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?
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).
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.
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.