K&R, so it was the variant with more pre-processor logic.
GCC was only accepted by customers with Linux installs.
Asking GCC to be available in any sort was not an option for other customers. In fact was a deciding factor why we got some contracts back then, as we always cope with whatever they had.
I stopped following their smartphone efforts though
The Sun machines were much more common and a lot of software was tested/built on SunOS.
I worked at HP during this time helping software vendors port to HP-UX. I also spent some time on the side compiling open source projects for fun on HP-UX and then pushing the required patches back to the project's owner.
Anyone remember Pointcast?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)
I was assigned to them briefly.
I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.
This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.
GCC was often preferred even at a performance cost because it wasn't worth figuring out some quirk of the HP, Data General, SCO, etc. C toolchain, especially because the pricing models of that era often meant that it cost tens of thousands of dollars just to setup the same environment that a single customer had.
I have known many other people in all levels of IT that have felt the same way.
Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's? Was it to cut down on bureaucracy, or to "reinvent" the company for the digital age, or something else?
Agilent is HP's life science division (test equipment for biology folks) and the electronic test equipment division is now called keysight.
As far as I'm aware these two were spun out since the growth wasn't as good as the consumer electronics division.
Profit, but no growth.
All the manufacturers of test equipment have the same issues: the number of people who need test equipment is effectively fixed and costs are mostly all customer support.
So, there is this gulf from the <$1000 category (no customer support--we have a forum, maybe, and it is probably in Chinese) to the >$25,000 category (okay, we make enough profit per sale to allocate a couple of hours of a real human to talk to you).
Now we have an all-in-one HP printer/fax/scanner/copier that gets me closer to that scene in Office Space than any device I've ever owned. The obscenely overpriced cartridges don't last. It takes forever to warm up. The list goes on and I'll never own another HP product again.
To be fair, HP wasn't the only one that had that bug. My SWAG is that there was some common library that a lot of drivers used, including HP, that fiddled with the FPU and never set it back.
But, doesn't matter, it's long since been fixed regardless of who did or did not have the bug. :-)
I despise everything HP, but their lineup of laptops from the past year has been pretty good. I love my HP pavilion 15T power.
Got a 4GB GTX1050, HQ series i5 and an SSD in a laptop for ~$600. Hasn't given me any problems so far. my only complaint is the difficulty of getting the right drivers for Linux. But it worked eventually.
Then over the years my mental image gradually changed. HP printers weren't reliable workhorses over the complete product line anymore. Then the Windows drivers got bad. Then the inkjet cartridge bullshit. They effectively quit making calculators. Then Carly, then...and now I'm in your boat, where the HP label is equivalent to "made in China, and not the good China, the bad China that uses slave labor and cuts every corner it can find". I now actively avoid HP products.
The Touchpad was only on the market for just over a month before being discontinued. Why do that?
WebOS had a lot of potential as a platform, to the extent that both Google and Apple subsequently borrowed major chunks of the UI.
I sold one years later for 90$~
He left Danger to go work for Helio, then Helio was acquired. He left Helio to go work for Palm, and then Palm was acquired.
Oddly enough, the team that wound up doing the OS for the iPod was in the mix during this timespan also. They pitched a product to T-Mobile, but T-Mobile wound up going with a competitor. So Pixo wound up selling their wares to Apple, and the rest is history.
Source: I am a former employee of T-Mobile, HP and HPE.
(wistful sigh)
At the time, I honestly thought it was all a bit silly TBH! "Why would I want to take a picture with my phone when I have a perfectly good camera?"
"Why does Paris Hilton have her pictures stored on OUR servers, doesn't she know that's a security risk?"
Fun fact - all those pics, from all the customers, were stored completely unencrypted. They were uuencoded for some reason, but if someone wanted to, they could've hoovered up every last file.
I was working the day that Paris Hilton had her account hacked, that was not a fun day. It was looking like some heads would roll, and then it turned out the hackers exploited her account by simply guessing her password. The initial fear was that someone had penetrated the network.
I joined HP in order to fight Googles and Apples hold on the mobile OS market. Everyone can join the winning team, but I wanted to join the underdog. Then they dropped it before I even officially started. Pretty sad, even though I found other cool projects to work on, not much had the same potential to turn around the whole company imho.
Léo Apotheker.
Here we're promised an alternative account of why the conventional story of HP mismanagement is false, and end up with a lot of handwaving and 'Apple starting' as an inevitable explanation for HP's decline, despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the intervening period.
In this case he is bring his experience having worked at HP, knowing and talking with people from there over the years.
He talks about Apple a lot because people want to hear about Apple a lot.
Indeed. Apple got lucky 3 times: the first was that the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was written for Apple II first, out of sheer happenstance. It was a blockbuster that propelled hardware sales. Apple II's were otherwise considered too expensive.
Second was a boom in "desktop publishing" which saved the Mac. Macs were far more expensive than CPM & PC's per processing power, and the nice GUI alone wasn't enough to justify the price for most consumers in the early years. However, desktop publishing, a field that didn't really exist when the Mac was built, took advantage of the graphical nature of the Mac and jolted its sales. (If Amiga had better coddled desktop publishing software co's, Commodore may have also survived.)
The 3rd was the return of Steve Jobs. Apple would probably have sank without him.
Instead Apple focused, got its shit together, and did something important. HP could have done the same, knuckled down and fixed the fundamental problems with their company, but instead they decided to throw away all their babies and drink the bathwater.
The problem is not that Gassee sees everything through the Apple lens, but that very few companies have been like Apple and maintained focus. Tech companies, ironically, often fail from their wild success: MySpace and Yahoo! being two notable examples.
Once they have all this money they start to do lots of stupid shit and ultimately lose their way.
Microsoft was on track to do this, but they seem to have sobered up. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably fail if they can't regroup and rethink their purpose. One day some telecom will buy Facebook with pocket change and we'll all go "Yeah, well, saw that coming."
As an aside, they seem to be headed back in this direction once again, with what appears to be 5 different-but-essentially-the-same phones coming out on the market this september.
And a whole bunch of wildly priced desktops and laptops that don't seem to consider anything but the bottom line.
The problem is that phones are a way bigger deal than computers. If they made but one laptop model it'd be ridiculous. Having one or two phones isn't a big deal. Twenty or, like Samsung in its heyday, two hundred is a problem.
Don't forget that Apple would never have got there without making a deal with Microsoft for cash in exchange for support for MS Office on Mac for 5 years. Also Microsoft got a bargain, since for $150M they were able to point to a competitor in the face of accusations of being a monopoly.
https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
Hard to think now that Apple came so close to complete and utter failure that $150M was enough to get them back on track. By launching new Macs they were able to generate enough cash to eventually get them into the iPod, iPhone etc. which turned their fortunes around completely.
Robert Nardelli, former Homedepot CEO is also a similar instance of CEOs making bad decisions with little push back and accountability and exiting with reputation and big bucks. Neoliberalism and a fawning media and 'economists' propping up whatever narratives vested interests push has to shoulder the blame.
No company can survive short termism and a string of wall street focused CEOs. HPs decline hastened under her 'reign'. They folded from hardware, were content to sit on printer revenues and DRM and focus on 'services'. None of these have scope for innovation.
The culture fostered by the managers of those times (later displaced and kicked out steadily after the Compaq merger and the disastrous EDS acquisition) was what kept people around while the CEOs were busy burning the company down. That culture is still intact in some small pockets.
Top management since the times of Carly, Mark (a one trick person who couldn’t do anything other than cut costs by selling and cutting everything), Leo and then Meg were mostly clueless on running such a large company that had the capability to create integrated solutions — HP had PCs, laptops, printers, printing solutions, PDAs, phones (briefly), tablets (briefly), software, services, security tools, networking devices, storage devices, servers with PA-RISC/Itanium running HP-UX to servers with x86 running Windows/Linux)...I’m sure I’m missing many more product areas of HP since Carly’s time and later.
I still dream that HP could do better as one company with many products in different areas. But management styles that worship Wall Street and look only at their bonuses can’t handle that.
So maybe the big problems did start around Fiorina's time after all.
Don't get me started on their inkjets. Nothing like an all-in-one that won't even let you SCAN when it decides to "expire" a costly printhead.
My policy regarding HP printers: "Never again."
The true HP is Keysight, though they have quality issues now.
The tile floors were to find small parts when dropped, and minimize dust and static electricity. The computer jockeys were in the wrong.
I'd see how they take our feedback and improve their products.
I don't think I've loved another brand as much as I loved HP, back in the day.
Alas, things change.
It's insanely hard to concentrate in an open-office bullpen with every surface being a hard noise-reflective one.
I made the mistake of buying an HP printer a few years ago. What a user-hostile piece of junk.
Apparently their ink cartridges are region locked – the first time a cartridge is inserted the printer is permanently set to the cartridge region. I didn't realise this until it rejected the ones I'd got to replace the starter pack.
Even though I'd bought it from a big UK retailer it had shipped with US cartridges, meaning it wouldn't work with any UK HP ink.
HP's support's response was basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Their determination to protect revenue by putting stupid roadblocks to buying cheaper HP ink from abroad meant I just bought third-party ink with unlocked chips. They never saw another penny from me on that printer and never will from anything else.
The other way to avoid paying through the nose for tiny ink cartridges is to get a printer with refillable ink, i.e. Epson's EcoTank branded models or one of the many third party refillable cartridge solutions. But these always end up drying out and clogging if they're not used frequently enough.
Edit: Apparently splix driver works for this one.
https://www.openprinting.org/driver/splix
I swear the ML-1710 model did not show up last time I checked the printer list. Maybe I just missed it.
https://driver-samsung.com/samsung-printer-ml-1710-drivers/
I own a ML-1660 for now 7 years and the drivers still work fine for me. Just no duplex printing, which is a shame.
This printer has ink tanks on the side that you refill, and tubes going to the print head. The ink refills are way cheaper than normal "attached-to-the-print-head" ones on a price-to-volume-of-ink basis. Also there's no way for the printer to tell whether or not Epson branded ink was used.
The only problems I have with it are:
(1) it's WiFi seems to drop the DHCP lease after it auto-powers off, so I fix this by telling the router to always give it a fixed address, otherwise the PC's that saw the printer before can no longer talk to it, and
(2) over time the odd "pins" on the print head get gummed up, and you have to run the process to fix this through a number of cycles to fix them all.
Brother B&W laser printer. You want color? Go to Kinkos. That's what we do at our house, at least. It is rare that the printout really needs to be in color, so rare that I can't remember the last time we actually went to Kinkos to print something. And Brother makes a solid printer. Consumables prices? Dunno, I change the toner so rarely. I do remember that the last time I bought one, they were so cheap that I bought two instead of the one I planned.
You can't tell by brand (at least company) because all the manufacturers do it at the low end, because the dynamics at the low end of the market make it a losing strategy to do otherwise.
The problem is that they started acquiring things too late, and bought mostly crap that didn't have a big moat around them. IBM exists because they made smart sales 50-60 years ago that are still returning value to the company in the form of maintenance, services and complementary sales.
HP chose unwisely and bought into legacy platforms that weren't as sticky.
I'll keep an eye on how well behemots like Microsoft or Saudi Arabia can really change under new leadership and build my hope on what I'm seeing there.
Intel, for example, ran every single fab line on VMS at the time. There were other customers with similar requirements and monetary outlays when they needed something reliable.
Considering this, you have a business that you can simply milk for cash profit for 10-20 years as it slowly winds down.
The fact that HP couldn't figure this out is a gigantic failure of management at the board and CEO level.
Most of the time, telling it to shut down doesn't do anything except kick you back to the login screen (seems like a bug with ACPI, not Windows).
Behavior with the Thunderbolt dock is abysmal. Simply plugging it in does not work. In order to get my monitors and peripherals working through the dock consistently, I have to boot the machine while disconnected, log in to Windows, put the machine to sleep, connect the dock, then power it back on using the power button on the dock.
The fans run loud enough wile idling that I have to keep this thing tucked under my desk so that it's not blasting in my left ear.
HP didn't fall because of bad luck, or failing to adapt to a changing market. HP fell because they make worthless crap.
HP had an interesting portfolio from their Digital and Tandem acquisitions also including the Alpha processor and of course Tandem's non-stop OS. I imagine the pairing of those two by porting non-stop to the Alpha or bringing non-stop's features into Ultrix might have at least kept them a niche player.
Having said that HP, Digital and Tandem weren't alone in losing marketshare to Linux on commodity hardware, or for that matter Linux on HP hardware itself. Imagine if HP had read the tea leaves and created Red Hat themselves instead of losing enterprise linux to someone else. HP is awash in lost opportunities.
That should have happened with all UNIX vendors but it didn't because the managers believed that they could charge premiums. They managed to brainwash even their engineers so they couldn't see the danger. I used to argue not only with Sun salesmen about this, but even the engineers would defend the price premiums.
We all know how that ended. I have the curse of being right about the wrong thing.
Unbelievably mind blowing engineers.
Scott McNealy, bless his heart, was the only executive openly willing to testify in the case against Microsoft versus NetScape: none of these other "executives" had the balls to testify for fear of making Bill Gates angry.
It was always the same set of people hopping companies, selling their bullshit and ruining them. Now we have an inferior operating system on inferior hardware, total chaos in virtualisation and cloud, low salaries and bad working conditions, in good part thanks to them ruining these UNIX companies.
Over time, these hardware companies grow or die. Their products have to get cheaper, hopefully due to economy of scale. Company management never wants to kill the old products with new ones, plus it's pretty hard to guess exactly where to go.
Everyone eventually falls off the treadmill.
Years later, of course, management has amazing 20/20 hindsight.
Here's what I noticed:
In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America.
By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.'
IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract.
At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.
Everybody at [Big Software Co] knows the software is buggy and bad, but the client doesn't, [Big Software Co] just hopes it works well enough that the client doesn't reject it outright or refuse to pay.
While [Big Software Co] works out the kinks in it's software at the clients expense it blames the failures on implementation problems user error or whatever it can to keep money coming in while it fixes the software. [Big Software Co] hopes that the client eventually sinks so much money into the software that they can't leave and also X months into the deployment it works just well enough to keep them on the hook.
This pattern repeats over and over and over again in almost every industry. You see this same type of thing in construction too, where [Big Construction Co] deliberately underbids to get the contract, then runs up the cost WAY beyond what anybody expected over time, the municipality, or whomever contracted with them can't leave as they've already sunk so much money into [Big construction project] that they can't cancel and have nothing to show for it.
This is almost SOP for every giant company in every industry anywhere, often times these companies are so big that the left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing so to speak, as the two are separated by so many internal layers / business units or whatever.
The only reason people get into bed with these giant companies is that whoever is signing the cheques on the buy side irrationally feels that [Big Software Co] can actually deliver because they are so big.
My wife has an HP Chromebook. She loves it.
She has no idea that it's made by HP. If I told her she would probably forget.
Now she wants to replace it with a newer, high end Chromebook. It might be an HP, or it might not, but either way she doesn't care.
But just for clarity: HP sold webOS to LG (not Samsung), and it (mostly) kept it's webOS name through various aquisitions and rebrandings. See http://www.lg.com/us/experience-tvs/smart-tv-features and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS#History
Samsung's Tizen is it's own thing -- not some acquisition or rebranding of webOS.
That’s when I HP was in real trouble. Instead of pursuing new markets in mobile they retreated back to PCs, printers, and services. They were trying to grow into a market o it’s way to stagnating.
That was 20 years after Windows came on the scene.
Parent poster was wondering why 1980s/1990s HP let Microsoft commoditize hardware (courtesy of IBM). I think the answer is the same as for IBM: old management who couldn't see the revolution coming. After 40 years of Cold War, where the business landscape had been more or less stable and consistent, people struggled to conceive the notion that fundamental shifts could happen.
Today it wouldn’t be an issue, but in ‘09 or ‘10 it was non-trivial.
Great UI design though. I’m still amazed how long it took for others to steal the card metaphor and some of the other great features. Like the Touchstone. We’re finally living in that world most of a decade later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_NewWave
I remember being trained up to support the product, wondering all the time WTF was the gameplan - a 'Windows' within Windows.
Only complaint is that it's most comfortable in a dock: The fan and heat sink exit at the top left (where I used to put a water bottle before I had this heater blowing on it), and this side becomes uncomfortably hot to use the integrated keyboard and trackpoint/touchpad.
The results are that they last forever, well past when the user would like something newer and shinier. There's a 12 year old laptop not far away that, after maybe 5-6 years of heavy use, is in perfect condition other than one USB port (IIRC).
Fortunately my Unicomp keyboard will be here soon.
Even if you're right, there are plenty of such execs out there, and the presence of one at the top is as much an effect as a cause.
Edit: found one solution: https://outline.com/SV3V7N
I've used it to selectively edit content out of forums on occasion.
javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/
Or Reader modes in Safari, Firefox, as mentioned.
No, I don't want to install your bullshit app [0]. Stop wasting the real-estate at the top of my screen.
And at the bottom of the screen, they often have another floating bar, asking if I'm ok with cookies. (Of course, the website loads just fine without me having clicked 'Ok', so either they're asking permission for something that does nothing, or they're asking permission only after having done it.)
1) Reader mode (which I use extensively)
2) Unobstruct [0] does not meet your "without installing", but does a great job nonetheless
[0] - https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-unobstruct-230e4e95cf5...