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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I dont know about HP before the late 90s, but I have been working in some form of tech for 15 years now, and I have developed an aversion to any HP product. Seeing that logo fills me with dread and anxiety. Early on it was dealing with printer drivers, and explaining to users that you don't need the full install to use the device. Then it was painfully navigating HPSM. Then test driving the HP Stackable Switches which we bricked on the first attempt to update. Now it's HPNA, which I fear I'm going to be forced by management to port a bunch of scripts to.

I have known many other people in all levels of IT that have felt the same way.

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I've gone both ways. Pre-90s, HP in my head brought to mind solid pieces of equipment with good engineering. You could back over a HP-41CV with your car, and it would still work (or at least I wouldn't be surprised; never tried). I'd blindly buy a piece of HP kit if the specs said it would do the job.

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 MBA types often come in and milk a company's good reputation for short-term profits. After the reputation is milked dry, they take their wad of cash and bail out. Similar happened to IBM's consulting division when they strongly enforced short-term profit goals. Customers got nickled and dimed, and stopped renewing contracts. Good reputations are hard to come by, don't blow them for a quick high.

You'd have to go back to the early-mid 90s for bulletproof printers that never complained and did not require (or even encourage) installation of horrible software. HP also made good oscilloscopes, gas chromatographs, and the like, but of course those weren't shiny enough to keep on making.

Technically the HP division for oscilloscopes and ee equipment still lives on via Siglent/Agilent/whatever name they're calling it now.

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?

Spinning it off was part of the deal with Carly coming on board. :/

Siglent is a Chinese test equipment company.

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.

Or to save the crown jewels from going under with HP the IT conglomerate. I guess a mature IT and consumer mass market requires different corporate structure, scale, and growth compared to ee and chem lab equipment.

The test equipment and medical/chemical diagnostics business was spun off into Agilent in 1999, and Agilent then spun out the test equipment a few years ago. Keysight Technologies is now where they live on.

> Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's?

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).

The original HP Laserjets (up through at least the III) were indestructible marvels. I also had a Deskjet 720c that was nearly perfect, I used it until the drive belt shredded after many years of good service.

Back in the mid-90's I had an HP 486 PC and printer (can't remember the model number) that both worked pretty well, all things considered.

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.

I had to track down a bug in an application once. It turned out the bug only happened after you printed to an HP printer - the driver changed a critical floating point flag in the processor and never restored it.

Ah, yes, the floating point bug that set the FP error handing to "software" instead of "hardware". Of course, no one thought to inform the application software side of the house, so you were one divide-by-zero away from an application crash because the FPU said "not my problem anymore". You could fix it with a liberal sprinkling of _fpreset(), assuming your language/environment allowed that option.

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.

The application I worked on was quite popular, and I can guarantee our customers used every printer that was out there. The HP was the only one that exhibited this bug.

I'll up your anecdata with the fact that I worked at Microsoft at the time, and was trying to track this one down across a wide variety of print drivers for the product I worked on. Though HP was the most egregious (IIRC, they all repro'ed), others exhibited the bug.

But, doesn't matter, it's long since been fixed regardless of who did or did not have the bug. :-)

As someone who despises printers (that scene from Office Space was one of the most cathartic moments of my life), I mostly agree. Except that the x360 I have running Linux is by far the most satisfying instrument for work I've ever owned, by far. I hate what they've done with pretty much any other line of branding they have, but that bit of hardware was damn well done.

I have a similar experience.

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.

Oh god. HPSM. I totally forgot about that. One large company I worked for used that to file routine IT tickets when it seems like it was a ticketing application for the telecom industry. They must have had some of the best salespeople of all time.

Don't like their notebooks, but workstations are excellent. Had z420, 620, 3x 440, all no issues. The active cooling on RAM is a bit weird though :)

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