Is It Time for Hewlett-Packard to Go Back to the Garage?
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
And so it's painful to read all these stories about how the HP Way is dead dead dead, about how the company founded by Bill and Dave has been trashed, et cetera. In fact, the company founded by Bill and Dave isn't quite dead. It just donated the HP name -- and entirely too many unfortunate employees -- to this now-completely-different company that has since been run into the ground.
Agilent, as far as I know, is still chugging along. Unlike this thing-now-known-as-HP, it still makes test equipment, descended from the test equipment that Bill and Dave built in their garage. I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches.
There was an HP minicomputer in one of the EE labs at Caltech circa 1980. It had the software that ran the EEPROM programmer, and if I recall correctly it also had the 68k cross assembler you needed if you were building a 68k project.
The documentation was mysterious and the system was quirky, to the point that no one actually understood the thing. Everyone just knew the magic commands they had to type to burn ROMs and such.
The thing was nearly full, and it was getting hard to work with. You had to upload files, work with them, and then delete them, so there would be room for the next person.
One day, my lab partner and I figured out that a certain part of the file name/path was probably a drive name. Out of curiosity, we bumped it up and issued a command, just to see what the error message was when you tried to access a non-existent drive.
There was no error. The command worked. It turned out the damn thing had two drives, but no one had known (and so of course the second drive was all free space)!
I think most people don't understand that for most of its life, HP wasn't a consumer products business. It focused on test and measurement equipment for engineers and scientists. The computer and printer sections of the company were created to fulfill the needs of that niche. When personal computers took off and the computer and printer divisions grew, the management thought than in the lusty days of the dotcom boom it would be best to split into two companies. Their rationale at the time was that it was too hard to manage a consumer products business and a industrial products business at the same time. Though, the tech stock market fever at that time was probably the probably the real reason.
HP's history after that is well known. Carly Fiorina has been vilified for destroying Bill and Dave's company, but at least she wasn't responsible for the split. Since the split, years of mismanagement have led it to where it is today.
Agilent, meanwhile at least pays some lip service to the "HP Way." A lot of the old-timers reminisce about the "glory days" of HP that will never come back. But, at least some fragment of Bill and Dave's legacy still carries on.
Does any of HP-alumnis here thinks that Hurd was a "HP way" CEO?
But the answer is no.
The HP I grew up with is (has been) gone and unless they get back to their innovative roots I don't believe they'll survive. Time will prove me right or wrong.
Would that be a reasonable vibe, or is that wholly skew from reality?