A couple of ex-housemates of mine (who worked at HP a while back) just laughed. It's like Oracle getting into video games, or Cisco deciding to crank up a steel mill. Software is /not/ one of HP's strengths.
I wonder who's selling short?
Select your product
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows - PCL 5
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows - PCL 6
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows - Postscript
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows 64-bit PCL 5
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows 64-bit PCL 6
» HP Universal Print Driver for Windows 64-bit PS
Thankfully they forgave us the usual split in NA, EMEA, AP1, AP2, etc, geographic versions, with the only clue being in the cryptic codename in the link.
I've had good hp printers (laserjet3, original deskwriter), and one decent one (hp555), but this one is pretty crappy. The software isn't very good, the wifi on it sucks, the ink cartridges are always low. What's more, it came from the apple store, with a new macbook. It works better with my ubuntu boxes.
And we're going to do it by dropping the premiere retail project that contains software we wrote ourselves.
Uh oh.
It's worth noting though, that they didn't dump their profitable business in their pursuit of a new market. On the other hand, they also had a huge pile of money to throw at building the xbox.
Microsoft eventually decided to basically build a PC dedicated to gaming (XBox) that would leverage the legion of game developers already building on PCs. They also would be able to compete against Sony and Playstation because their platform was arguably easier to develop for and more well-known.