When I need to do some calculating, I pull out my 20-year-old HP calculator and calculate the fuck out of whatever needs calculation. When I need some marks on paper, my five-year-old HP laser printer prints the living shit out of that piece of paper, and I expect it will be fusing toner for many years to come. I’ve also got a couple of HP computers that work just fine, and they’re a slight cut above the usual commodity crap you get at Best Buy — that is, they appear to be the product of an engineering team that had a little more on their mind than wringing every last, single penny of optimization from their PC design.
So, it’s hard to watch yet another American company that is clearly capable of producing decent products get run into the ground by the morons in charge. First, Cara Carleton Fiorina bought Compaq with a big flourish, and all that got HP was two of everything in its PC line. HP never integrated Compaq, so it ended up selling PCs that looked like HP PCs, and PCs that looked like Compaq PCs. That’s death in a commodity business where making a lot of one thing is the key to profitability.
Then, Leo Apotheker flew in and bought Palm (WedbOS) almost exactly a year ago. Yesterday, he announced that they’re killing the Palm unit they just bought, in part because the rushed-to-market, crap Touchpad that was introduced a couple of months ago was a flop. From what I’ve seen, WebOS had a lot of potential if it was running on the right hardware. It takes more than a year to get that right, so Leo might as well have invited Carly to a bonfire and burned the $1.2 billion he paid for Palm.
I get that the commodity PC business is morphing into a non-commodity device business, and that Apple is eating everyone’s lunch because they’re building 30 million of one thing instead of one million of 30 things, but weak management at companies like HP is making it really easy for them. The rumbling sound being heard around Palo Alto today is Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard spinning in their graves.
c u n d gulag
But, but, Carly was a “Job Creator!”
Hallowed be her name!
dmsilev
When I get into work today, I’m going to hug the various pieces of 30 year old and still fully functional HP test equipment that we have. To me, the old HP died when Agilent was spun off.
RossInDetroit
My main bench signal generator is a HP 200CD. This was one of their first products. This unit is vacuum tube based, is 50 years old, hasn’t been calibrated since the ’70s and beats the pants off of modern solid state sig gens in performance.
debit
@c u n d gulag: mistermix is clearly one of those demon sheep and should not be trusted.
MarkusR
Having been a Compaq worker, and then an HP worker, and then a Foxconn worker, yeah, I can attest that HP’s modern business model is to buy stuff up and then drive it into the ground. The entire company is driven by bunch of marketers.
Morbo
Ugh, no printers please. Uninstall your HP printer and I’ll bet you cut down on the number of processes running by a dozen.
RossInDetroit
William Hewlett and David Packard are turning 500 RPM in their graves right now.
Jinxtigr
Rightwingers, libertarians, Chicago Schoolers and corporatists are just pissing me off lately, to the point that I long for a portable guillotine ;P
Kirbster
@dmsilev: Amen! No one made more accurate and reliable test equipment than HP.
NonyNony
@Morbo:
Wait – are you using their shitty inkjet printers? HP had good inkjet printers 20 years ago, but their current crop sucks.
On the other hand, I have a home LaserJet that I bought 10 years ago. It uses a postscript driver and that’s it. It’s a freaking workhorse too.
As far as I know, HP’s laser printers are still pretty damn good – of course they haven’t had to replace any of the printers at work in over 5 years (and I’ve had mine for 10, as I said), so maybe they’ve gone downhill in the last 5 years.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
I still have my old HP-21C that got me through engineering school in the ’70s. Doesn’t work anymore– I left it in a drawer and the batteries finally corroded… but it was a bitchin’ little machine in its day.
Oh, and back then, we EE students turned out in droves when HP made an interviewing trip to our campus. Other companies had empty sign-up sheets, but EVERYONE wanted to work for HP.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
And oh yeah, my old HP laser printer at home prints rings around the crap we use at the office.
Also, too, get offa my lawn!
Grumpy Code Monkey
Does Apotheker need an apothecary?
I blame Carly for my first-ever layoff, although to be fair it really wasn’t her fault. HP had been threatening to EOL the HP 3000 for well over a decade before she showed up; it just happened during her tenure.
noodler
I am partial to HP products, and their laptops rock, those that are not compaq’s and could not get through b school without the HI bus and financial calculator. But, it seems that their little ipad like tablet device is not doing so well at all, russel brand promotions notwithstanding.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2011/08/17/report_best_buy_wants_to_return_200_000_hp_touchpads
Liberal Sandlapper
Fuck HP and Microsoft and Dell and any other company that has made my business life a living hell the last few years. I just bought all new Apple iMacs and MacBooks and life has been peachy ever since. The only problem I have had was with some FUCKING MICROSOFT OFFICE software on the Apples.
May they all disappear (and their employees find better jobs elsewhere immediately before they crash).
malraux
@Morbo: Dear god yes. And if you think that’s bad, I picked up a router a few weeks ago that did exactly the same thing. The setup program installed a bunch of always running processes to “monitor” the router.
mistermix
@NonyNony: I agree – their inkjets are generally crap. My HP color laser weighs ~30 pounds and is built like a tank.
@noodler: That’s what Apotheker bought for $1.2 billion last year and threw away yesterday.
SensesFail
@mistermix:
Ok, this is a great start to a script for an awesome HP commercial.
MattF
Inneresting that most comment here is about the old HP– test equipment, calculators, printers. And that whirring sound from Messrs Hewlitt and Packard. But it’s gone, baby, gone.
So, who around here still does engineering? I mean, besides Apple.
MikeBoyScout
Clearly Apotheker is smarter than all of you.
While nearly everything has been trading at a discount for the past 2 weeks there has never been a better time to offer a 64% premium to acquire market share in a faltering market.
YellowDog
I use my HP-15C calculator frequently. I still have the HP-16C that I used during my life as a programmer and the HP-11C that preceded the HP-15C. Nothing beats RPN logic on a calculator.
SteveinSC
It’s similar to the Taurus. Remember about 20 years ago it was a hot seller and people I knew, in particular a doctor, bought top-of-the-line one every time he traded. Then Ford, I am sure guided by the best young minds from MBA school said, hey, why don’t we sell a cheap look-alike to the rental car companies. No one will be the wiser. Promptly, RIP the highly profitable marque The Taurus. It appears we will do a lot to improve the economy if we occasionally take 10,000 MBA’s out and shoot them, pour decourager les autres.
dpCap
it’s funny (sad?) how modern “capitalists” seem more interested in destroying than creating? How does this comport with Rand’s idea of the Producers?
JGabriel
mistermix @ Top:
HP used to have the best printers and calculators, bar none, but their PC quality was never the top of the line, and seemed to descend into pure suckitude around the time Fiorina came along. At least, that’s my recollection. I built my own last time I needed a PC upgrade and haven’t bought a main brand PC in a decade — so their quality may have improved since then, but it wasn’t evident last time I checked a couple years ago.
That said, I think whoever buys the consumer PC line from HP ought to go back to calling it Compaq. Compaq built good PC’s (and servers), and anyone who commits to a quality PC line can probably reap a lot of goodwill by reviving the brand — with the caveat that they’ll just destroy the name if they put out a mediocre product.
.
terraformer
@RossInDetroit:
That’s quite an awesome list of equipment you have there on your site. Cool hobby!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’ve avoided HP products. Their driver software sucks. I realize they’re being installed on Windows, but it’s Windows: It’s not like it’s new. I’m lucky to get them installed correctly, and they are very touchy about things starting up right or having other things installed afterwards. They’re computers seem to be the same way. They are OK as long as you don’t want to do anything with them.
My experience has been that Brother makes hands down the easiest to use printers. Heck, they even publish the Linux CUPS files on their site. I plug one of their printers in my network. If it’s brand new, I go to their site for the driver, otherwise I just set it up on the computers I need to print from. And the driver install is run the install and then go set up the printer. None of this: walk through 350 steps to ask me who I am, what I do, will I be printing pictures, do I want these 10 pieces of fancy software, and as a bonus, we’ll slow your computer down 20 percent.
Hoodie
Back in the 70’s, HP was the Cadillac of test equipment, process control, medical monitoring, etc. Its’ a tragedy to see an historic American company gutted like this, but it’s just one of many to suffer that fate.
Dennis SGMM
I have an HP 14C that’s well over twenty years old. It’s programmable and uses RPN. It ruined me for any other calculator. Once you get accustomed to RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) you wonder why everyone doesn’t do it that way. It spent most of its working life inside machine shops where heat, metal dust, and oil mist were were ever present in varying amounts. It still works perfectly.
The decline of HP is present-day American capitalism in a nutshell: find a good company then strip mine every last thing of value from it. The last step will be for the HP and Compaq names to be sold to the highest overseas bidder.
mike
I worked for a geek-driven company that got bought by HP in the mid-Aughts, and my initial optimism was quickly dashed when I saw how HP-INO the company had become. Nothing left but a bunch of suits made fat and stupid on toner sales.
Also: HP42s represent!
R. Porrofatto
In case anyone might wonder why such awful mergers occur, HP & Compaq CEOs Carly Fiorina and Michael Capellas shared $120 million in bonuses just for doing the deal. The collateral damage to their enrichment, 40,000 jobs lost in just the first couple of years. For all the spew about efficiencies and whatnot, it’s the skim and looting that matters most in merger/acquisition land, and is why, perhaps more than the banksters, private equity vultures are destroying us. For some people, the slow dismemberment of America is deliberate, just because it’s so damned lucrative.
PurpleGirl
@NonyNony: I also bought an HP home laser printer in the late 1990s. It’s still going strong.
malraux
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I love my brother laser printer as well. Good driver support even for old printers. And its actual driver support, not crappy always on program to send data to the printer like so many companies do these days.
PopeRatzy
I’ve been an engineer in and around silicon valley for over 30 years, the idea that a modern HP PC is any less of a commodity than any other PC is ludicrous. The HP design *team* is a Chinese company that is called an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer). Some engineer in HP sends a set of specs to their ODM. The ODM team designs, lays out and manufactures the PC. HP (just like all the other mass producers) approve the base design (which is based upon an Intel or AMD *reference* design) and then the *new* product is put into an HP case. HP case is the sole difference between it and say a Dell. Apple may be the most evil corporation in the world but they are still designing a lot of their own hardware.
Syphon
I wonder how big a bonus he’ll be getting for this.
I imagine it’ll have to be in the tens of millions, right?
mistermix
@JGabriel: So I have an HP laptop and an HP all-in-one computer. Both are decent, and a bit better than their Dell equivalents, IMO.
Violet
@noodler:
Friend works for a company that switched from Dell to HP, at least for the laptops it issues its employees. His most recent laptop has had more problems than I can even list. Problems include things such as mandatory recall because laptops were burning up or exploding or something. He said the IT guy’s eyes got really big when the laptop’s serial number was in the recall group. Other problems include, problems with the charger, hard drive failure (after a month), and inexplicable software compatibility problems (perhaps not HP, but the OS is the same as the previous computer and things worked fine on that one.)
Based on the hassle of the HP, when it came time to look for a new laptop, I didn’t even consider HP.
Don
One more item, folks. Isn’t Apple’s new campus in Cupertino being built on old HP property? And for the record, I always preferred Tektronics O’scopes over HP’s, but it was the rare piece of electronics that outperformed the HP stuff.
Tuttle
HP printers are still pretty good, but not like they used tobe.
At work I’ve got three 4700s that are fine, modern printers, but I have 2 5550s that are expensive fucking junk. And a 10-year old 5si that simply can not be killed.
But, even here, Apple (via Canon) is superior. I have 4 LaserWriter 600s that are 15 years old and will not die. Those Canon units they used don’t even succumb to gravity maintenance unless you drop them from at least the second floor.
cleek
i like my HP all-in-one inkjet, has performed pretty well, so far. but i hate the driver software that it requires. a printer/scanner/fax should not try to take over how all PCs on the network deal with images.
Judas Escargot
I still have the HP-10c that got me through undergrad, and the thing still works. As does the HP-42S I got later on in life (I needed its binary/hex/logic functions, which the 10c didn’t have). I realized one day that keeping calculators that can fetch a couple hundred each on ebay in my desk drawer at work wasn’t a good idea, so I now use one of these day to day. Fans of RPN might want to pick up one before those disappear. It doesn’t feel quite as solid as the older ones (what does?) but functionally it does its ancestors proud. Plus, it can do fractions (great for carpentry).
Back in my sysadmin days, HP-UX was the redheaded stepchild of the unix world, but some engineers did swear by their workstations.
I’ll just join the chorus, and wonder out loud YTF anyone would consider this a good move. Not once have I ever heard anyone raving about HP’s Business Enterprise Services, or whatever the hell they think it is they’ll be selling from now on.
To think of all the historic brands destroyed by HP’s incompetent management: Compaq, DEC (via Compaq), now Palm. Masters of creative destruction… without the ‘creative’ part.
IMO, Bob Lutz is right. MBAs suck the life out of everything.
Woodrowfan
10 years go I bought an HP printer and it worked great. When I finally had to replace it 2 years ago I bought another HP printer. What a piece of junk! And it wasn’t the low end cheapest one either. So after less than a year I junked it and bought a Brother. Works fine and the ink is cheaper. Buy an HP again? Not anytime soon…
artem1s
Apple is eating everyone’s lunch because they’re building 30 million of one thing beautifully instead of one million of 30 ugly things.
as a friend of mine noted when Apple came out with the first iMacs, ‘finally, a computer that isn’t dead flesh color’.
JGabriel
@Tuttle:
Loved those old HP 5’s. Just fantastic workhorses.
.
keith
I have very very fond memories of their RPN calculators. They may even still make them.
rjv
Mistermix,
Current Oracle president Mark Hurd bought WebOS in between playing footsie with a soft-pr0n queen. Leo swooped in much later
RossInDetroit
@terraformer:
That’s not my site. Sorry for the confusion. I should have added a ‘like this’ for clarity.
I work on ’50s and ’60s vintage consumer electronics. “Tube stereos” to everyone else. I use vintage test gear because it’s cheap, simple, rugged and it works. My HP analog distortion analyzer is ancient but is easy to use and perfectly adequate for tweaking up an old Scott 299 tube integrated amp.
Here’s a great site with tons of vintage HP test gear.
Most of the vintage US tube audio gear that I refurb goes overseas. South Korea, China, Japan, Malaysia, etc. are my best customers. Americans buy disposable new black boxes from Asia while Asians are paying a premium for American consumer electronics from 50 years ago.
Woodrowfan
BTW, if you want to see how the bean-counters can destroy a company, read up on the story of Schlitz beer. From a popular beer than competed with Anheuser-Busch and Pabst for the #1 spot to a complete joke with no market share whatsoever in about a decade or so. All because management switched from actual brewers who cared what they made to MBAs who thought only of cutting costs.
Myles
Yeah, PopRatzy is right. I was actually speaking with a Silicon Valley tech finance guy about this yesterday, and we both agreed that this should have happened a billion years ago. The consumer PC market is just a horrible market to be in because no one has pricing power except for Apple, and if you don’t have pricing power you need to get out.
HP was just following on the steps of Motorola, which exited the mobile electronics business last week (by selling to Google). It’s not HP; it’s just the industry.
RossInDetroit
@Don:
The last of my old Tek scopes just bit the dust. It’s a colossal 565 tube/SS hybrid dual-beam 4 channel. 80 lbs if it’s an ounce. I’m thinking of making a coffee table out of it.
GregInMA
Nearly every day I use my HP-41, and have been doing so since 1982.
Now, get off of my lawn!
Grumpy Code Monkey
@MikeBoyScout:
Maybe he is…
mistermix
@rjv: Hmm, I thought the Palm acquisition was Aug, 2010, and our square-jawed hero Leo started in spring, 2010.
Amir Khalid
IBM, the company that created the PC as a product, got out of that business back in ’05 for the very simple reason that commodity personal hardware is an extremely low-margin business. You got to work your socks off to build massive volume, if you don’t want the profits to be more than a teensy rounding error on your annual P&L statement. It’s been that way at least since the early 1990s. There are easier ways to make money, like software and services, which is where IBM has been concentrating ever since, and which HP is presumably going to do as well.
As I recall (from having been an IT journo), HP bought Compaq because it wanted to expand its PC volume (and presumably work that much harder at making its money). It may have also wanted the server biz that Compaq had acquired by taking over Digital Equipment Corp, a former mainframe maker fallen on hard times.
Myles
@Amir Khalid: Eh. IBM has got a good business model.
The profits in the consumer PC business are just abysmal. There is no point going in, because you are going to spend your entire life chasing 0.1% margins. It’s just retarded. Why would anyone want to spend their lives doing that?
Cervantes
Minor correction: Apotheker did not buy Palm; Mark Hurd did.
(And there was an interim CEO in between as well.)
ETA: Apotheker was anointed in late September, 2010.
Amanda in the South Bay
Well, I wonder if Best Buy, etc are gonna have some ridiculously steep discounts on Touch Pads. I’d be willing to buy one for…oh, no more than 50 dollars, perhaps.
Taiko
Delurking for a moment to defend the Touchpad! The Touchpad is an excellent tablet, in particular due to WebOS. The touchpad’s only problem is the lack of 1000s of apps that Android and IOS enjoy, not the hardware or OS.
WebOS easily outshines any Android-based tab (or phone) I’ve tinkered with, and competes directly with Apple’s offerings. And it does so even though there’s been so much churn at Palm/HP.
Judas Escargot
@Amir Khalid:
IBM has a long history as a software/service company: That’s basically how their old 360/370 businesses worked. They’d lease you the hardware, and sell you all the SW and services. So selling their PC business off to Lenovo was, in a way, just IBM getting back to its roots.
HP’s very different: They have no real history as a software/service company, so they’ll basically be rebranding from scratch. HP was always a hardware company, literally started in a garage, known for its engineering tools. IMO their initial mistake was back when they spun off the test equipment division to Agilent and decided to become a second-tier PC maker.
Now they’ll be a third-tier “business services” company. If they exist at all.
That’s not how it looked down on the ground.
Compaq acquired DEC first, then tried to pressure all the legacy VAX/VMS users to buy Alpha servers or Compaq PCs. Those users bought Suns, instead. Then HP bought Compaq, and tried to force all the remaining VAX/Alpha/HP-UX users to buy HP workstations running Windows NT. They, too, went to Sun and Linux. Most of that market’s gone over to running Linux on commodity hardware by now.
Even at the time, I remember thinking how stupid it was to discontinue VAX/VMS so soon: With thousands of legacy users in academia/government, they could have milked that market for another decade, with minimal costs (no one expected them to make more VAXes– users just wanted bug fixes and replacement parts for awhile longer).
BackScatter
Given the sky-high prices for patents right now it wouldn’t be at all surprising if HP could recoup more than that 1.2B price from Palm’s large patent portfolio. I’d guess GOOG is out due to them dropping 12B on MOTO but Samsung, Facebook, even Amazon all could be interested in controlling their own mobile future.
Still, I thought HP via WebOS was the only company that could legitimately compete with Apple by controlling both the hardware and software stack and even rolling WebOS functionality into their PCs. Too bad they didn’t have the will to fight. Hopefully, the IBM-plan works for them.
RossInDetroit
@Judas Escargot:
I was an IBM mainframer in the ’80s-’90s. Their documentation and support was astonishing. Get an application core dump and solve it in 10 minutes with a shelf of manuals. It’s like every possible thing that could go wrong had been anticipated, written up, indexed and organized in the most efficient manner just for you. They were/are the gold standard for documentation.
daveNYC
HP-48G. RPN plus an eight row or so display. Visible stack for the win.
Steeplejack
I felt a little like a cheating spouse when I bought a Brother 5370 a few months ago. I had always bought HP laser printers. I think a friend of mine still has a LaserJet 5 chugging away that I handed down to her in about 1996. And I’ve got a really old LaserJet II sitting around here somewhere that still works. (Just don’t have a cartridge for it right now.)
But the newer HP printers seem flimsier (which manifests for me in bad paper handling and alignment), and those gigantic Borg “let me insinuate myself in everywhere” printer drivers are ridiculous.
We got a couple of the Brother 5370’s at work, and I was impressed, so I ended up buying one. And it has been great. End of story.
And somebody upthread has given me calculator lust. I don’t currently have a big-ass nerd calculator, and that HP 35s is calling my name. (I used to have both an 11c and a 16c back in the day.)
As for HP computers, we have a few of those at work too (older models), and they’re okay. I really like the keyboard. Has a bit of the old IBM PC “clicky” vibe, which I like. Reminds me that I have been sort of lusting for a new keyboard. My current one (Microsoft) is pretty good, but the labels on the keytops have started to wear off. WTF?! Admittedly, I’ve had the keyboard for at least six or seven years, but still . . .
Ben Cisco
Marketing uber alles.
__
This tune seems appropriate.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I used to use Compaq servers (eg: R6400, MLxxxG1/DLxxxG1 series) and when HP bought out Compaq I stayed with the ML/DL series. Damned good servers with a solid design that are easy to set up, maintain and service. HP was smart in buying out Compaq but they were wrong in what they did with it afterward. Being Compaq has been around since the early days of computing, they had collected a pile of IP, patents and industry cross licensing that were worth a lot to the right buyer.
HP getting out of the PC business? They should have done that when they absorbed Compaq, converting their HP models to the Compaq line if they intended to keep it alive. Competing against yourself for market share isn’t a very smart move. Interestingly, HP did integrate Compaq’s servers into their server lines, which was a very smart move on their part. Which makes their decision to keep their PC lines running in tandem seem odd.
HP printers? Their early ones, especially their office equipment line ink jets, were excellent units. I’m still using an HP2000C office ink jet (bypassing the cartridge date chips using an HP Print Server) and it’s been reliably cranking out print jobs for me since 1998. It had one design flaw (weak plastic carriage for cartridge pump that would break under stress from spring tension) that was quickly updated (and easily fixed). Their home ink jets?
They make a great anchor for a very small raft. Get a good Canon instead.
The HP and Compaq merger was a good idea that was badly done. It ought to be interesting to see how this move goes but I do hope that HP sticks with their server lines.
Cap'n Magic
Lets not forget that one of the things that Compaq picked up (and HP got in the package) was Tandem. Tandem boxes, like IBM big iron, stays up (as long as they’re no bug in the app or OS.)
HP is only now realizing that value-added services is where its at-sadly, they’re 10 years behind where IBM was 7 years ago.
I didn’t see if it’s just the PC side getting jettisoned or does this include the printing/scanning lines as well?
Cap'n Magic
@Steeplejack: You can still get “old” IBM keyboards that you can pound nails with.
cleek
@Judas Escargot:
man, i wish HPUX was gone… it’s the trickiest of the ten or twelve different platforms our software has to run on. the C++ compiler is like a decade out of date so i’m constantly having to back out elegant things that require this or that bit of C++ esoterica to get it to work on HPUX. it’s our lowest common denominator.
iLarynx
Mistermix, if I may quote from Sam Elliot’s cowboy Stranger character in “The Big Lebowski” –
There’s just one thing, Dude.
Do you have to use so many cuss words?
Steeplejack
@Cap’n Magic:
Yeah, I know, but I’m too lazy to do anything about it. My current keyboard is actually very comfortable, and since I’m a touch typist the keytop labels fading away is not a big deal; it’s just funny.
Since my previous comment I have been trying to remember the name of a keyboard that I ran across a year or so ago. Supposed to have that really good IBM feel but all modern and stuff. (Many new computers don’t have a connector that will accept the old IBM plug, and I haven’t checked lately to see if adapters are still available. I remember I used to have one, but I don’t think I have it now.)
Rorgg
Had a HP RPN calculator in HS and college… T-31? Something like that. Loved the hell out of that thing, and it just popped up in a stack of old junk. Battery leakage has probably killed it, but my daughter was so fascinated by the open-case setup and the big graphing LED screen, I may just try to scrub down the contacts and see what happens.
My old cheap HP inkjet printer behaved like a cheap inkjet printer is supposed to for several years, until I got a new one for free. It wasn’t great, but it worked.
The current cheapo desktop I got on clearance at Best Buy went fine for about 2 years, I think the hard drive just died though, so I’m not feeling great about it at the moment.
Oh, and Fiorina sent HP tech support to India, at which point I got continually borked at every turn trying to fix the HP desktop I had at the time. Steamed me to no end.
piratedan
sounds about right, sixty to thirty years ago businesses were created by people who had ideas and banks lent them money to build those ideas into products. Then instead of people who created and built things, business degree people got to be in charge and now most of what they do is buy each other out and throw money at advertising agencies to sell Eskimos ice.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
To me, the old HP lives on under an assumed name. The original HP corporate culture lives on at Agilent, down to having volleyball nets outside the cafeteria so people can play at lunch.
burnspbesq
@RossInDetroit:
If I send you my tube headphone amp (a Ray Samuels Raptor), can you get rid of the noise it keeps making?
dmsilev
@daveNYC:
Amen. My 48G got me through most of undergrad and a good chunk of grad school.
Canuckistani Tom
Up until a couple of years ago I had a HP Laserjet IIP. Weighed a ton, but reliable. But they stopped making cartridges for it, and I started getting too many memory overflow errors. When they stopped adding serial ports to computers, I knew it was time for it to go. Put it on Craigslist, and it was gone in less than 24hrs.
wormtown
Haven’t had time to read the thread, but YES YES YES to the post. Exactly what I thought when I heard the news. I still have my 11c (I think, the # worn off; an engineering calc from 1980) and use it every day. I was hesitant to buy hp when I was in grad school, because I was afraid the of RPC; but after burning thru Texas Instrument calculators at a rate of about one/year I bought my trusty little calculator. Always had fun when someone borrowed it and said “where’s the = sign?”.
RossInDetroit
@burnspbesq:
maybe. Post a link to teh schem or specs and I’ll see if I can make any sense of it.
Karen
I had a TX Palm five years back and not only did it stop working, Palm customer service was shit.
Same for the Dell laptop I bought back in 2005 that only lasted 2 years. I paid for the $300 customer service/warranty and all it got me was impatient people in a call center in India who demanded that I install the little $10 keyboard they sent me by myself, even though I have RA and didn’t have the strength to pull out the old keyboard. And insult to injury was that if I didn’t return the old keyboard to them they’d charge me $10.
I replaced that with an HP that lasted me 2 years as well. Like with the Dell I paid for the expensive customer service help and it got me very little help.
When that went in 2008, I didn’t want Vista OS and I took a chance on Mac. It still works well in 2011, my macbook pro laptop is great as is my minimac desktop. I’m in love with my iphone. And when I paid for the $300 customer service/warranty for mac products, I got the most patient and helpful customer service staff ever. I was so sad when my warranty expired in March of this year but only because I’d no longer get the customer service that dedicated any amount of time with me to solve any problem.
That’s why Apple is popular, besides the iphone/ipad apps. They know what customer service is. Unlike HP or Dell or Palm or so many other companies these days.
Twisted Martini
Little known fact, but HP made ultrasound systems as well. And they are absolutely bulletproof, 10+ year old systems run like they were made yesterday.
daveNYC
@Cap’n Magic:
I worked at a company that ran a lot of stuff on Tandems. I can’t say for sure, but I was under the impression that they were getting hammered in the market, not that they were that big to begin with. I think a lot of places decided it was cheaper to go with massive redundancy. Not to mention that the learning curve for the OS was hellish.
Amir Khalid
@Karen:
That’s the thing with low-margin product. Make any more than a token effort at customer service, and that’s your profit margin on the customer gone to waste.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Steeplejack:
If you are in to good keyboards, check out this thread on [H]ardForum. I’ve been hanging out at that place for years and it’s packed with excellent info/reviews. That and lots of people who know their stuff.
RossInDetroit
@burnspbesq:
Hrm… Looking at the product page there are some inconsistencies. He says 12AU7 driver & 5687 SRPP output and gain of 14. I’ll bet it’s a 12AU7 gain stage and White Cathode Follower output stage, which has zero stage gain.
SRPP output stage would push the total gain over 200 and be unable to produce the stated 32 ohms Zout without feedback because it can’t sink current.
This is basically a clone of the old Earmax headphone amp.
They have 3 years transferrable parts/labor warranty. Are you out of warranty?
Mike
@Steeplejack: The newer HP printers are garbage. Their quality control went to shit. It’s a shame, since HP printers used to be real workhorses. Brother makes some of the best printers out there today, IMO–reliable, sturdy, and good quality. The only problem with them is that they insist on using color ink for B&W copies and you can’t get “refurbished” cartridges for them, so the ink gets pretty pricey.
Villago Delenda Est
@R. Porrofatto:
These people are pirates.
They should be dealt with as pirates were dealt with in the 17th century.
Mike
@wormtown: RPN seemed to be the litmus test whether you would succeed in an engineering/technology related field. If you couldn’t handle reverse polish notation, it probably was best if you looked at another major.
Steeplejack
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Thanks for the pointer. That’s a better lead than fumbling around on Amazon (which I just tried for a little while).
I was thinking that I had seen the keyboard I was talking about on some hypergeek site. The keyboard in question even comes in submodels with different levels of “play,” depending on whether you prefer soft or hard response, and the commenters were frothing at the mouth and beating up one another for their stupid preferences and failure to pick the obviously right model. Hilarity ensued.
ETA: Just looked at that site. Gold mine! Thanks a lot. I think the Cherry MX may be the keyboard I was thinking of.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Appears that “Cherry MX” refers to the mechanical switches in the keys, and they are used by several different brands. Current research suggests that Filco may be the elusive über-keyboard.
Martin
HP isn’t entirely killing WebOS – they’re just killing the consumer product side of it, just like they’re killing the PC business. They’re likely to keep it as an embedded OS for their printer business and whatever other enterprise avenues they go down.
I don’t think this was necessarily a bad decision by Leo. At least I should say, given that the HP board hired Leo, and this is exactly the direction that you’d expect Leo to go down, I’d say he’s doing exactly what he was hired to do. The HP PC business has been shit for years. Hell, everyone but Apple’s PC business has been shit for years. As of today, Apple can basically write a check and buy every company that sells more PCs than them. Those bargain basement PCs are nice to buy for next to nothing, but the industry is dying fast as a result.
It’s too bad that HP gave up on the Touchpad – it did have a lot of promise – more than anything else in the market outside of the iPad, IMO.
I suspect the printer business will hang on. Consumables make a pretty penny so no need to give up on that. (If you want the decent HP printers, skip the consumer lines and buy from the bottom of the business line, those are far more durable and reliable, but prices start about 50% higher.)
An HP-28S got me through college, though my favorite calculator is the TI 2500 Datamath my dad handed down to me that still functions perfectly. Almost 40 years old now.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Mike:
OTOH,I often got pissed off at courses/programs that required fancy pants graphing calculators. Back when I was a math/econ major (late 90s), and I took every single math course (and then some) that the engineering crowd took, I really didn’t see the need for a graphing calculator, much less the wankage of RPN (hence my preference for the 38G over the 48s). They are expensive and the students focus more on learning the ins and outs of the calculator rather than the actual material.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SteveinSC:
Co-signed.
You can’t cultivate your garden without pulling a few weeds.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Well, if you really don’t think Apple or OSX is the greatest thing since sliced bread, ThinkPads are pretty nice. Granted, not as sexy as a Mac, but sexiness in consumer products is overrated in my mind.
Dragon-King Wangchuck
When I need to do some calculating, I pull out my 20-year-old HP calculator and calculate the fuck out of whatever needs calculation.
OT, but a calculator? Rilly? You know, you could install some spreadsheet software, having a running history of the calculations you made, with readily available extra columns to make notations – and the option of saving the file so the next time you need to calculate the same type of fuck out of something, you’re already halfway there.
Also too, nice lawn.
Ruckus
@Mike:
When my second HP deskjet died after a year I looked at Brother because of the referrals and the print quality. But the ink issue killed it for me. Went with Cannon and am quite happy with it.
20-30 years ago HP was it, anything they made was great. Had a flat bed plotter that I couldn’t kill with a hammer. Now? I have a 5 yr old desktop that works fine. But if I have to replace it? Going back to Apple. My first one was a Apple II 128. That’s been a few days ago.
Steeplejack
As a happy sidebar to this thread, I think I have gotten a line on an updated driver for my current keyboard, the Microsoft Office Keyboard (mine is all black). Aside from the keytop labels fading, I have liked it a lot.
The problem is that in some computer rebuild a couple of years ago I lost the driver software that came with it, so now some of the exotic keys don’t work. And Microsoft no longer supports it with its Intellitype drivers. (WTF?!) I especially liked the scroll wheel on the left, which allowed me to keep my right hand and the mouse poised for clicking on stuff instead of scrolling.
Anyway, I found a couple of threads that seem to show workarounds or solutions to recapture the lost functions. Cool! Will check them out later.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay:
The clitoral trainer and the little slidey bar and flippy switch are horrible, horrible things. They’re nice rugged laptops, but input is just terrible on those laptops.
I don’t mind Windows desktops much, but Windows laptops are such fidgety, gimmicky things that it just drives me bonkers. There’s always little trap doors for every little thing and switches and doodads and redundancies and that shit is always getting in my way. I have a laptop in my lap north of 12 hours per day many days – my tolerance for gimmicky stuff is very low. Besides, running Windows on my Mac is much easier than on anyone PC I’ve encountered. There’s always a zillion other little driver things that need to be installed on a clean Windows installation to get it running properly on a PC laptop – but on the Mac it’s much simpler to get a new Windows install up and running. Since I test my work against Windows browsers and need to contend with the various versions, I can actually do all of that on the Mac (along with running all of my unix stuff) but a similar setup on a PC laptop would be vastly more difficult.
Honestly, if I had to work 24/7 inside of Windows, I’d still run it on a MacBook Pro or Air.
bluehill
Republicans have been effectively selling the message that government should be run like a business, but no one calls them on the fact that some businesses are run badly by incompetent executives. Enron, MCI Worldcomm, Lehman, Bear Stearns are well-known examples of companies where leadership was incompetent and in some cases criminal. I doubt that most people who work in a large company would want the government run in the same manner as their company.
Sloegin
HP seems to commit corporate suicide every decade or so; oddly enough, whenever they become top dog of a particular product line…
#1 calculator vendor, demolish their entire operation
#1 printer vendor, wrack and ruin
#1 PC vendor, kill it off and go do a corporate version of a Larry Darrell.
I run an all-HP shop, and yet the thing I’m still the most miffed about is when they killed off their calculator division. Man, those things were the AK-47s of their time.
Cain
I am at Linuxcon today – and the keynote yesterday in the morning was about WebOS and how awesome it is and how it’s moving and so forth. Four hours later, HP kills it!
The HP guys there were just shaking their heads. Moronic.
horse dave
Fond memories of my ole HP41c
I can’t count all the HP test equipment I’ve used over the last 25 years.
Its also good to see so many fellow (progressive?)engineers on BJ.
Mike
@Amanda in the South Bay:
That’s the test. The person inclined towards engineering or technology related fields will be more interested with mastering the calculator instead of the math one is calculating. That’s the litmus test.
ML
That rumbling sound heard in the Bay Area always includes (Bank of America’s founder) A.P. Giannini spinning in his grave.
Scamp Dog
I have Mistermix beat: I still use my 25-year-old HP-15C that I got for Christmas 1986. My boss is jealous!
burnspbesq
It’s no accident that one of the most popular iPhone apps is an HP 12C emulator.
Elie
@MarkusR:
This is the curse of what the United States corporate sector has become… not knowing really about how to develop and improve products — only how to “grow the business” – e.g., capture short term profits at the expense of all else…
If you penetrate the layers of “leadership” down the food chain, you see that thoughtless yes men and sociopaths are the only types that become “successful” in the organizations. They get rid of everyone else except at the mid level, where all the real work gets done. Its a terrible, self destructive plantation system that like the plantation, ultimately does not work except to create slaves and dstroy the fields with monoculture, like the Old South. These places are horrible places to work and poor morale is reflected in every employee survey these organizations continue to be compelled to carry out each year.
It would be wonderful to experience a rebirth of true American corporate leadership. But where is that to come from? The business schools are just producting more of the current sociopathic plantation overseers.
Scamp Dog
I’ve got Mistermix beat: I still use my HP-15C that I got for Christmas 1986, yes folks, that’s 25 years. My boss lost hers some years ago, and she’s jealous. :) So you kids can get off BOTH our lawns.
giltay
Rumour has it that ran twice as fast on an iPad.
Martin
@bluehill:
A related observation:
Read the whole thing. It’s short, and dead-on.
Cap'n Magic
@Steeplejack: Unicomp is the outfit that continues with new keyboards using the original IBM bucking spring design-and they support USB as well.
Carol from CO
I saw the newest ipad in best buy recently. I would think that everyone who wants an ipad and can afford it will have already bought one or both of the 2 previous versions, so who’s going to buy this one at $500?
I love my 30 year old HP 12C calculator, my 4 year old HP PC and printer and hope they outlast me.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Steeplejack:
Glad to help! If you are in to computing and good hardware, [H]ardForum is the place to be. The community is ruthless, divided and each section has their ‘sides’ (Team Green/Team Red, Intel/AMD, etc). They have reps from major manufacturers hang out there (Asus, Intel and so on), and they contribute valuable information/help to resolve hardware issues with their products.
IMO, there’s no better PC hardware place online. I do love that they have detailed sections for PC/server related hardware and systems…
and one area for everything Apple. Just as Stevie would want…lol! Gotta keep them in their own little garden. Every once in a while one of them wander out and try to establish a new area for something Apple but they get redirected right back to their little area real quickly.
:)
Cap'n Magic
@daveNYC: In certain businesses you couldn’t avoid Tandem (ATMs and the like.) What hammered Tandem is the ‘good enough’ theory of reliability that permeated the marketpalce; people didn’t think that SLA’s and 5-to-6 nine’s reliability was important to business. Tandem also had major egg on their face when they won the CA DMV contract in the early-mid 90s beating IBM–and Tandem (and their consortium partners) couldn’t deliver. They also didn’t have a real clear migration path when CPUs got more powerful without breaking backward compatibility.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Give me a job that pays 80k a year, and I’ll gladly buy a 13 inch MBA. Until then, Macs are for people who are at a minimum upper middle class.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
I am with you on this one. To paraphrase the gun nuts, “I’ll give you my HP12C when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!”
@burnspbesq:
There’s a pretty sweet iPad app version of the HP 12C as well.
Apart from this, much of this news about HP is unfortunate and, as with many posters here, I agree that it looks like HP is going to stumble badly because their management doesn’t know what they are doing. But the past few months have been notable for bonehead business decisions in the computer industry.
replicnt6
@Steeplejack:
Don’t know if they still exist, but for years I was using Northgate OmniKey keyboards. They felt very much like the old (1980’s) IBM keyboards. All clicky. Heavy. Awesome.
Bubblegum Tate
@RossInDetroit:
How much do you typically sell a refurb tube amp for? I would love to get my hands on one.
YellowDog
@replicnt6:
I just disposed of my Northgate OmniKey. I have been using Mac’s for 18 years, but kept the OmniKey hooked up to an old custom-built PC so that I could run S-Plus on Windows NT. That was the closest thing to an original IBM PC keyboard (I had one of those, too). I retired the PC a few years ago, but kept the OmniKey just in case…
And for Scamp Dog: 30 years with my HP-11C, 29 years with my HP-15C, and 25 years with my HP-16C.
Comrade PhysioProf
Hellz to the yeah on the HP-15C. I bought mine in 1984, and the motherfucker just keeps on RPNing like a baddeasse! And my HP-5MP PostScript laser printer I bought in 1995 keeps on printing like a motherfucker!
BTW, I use this RPN calculator for Windows computers, and it works great (even on 64-bit Windows 7):
http://excalibur.en.softonic.com/
Arclite
Yeah, HP used to have some of the best equipment in the business. I had an HP Laserjet 5P that I actually put in my suitcase (it was a big suitcase) and brought to Japan, then took it home again 6 years later. Yeah, it was expensive, but it worked flawlessly for 12 years. I only got rid of it b/c the company sent a laser print fax machine home with me when I started working from home. I think I sold it for $50, a far cry from the $500 I paid for it, but a bargain for whomever bought it, as it still produced flawless 600dpi documents.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay:
65% of US households have an HDTV and the average price paid in the US this year is $1133. That’s a purchase that provides zero productive value to most households. A 13 inch MBA is $1299 and computers typically provides at least some productive value to most users.
People aren’t too poor to afford Macs. When consumers buy entertainment, or cars, or a million other things they do a much better job of assessing quality/price, but when they buy computers they typically run straight to the cheap shit that’s going to break in 18 months.
I don’t know why, but I don’t know a single PC owner that isn’t willing to spend an extra $1000 upgrading from cloth to leather seats in their car or an extra $1000 to get the 3D TV and Bluray – but ask them to spend a few hundred bucks on a computer they’ll use every day, usually for vastly more time than they’ll spend in their car or watching TV, and suddenly everyone else is the idiot for not breaking out the soldering iron or putting up with the metric ton of crapware or lack of reinstall software in order to save a nickel. My neighbor thinks I’m a retard for buying Macs but he runs off and buys an H2 and then whines about how much it costs to fill it up. In 2 months he pays more for extra gas than I pay extra buying Macs over PCs in 3 years. But apparently I’m the moron.
Arclite
@noodler: Oh yeah, nearly forgot: my work laptop is a kick ass HP 15″ Core i7, and it’s connected to a docking port that runs two gorgeous 24″ HP LCDs. The modern HP stuff is pretty good too.
malraux
@Martin: Another Mac advantage is typically longer product life. My wife’s MBP is 5 years old and still going strong. How many 5 year old windows laptops would still be considered reasonably current?
Elie
@Martin:
That is an excellent comment that you linked to… I wonder if there are other successful business examples like Apple and Jobs leadership style
Martin
@malraux: We’ve got 5 Macs running in the house. My son’s in the newest – less than a year old and he earned most of that on his own. Mine is just over two. My wife’s 3. My daughter’s is 5, and the home theater/server is also 5. Daughter is due for a new one, the slowness is now quite noticeable – probably take my wife’s and get her a 13″ MBA next month.
RossinDetroit
@Bubblegum Tate:
I always sell on That Auction Site that starts with E and ends with bay. Search there for things like Fisher X-101 and Scott 299a for starters. Hold on to your hat. The Asian collectors have deeeeeppp pockets.
Amanda in the South Bay
And most people really shouldn’t be buying all that crap either. Hence all the credit card debt and low levels of saving.
Seriously, if I could afford a 13 inch MBP or MBA without going homeless, I could. And yes, the first thing I would do is bootcamp me some Win 7 and Visual Studio.
I dunno; I survived two phone interviews yesterday and have an in person interview Monday morning for a C# internship. If I get it…we shall see.
Will
Geez. Yes, WebOS is the best phone OS no one has ever gotten to use. It had wonderful potential for tablets, as well. No other phone OS figured out multiple applications like WebOS did. That’s great, so glad that HP bought out Palm and then dumped it just as fast. Way to go, fellas.
RossinDetroit
Regarding calculators, I still use the Lloyds Accumatic 320 that mom bought me in ’75 for electronics school. Now that I’m 52 Y/O the big blue fluorescent digits are just what I need.
Ruckus
@Martin:
This same logic works on other consumer goods as well. We’ve been hammered with low prices=value for so long many don’t know better. Selling value today is hard. Maybe it always has been but today we have large corps telling us that low price is the key to product quality, just like the teatards telling us that low taxes are the key to better government. Shit costs money, good stuff costs a little bit more.
Martin
@Elie: I’d say Apple and Jobs are both rather unique. But the Starbucks CEO is quite liberal (though I question some of their more recent business decisions) and there’s quite a lot of others – the Google guys for example. But it’s just taken as gospel that all CEOs are rock ribbed Republicans. Hell, look at Buffet. I wouldn’t call him a liberal necessarily, but he doesn’t advocate for any of the idiotic stuff that CNBC supports and in terms of his business decision making, he’s really quite small-c conservative. He thinks the GOP are a bunch of economic radicals, and they are.
Generally speaking, I’d say that tech CEOs and VC guys are more supportive of liberal policies and govt in general. CEOs of mature and industrial companies are more conservative. And that makes a certain amount of sense – large companies tend to become very inwardly focused. They stop hiring, they go for efficiencies, they stop being creative and taking risks. Even large tech companies, if they are going to remain large, have to take risks. HP fell because they got conservative. MSFT is weakening for the same reason. And tech CEOs and VC guys know the value of new markets, of innovation, and how expensive that is to do, and how helpful government can be in that effort.
Spike
That first paragraph reads like a shout-out to the H-Dog of the Accounts Reeceevable posse on the Onion, kickin’ it hardcore at Midstate Office Supply.
Joe Bauers
Two things:
1) Remind me again why the assholes who run these companies into the ground must be paid millions of dollars and suffer no taxation to do so, when if I did my (5-figure) job as poorly as they do theirs I would be fired in a hot minute?
2) I really wish Apple would make a computer at the iMac power/price point that either didn’t have a built-in monitor or could serve as an second monitor to my work PC. The Mini isn’t powerful enough for what I do, I’m not spending $2500+ for the tower, and my desk isn’t big enough for my work notebook and its external monitor plus an iMac.
Mike G
The HP Proliant servers (DL380 G7s, if you care) I work on are still quality pieces of engineering. HP inherited the product line from Compaq and have kept them up very well.
But their consumer-end stuff seems to have gone to crap.
I know a few people who work/worked at HP who say the quality of work experience has turned to shit also. The humanistic, pragmatic California culture was ground into hamburger by Ambitious Empress Carly and her Texas asshole crew of spreadsheet grifters chasing that Wall Street greed.
And once an enlightened, far-sighted culture is destroyed for a short-term, money-grubbing one, it’s almost impossible to rebuild.
malraux
@Joe bauer: the larger iMac accepts video in. You’d need something to convert to thunderbolt but the adaptor should exist. I’ve been using my iMac as a secondary tv since I got it.
worn
HP lost my business years ago when I as an early adopter I bought one of their first Lightscribe optical drives. The unit worked for approximately three months. I then had to go through an exceptionally time wasteful process with their Indian customer support team, wherein the rep I was speaking with found it necessary to read back to me a great number of the exact same unhelpful Knowledge Base items available online prior to starting the real runaround that was securing an RMA. Finally getting approval, I sent the unit off and then waited another month. What I received in return was a refurb’d drive that literally worked for two weeks before dying. And I simply didn’t have the patience to go through the process again. This took place right around the time they started putting chips in their print cartridges to foil refillers. It was all just too much and so they lost my business pretty much forever.
Recently my father gave me an HP all-in-one inkjet that he thought was broken (just a paper jam he couldn’t figure out how to clear). Besides the buggy, intrusive software, I can empirically state that the scanner portion of the unit is absolute crap, quality-wise, especially when compared to the results I used to get from the Brother MFC at work.
As sad as it is to see a once great company slowly decay, it’s a certainly a situation of their own making.
Bubblegum Tate
@RossinDetroit:
Ah, dammit. I can’t bid against deep-pocketed Asian collectors on vinyl, much less tube amps. I’ll give it a shot, though…I deeply regret letting my old tube amp go back in the late ’90s.
HyperIon
@dmsilev wrote:
Amen. But I hope you are not thinking that the quality formerly associated with HP calcs and test equipment (scopes, etc) ended up at Agilent. My company had the misfortune to work with Agilent on a doomed project. The employees were smart but the management were idiots. And there were all these fiefdoms that seemed to hate each other (GC division vs. MS division, for example). And don’t get me started on what a piece of crap software ChemStation was and IS….
HP hardware good, HP software BAD!
Edit: Kirbster, you beat me to the punch.
Villago Delenda Est
@Joe Bauers:
They are members of the club.
You are not.
Woodrowfan
as yes, IBM. I was doing IT when we used OS/2.
HyperIon
@dpCap:
These days it’s more like Mel Brooks’ 1968 movie of The Producers.
HyperIon
@Don:
Me, too.
Plus the HPs always cost lots more.
HyperIon
@RossInDetroit:
or a space heater.
those suckers had a fan that could move a lot of air.
and generated a fair amount of heat from the tubes.
and that turquoise color!
HyperIon
@Twisted Martini:
their gas chromatographs are still pretty much the standard.
but it’s a very old technology (>30 years).
redshirt
Damn! Late to this thread. Plenty to add – I’ll just say this: I gave up on HP after once swearing by them in 2005 or so when the $1000 fax machine I just bought for the office would frequently not receive faxes. After weeks of troubleshooting, returning the model for another, the HP techs concluded that their fax machine was too advanced to talk with older fax machines.
And that was that – ate the $1000, but have never bought HP printers since.
Thymezone
Clearly Apotheker is going to be running for the Senate, as a successful job creator. So this is just the prep phase.
Cat900ss
@Roger Moore:
I started with HP in 1979, and was in the group of people that became Agilent. At the time we were quite sure we’d gotten the real HP DNA. Agilent still designs and builds some very fine products.
I was also in the group that spun out of Agilent to form Avago. We design and build stuff for wireless, datacom electronics and fiber optics, as well as components that go into all sorts of products.
Finally, there are a large bunch of engineers working for Intel and AMD that originated here.
That’s where HP has gone…
As for Carly, she deserves all of the negative comments but let’s not forget how she got in control and the state of HP at the time, and that dubious distinction belongs to none other than Lew Platt.
Mr Platt’s hands are far bloodier than is generally known and I submit he and his cronies were the real beginning of the end.
And finally, to prevent any mistaken impressions due to my posting on a “liberal” site, I’m a “MoreScience High” type, not a “CommieMartyr” graduate (google Fire Sign Theater if you’re offended… ;-)
The Other Chuck
@BackScatter:
I’m less charitable: the just fate to befall HP for what it has turned into now is now is for them to fucking crater, and thus their smouldering wreckage would be them creating at long last one useful thing: an example to others.
The only reason I don’t actually wish for this outcome is that it would put a whole lot of people out of work who don’t actually deserve it.
rjv
@mistermix: HP bought Palm in April 2010. FTC approved in June. Hurd resigned in August and Leo was hired in Sept 2010 & spent the rest of the year hiding from Oracle’s lawyers. You know, just another typical day in Galt wonderland
Delia
@malraux:
I have a five year old HP laptop that’s still humming merrily along. I’ve never tried to use the Lightscribe. It seemed like a pointless product to me. I will add that my son bought a Vista HP about a year and a half after me and it promptly went into a nervous breakdown and had to be sent back to the company for repairs. It’s been alright since he installed Windows 7.
Arundel
Sort of related: HP and its touchpad devices are product-placed and rather relentlessly promoted on every episode of “Project Runway”, the fashion competition. The season is only 5 or so episodes in, and I notice most of the designers go for the good old fash paper and pens to sketch their designs, despite being exhorted to use their HP tablets to draw on. As cool as it sounds, sketching something with the drawing skills on paper you’ve used for years doesn’t always translate to drawing on a tablet. Anyway, the new today made for some amusing asides in recaps, and sort of dismal to think the rest of the season viewers will have to watch promotion of a product line that’s just been pulled. Sort of minor, but yow.
@Martin: thanks for the link to that Anil Dash post, very good points. Agree with yours as well- another thing people don’t take into account when they go for cheap PCs is valuing their own time. Updates, patches, maintenance, fighting viruses and spam.. it seems to add up.
mai naem
@Martin: Its the way it is. I used to sell lets just say a high price durable house product and it always amazed me that you could lose a client based on $25 difference in a $5,000 deal. Whatevah. I guess thats why people go to WallyMart.
As far as printers we have an old HP laser printer from the late nineties still going strong. Meanwhile we have a Kyocera copier/fax/printer which is in constant need of stuff. Also have a canon which has needed more attention that the HP. Also have 2 more newer 5 yrs old HP printers which are still good. Went through two Brothers because my dad had good recs about Brother from decades ago. Neither lasted a year. Had a HP laptop – POS from the beginning. I got hardly any use of it. I l loved Gateway when it was the Gateway where you ordered the custom computers. I still use Gateways but I know they aren’t what they used to be. I keep looking at ASUS and Lenovo and come back to Gateway.
bluehill
Thanks for the link, Martin. Great point as well as your comments about tech cos vs. mature cos. As you note, with mature companies, the focus is generally on cutting costs to grow profits and maintain market share. This has contributed to offshoring and attempts to bust unions. So in some ways these companies are job killers.
I know it’s more complicated than that, but the point is giving tax breaks to the CEOs of these companies and cutting the corporate tax rate for these companies probably isn’t going to create a lot of jobs.
If the GOP were really interested in spurring job growth, they would be proposing tax credits for r&d, new industries and pushing for certain infrastructure improvements to reduce costs for mature industries. Oh well, I’m preaching to the choir here, but sometimes I just need to vent.
Andrew J. Lazarus
My recent purchases of HP laptop, low-end desktop, and low-end all in one were all disasters. Buh-bye!
stannate
Apple makes money off of their computers because if you wanted to run something on a Mac OS, you have to buy a computer from Apple (ignoring the brief run of Apple clones from Power Computing and UMAX in the mid-90s). HP could have leveraged their ownership of webOS into something similar in the post-PC world of tablets and smartphones, but giving up development after owning Palm for approximately one year is a deal that will truly bite them in their corporate-personhood ass. I can’t think of a company that would want to buy webOS to make it a part of its closed hardware/OS ecosystem–HTC, Samsung, and even Amazon have been thrown about, but I’d guess that they’ll pass. It would be ironic if Apple decided to buy webOS so it could own its patents, as webOS is the last vestige of good old BeOS–the Mac operating system that almost was.
The company I’m working for switched from Dell to HP for its desktops, laptops, and tablet PC’s a couple years ago. A prior job exposed me to the horror that was the tc1100, and while I’m glad to see that the current EliteBook tablets (2730p/2740p) aren’t horrible, they still suffer from a fatally compromised design of being too dinky for a real laptop, and too awkward to use as a tablet. Don’t try to yank out its hard drive unless you’ve got a good 20 minutes to kill. Anyway, the news that HP’s getting out of the PC business has validated some thought in my company’s IT department that a combination of Wyse thin client terminals and BYOC (bring your own computer) will be the way to go in a couple years’ time.
As for myself, I’m in the market for a new computer to replace my somewhat wheezy Dell. I’ve built the last three out of four PC’s, and I’ll most likely go the built route in the future…unless I decide to move toward a MacBook.
Joe Max
A good friend of mine worked at HP for years as a hardware engineer and was assigned to the Palm unit a year or so ago. About a month ago he walked into my place with one of the first Touchpads. Q: “How is it?” A: “It’s utter crap.” And he’s one of the Quality Assurance guys. Why? Because it’s being rushed to market, and the marketers are micro-managing the engineers. Uh oh…
Two weeks ago he bailed out of HP to go work for a start-up in downtown San Francisco, because he thought the whole project was headed for a massive failure.
Joe Max
@Cap’n Magic:
My dad worked for IBM and was on the design team that created the PC keyboard. He told me I could take that keyboard, throw it against a brick wall, plug it in, and it’ll work.
Cap'n Magic
@Joe Max: Now, if you were to throw the predecessor keyboard (the old monsterous 3278 Mod 5 keyboards) against the wall, the wall would lose-the keyboard alone weighed 20+ lbs-and you seriously didn’t want to life the 3278 display unit yourself. They were replaced with the much smaller and lighter 3178s. But the 3178 used the same keyboard build architecture that the PC had.
I still have a classic model M that was from an old RS/6000, and a QuietTouch keyboard that was the same design of the keyboard used on IBM’s first ‘portable’ computer (L40)-this one has the ever ubiquitous first gen TrackPad nub.
I have had numerous other keyboards fail for one reason or another-but the IBM’s still work. Now if I can find the matching numeric keyboard for my QuietTouch I’ll be a happy camper.
Max Daru
@Liberal Sandlapper: I was at Apple headquarters in Cupertino a couple of months ago in the legal department. Every printer I saw was a HP.
Porlock Junior
@dpCap:
Well, Rand really doesn’t matter here. For the real scoop, read a Real Economist like Joseph Schumpeter, whose justification of capitalism was its ability at Creative Destruction. The MBA crowd has already mastered half of that! Clever! But no one knows when they’ll pick up the other half.
Porlock Junior
@Judas Escargot:
OK, you win. I normally do read the comments before tacking one on at the end, but I hear so little of Schumpeter these days that I thought I could cheat. Memo: not at Balloon Juice.
Porlock Junior
@Cap’n Magic:
No shirt, Sherlock! Just ordered one. Thank you! (Assuming they actually work. Otherwise, a PC-AT fan’s curse on you and them.)
Steeplejack
@burnspbesq:
Hey! Good idea. Gonna see if there is one available for the Droid.
Steeplejack
@Cap’n Magic:
Cool! Thanks for the tip. I haz retro keyboard lust.
Steeplejack
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Heh. As it should be. Although my next computer may well be an Apple.
Steeplejack
@replicnt6:
I think I had a Northgate at one point. I am starting to feel really old at the thought of all the technology that has passed through my hands and that I have forgotten. Just had a flashback to my old Hayes Smartmodem 1200. Whoa! Anyone remember those?
Steeplejack
@Spike:
Herbert Kornfeld represent! I loved that series at The Onion back in the day.
This is the earliest one I can find: “Keep Your Fucking Shit Off My Desk.” But the whole run was epic.
ETA: Flashing back to the Letter Opener of Death. Whoa.
Steeplejack
@Cat900ss:
No, we grok the Firesign Theatre references around here.
Rathskeller
@Joe Max: around 1983, our college computer center was visited by the HP sales. Part of their demo was to unplug one of the keyboards, and literally fling it against a concrete wall, then demonstrate that it worked. We bought 200+ that day.
It’s nice to read all the old timey tech folks here, I didn’t know I had so much company. (HP-41c used to rule my world.) Now I’m off to get an HP emulator for my Android…
Ab_Normal
Oh, HP. :( The only reason we replaced the LaserJet IIIP (purchased 1994) last year was because we didn’t have any PCs with parallel ports, and I wasn’t nerd enough to make the parallel to USB adapter work.
Oh, Palm. I was an early adopter of the Pilot (mine said US Robotics, for Hank’s sake), and I followed them thru Handspring. Right now I’m using a Zire 31 that my husband bought me for our anniversary… what, five years ago?
So, when I saw the TouchPad with WebOS my want light went on hard. Good thing I didn’t have the $$$… though $150 is a tempting pricepoint, especially if I can get the dev kit and code my own apps.
Comrade PhysioProf
You can buy a parallel port ethernet print server for about fifty bucks. This is how I use my Laserjet 5MP.
Mr B
Well, one HP acquisition that has been extremely successful is the one nobody really knows about. I work in that group and we just had our best Q3 ever. In fact I think it was the only HP division that exceeded goal this quarter. The acquisition was finalized under Carlyfornia’s regime but was in the works before she sauntered in and proceeded to wreck the rest of the company, which continued under Hurd. Apotheker stumbled with the Palm deal but I believe he is a lot closer to the old HP way than any of the prior idiots.
The “Agilent” spin-off was a disaster. They should re-acquire that business and dump the minimal-margin PC and webOS groups.
Amanda MacEnrow
As rjv and cervantes have both noted, it was under Mark Hurd’s dominion that HP shelled out the cash to buy Palm Computing and its WebOS.
First, Lew Platt divested HP of its best, most solid lines of business by spinning off Agilent in ’99. Huge mistake.
Then Carly made her big buying mistake with Compaq.
After which Hurd (who was eventually fired for his sexual dalliances) made his mistake with Palm (he also bought EDS, but that hasn’t yet been ruled a mistake).
And now Apotheker has laid his big doodie by spending $10 billion buying Autonomy.
It’s a goddamned shame what this parade of miscreants has done to a once great American company.