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Comment by crapshoot101 | Hacker News Reader

The most amazing thing for me of the piece is the realization that HP still had $110B+ in revenue last year - its a useful reminder to us (put myself squarely in this category) of some of the behemoths in the valley that get short shift at times in the "Silicon Valley" PR ecosystem. There's apparently some interesting research still going in HP labs - one smart friend moved out here to work on Memristors with them (over multiple alternatives), because they had backed the work for a while.

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If you get out of the VC/Silicon Valley/Tech universe these companies are appreciated much more. In the wider business world, they still get a lot of attention, largely because they are good businesses despite not having the sex appeal that smaller, but quickly growing companies might have.

Might you know what HP's current stance on memristor research is, by any chance? It's one of those technologies we've all seen simmering away hopefully, and HP's been (or, perhaps, was?) one of the few large SV corporations with an interest in longer-term R&D.

Well, they were boasting about it just this summer

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-lab...

Thanks for that. With the vulnerability of R&D, I'd feared the group may have been sidelined. I noticed they're claiming to be preparing to ship memristor DIMMs in 2016 - hopefully that's a genuinely commercial roadmap, rather than RSN.

Well, they are the 3rd largest in revenue in the IT / Software services segment after IBM and Fujitsu.

Good point, and how often are the blogs and podcasts overflowing with news about IBM and Fujitsu? I discovered long ago that there is a huge difference between generating news and generating the things companies are created to generate (money, products, services, employment, research, etc.) One consequence of this difference is that our unconscious estimates of the comparative scale of what is going on at various companies is wildly distorted by news coverage.

You just found a great advantage that exists for investors that put money in "old" companies. Many of these old companies will make more and more money for decades to come. But most retail investors are only interested in "big growth" from companies such as Twitter, FB, Gopro, etc.

Small margins and low growth though.

And many would argue that it'd be hard to do better.

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