Losing the HP Way

I've seen HP lose its way from another perspective -- technical support -- over the last couple of decades. I am genuinely sad to say that I couldn't be happier that HP is getting out of the consumer market.

HP might not have been a printer company, but they built a strong reputation early on for workhorse printers, and the driver software wasn't usually too bad, either. My first job in the tech industry was in the data processing department of a good-sized East Bay school district. We must have printed tens of thousands of pages per month on an HP LaserJet 4. Never had so much as a hiccup from it.

I knew less about their computers at the time, but if memory serves, they had a good reputation there, too.

But there was this sort of gradual degradation in every single one of their product lines. The best thing I can say about their chintzy-as-hell newer printers is that the printers themselves aren't quite as bad the software. The software is terrible, and it gets worse every year, not better. In some cases, you can't install HP's driver software for two different-but-similar models of printer on the same computer; the software interferes with itself.

Their computers are a joke. We've found a lovely variety of manufacturing defects and design flaws. There's a guy on eBay doing a decent business manufacturing and selling aftermarket copper pads for graphics processors for HP laptops because their thermal pads are notorious for shrinking away from the aluminum heat sink. We've had several laptops that have seriously had every single major component replaced -- motherboard, screen, hard drive, memory -- and these aren't abused or old laptops.

And their support is just as bad. We, at one point, spent almost 40 hours in a single week on the phone with HP support for one client or another. 40 hours of lost productivity; 40 hours of cost for at least three parties; an entire work week, poof. I wish I could say the support was any good, but it wasn't.

We do our best to steer all of our clients away from HP. If they do genuinely get out of the consumer market, I can only hope that we'll see a net increase in worldwide productivity.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be Hewlett or Packard and see that happen to the company I built.

"Who would want to buy the HP PC division?"

Maybe a dominant tech giant seeking to control every level of its customers web-browsing experience:

Chrome Browser, ChromeOS, Chromebooks, Android OS, Motorola-Mobility acquisition...