

Is It Time for Hewlett-Packard to Go Back to the Garage? - bwsd
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/is-it-time-for-hewlettpackard-to-go-back-to-the-garage-08252011.html

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mechanical_fish
As a former employee of Agilent, I have to say that the saddest thing about
the HP story is that another company _got away with the name_. To the extent
that the real Hewlett-Packard still exists, Agilent is the real Hewlett-
Packard. (The company spun itself into two parts in the 1990s.)

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.

~~~
tzs
> 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)!

~~~
mechanical_fish
Thank you very much for this pitch-perfect illustration of what I was talking
about. Hysterical laughter: Achieved!

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cHalgan
The following stroke me as a very strange: "Hurd borrowed heavily from the
founders’ playbook". Really? How? Where? Why? WTF?

Does any of HP-alumnis here thinks that Hurd was a "HP way" CEO?

~~~
mullr
The assumption of "alumni" status amuses me, somehow. :)

But the answer is no.

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codedivine
Not a bad article, but does not add any new info or interesting analysis.

~~~
bwsd
I totally agree with you. The best part of the article was the thought-
provoking title. :)

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.

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pnathan
I get the general vibe that pre-Carly HP was an engineering firm, and after
that, it's been an enterprise IT firm.

Would that be a reasonable vibe, or is that wholly skew from reality?

~~~
count
Coupled with the purchase of EDS and the hiring of a CEO from SAP...I think
it's safe to say that they're now an enterprise IT services and software firm.

