What is Digg?33 Comments
- manano, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Having experienced Carli's regime first hand I must say that it felt like drifting in a sea of ever changing strategies. People were rowing the boat and the task master beating the drum "Flogging will continue until morale improves." With Mark Hurd at the helm, HP has regained its focus, the company is focused on matching customer needs with products that are both high quality and profitable without squeezing the customer's budget. Contrary to what some believe, quality costs a little more, so quality ink means a higher price. You get what you pay for, just ask Lexmark and Dell printer customers.
Creating and building takes a lot longer than destroying. HP is in the right track to regain its soul, perhaps it will never be the powerhouse of years past, but it will continue being a (profitable) cornerstone of Silicon Valley. - dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I love this stuff. Honoring the places and people where our most innovative ideas and technologies were birthed from. Why it reminds of the days when I used to trudge through the snow 8 miles to and from...(trailing off)
- mc7winkie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7This is kinda nice that HP respects its roots. It makes it look like a nice company not in it all for the money and more to be a good product. The way companies should be...
- clandress, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6You gotta respect these guys. This was an age when people were hell bent on ushering in new technology at great potential losses, all in the name of computer science. Where can you find that kind of mindset these days?
- CamperBob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Wow... that last photo, with the sun-bleached floor, is especially poignant.
HP was not always the ink-hawking gang of marketing dweebs that you see today, folks. The company using their logo has nothing to do with Hewlett-Packard... except in the wet dreams of a few lawyers and accountants. - FishyJoe, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Carly was horrible. Completely destroyed the engineering culture into an instant gratification marketing culture.
- cranium, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Carly was indeed a major disaster for HP. HP's culture values honesty integrity and quality. Carly only valued Carly. She's already in the management textbooks as a negative case study, in fact that happened while she was still in charge.
I've been working for HP for 16 years, and in my opinion Mark Hurd has done more to restore the real HP than any other CEO I've worked under. This is the only time in my life I'm enthusiastically following the "hurd".
To those who proclaim HP dead, I think you're jumping to conclusions. Don't count us out yet, we're busting our butts to get the company back on the right track. - romeyinfc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4@dhughes -you'd be surprised...
When she was CEO, many business magazines called her "The most powerful woman is business". I'd have to agree - she pretty much single-handily brought down the company. This is not with her getting the blame for being a woman, but rather for instilling a culture of quantifiable results over anything qualitative, then trying to come off like rock stars. When they released the HP iPod & that fugly Gwen Stefani camera - it was over... - ahawks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Tell us how you really feel....
HP is no longer the #1 printer manufaturer? Who is then?
They haven't produced any software in a while because in 1999 the R&D departments (including software) spun off into Agilent Technologies.
I find the HP/compaq laptops to be excellent.
Carli did wreak havoc, but she's gone now, and from what I can tell, things are turning around.
and "Retire the brand"? I asusme you mean HP should just close the doors? Do you have any idea how many people that would put out of work? 150,000. Including me. - rmccabe916, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4My personal experience with HP has been great. I got to meet the company's IT director for Junior Acheivement in high school. He told me how even though HP doesn't make as much money off of their computers as Dell or Gateway, who spend more money on advertising, they still get a ton of money off of creating new ideas and patenting them. Not the selfish, I want to keep my product to myself kind of patent, but true innovative ideas. They may not hit a jackpot on every single innovation, but for those that they do, they can get a ton by licensing the ideas out to other companies. He also admitted to how HP does make money off of the ink the sell, something that was kind of funny to hear since I just got one of their printers with one of their laptops. (Which is great BTW--no problems at all--and cheap for what I got). I hope they continue on doing what their slogan claims they do--Invent--plain and simple new ideas everyday. :)
- FluffyArmada, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I like HP alot. They are probably in my humble opinion, one of the most un-sleezy companies from which one can purchase a computer. But they don't stop there! They're to awesome for that! They offer online learning courses for all sorts of stuff. Not even just Windows; the have Linux courses, network security courses, etc. So all in all, they're one of my favorite technology companies.
- oMeSSiaHo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2When you compare the cost of in to Lexmark, Canon or Dell HP's ink is the cheapest and next to Canon the best quality. That could have just been our store though...
The first A64 system I sold was HP, the first Turion system I sold was HP, the first Core laptop I sold was HP and the first X2 system I sold was HP. The printers like the PSC3210 and the PS8250 are great and have the lowest cost per print. I'll admit it was hard to start liking HP but with all of the awesome (for retail) computers I've sold has changed my mind.
In general they are still lower in customer support but my dad got a new AC adapter in two days. Also their monitors arent that hot and are pricy for what they are. Since HP has never seemed to try to excel in this area I can forgive them. - petepete, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I've always wondered what the lino under HP's doors looked like
- CamperBob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Oh, and I love the journalist's confusion of that Smith Chart mural with a Pan Am logo. What a perfect metaphor for HP's fall from glory as an engineering powerhouse.
- Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2thats strange, I have had good serveice from Hp, and they use pretty good parts except for the PSUs, my compaq and my dads pavillion have ASUS mobos, the pavillion has an nforce 4 chipset and pci-e slot, mine has an ATI xpress 200 with a pci-e slot. I got my comp for $500 anjd with a $200 RAM and GPU upgrade this thing kicks ass.
- McGrude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I live only a few blocks from there. My dad worked across the street at IBM's Palo Alto Research Center for most of my childhood.
- grady, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The phone on the desk is from the '80's not the 60's. The caption is wrong.
I believe that the phone shown is a Nortel (Northern Telecom of Canada) Companion desk set, which was a 1A2 style set for the Northern SG-1 (Pulse) PBX.
These phones had interchangeable face plates to tailor the color to the office decor, and a companion 'snap on' speakerphone. - oMeSSiaHo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"What a joke, everything from laptops to PDAs, HP designs are often poor, their prices too high and they are always out-of-synch with partners like Microsoft."
Thats funny because I can remember selling a Turion ML-34, 1gig RAM, 100HDD, Media Center laptop for $800 plus many more like it. I almost always recomended HP to my customers especially compared to Sony, Toshiba and Acer. The prices are amazing for the specs and the only complaint I had in two years was two bad batteries.
I also respect HP for being one of the few companies to embrace AMD early on. When I left we had only one HP computer using a P4. - CBTF, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4my hp compaq has held up great.
- ahawks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Google? I don't know... maybe
- dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2 The keypad (not rotary dial) telephone on the desk was really advanced for the time if that was in the 1960's, I know where I lived we didn't get rid of our rotary home phone until the mid to late 1980's!
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My fiance and I got two different models of HP laptops for about $1k each, and they've still yet to start acting up after a year. And they play WoW fine.
Can't complain. Shame the macbook didn't come out til a couple months ago though. - smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> ive dealt with the same ***** hp hardware for 8 years and have had nothing but problems, finaly im moving up to a more recent pc
You're running a 1998 PC and complaining about the manufacturer????
PS watch out for Y2K! - Nalin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The only problem I have had with HP is their lack of support for 64-bit Windows drivers (oh the rage...) Other than that, I really like HP. I'm a big fan of their calculators. =)
- thecorch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Kind of cool but you think they could've found better things to take pictures of. I would've like to have seen more of the building itself.
- fitzymj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I guess in 45 years we're all going to be looking at those pictures of the new Google offices that we've been drooling over and make joking comments about how antiquated they are. And we'll be doing it on Digg v24...
- FluffyArmada, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2As has mine... even if I am having problems getting Windows SP2 to work with my possessed D-Link wireless card.
- author20, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7Carlie Fiorina destroyed HP. First, it was the focus on her personality and style, rather than HP's core values and objectives. Then the self-destructive Compaq acquisition, and printer ink battle with Dell. Who lost? HP in every case; they are no longer the leading printer company and as ink-jet took over from lazer, HP's products are a joke -- free printers....$100 ink cartridge. Year 2000 compliance was met with HP snoozing while I stayed up all night in data centers. Software division? A 100% failure -- can you name a single product that actually made it to market? Personal Computers? What a joke, everything from laptops to PDAs, HP designs are often poor, their prices too high and they are always out-of-synch with partners like Microsoft.
I think the HP brand is dead. Even if their R&D and staff are still some of the best -- Carlie Fiorina did to HP what Steve Case did to AOL. The brand is dead. And compare their customer support to anybody else -- HP techs are light-weight, lazy, unenthusiastic, unthinking (I asked if they had samples of their "slimming down" camera on the Web -- they said "no"...).
What a joke -- retire the brand. HP is dead. - hiscity, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Oy! I used to love HP products because of their RPN calculators and test equipment. The HP Pavilion laptop that I've carried for a couple of years now has been rugged, but tends to run hot. Their bright spots were the old durable, keep-on-printing laser printers. At home now, I'm severely limiting printing, since I can't justify the expense. It makes me nostalgic for the days of noisy, slow, dot-matrix printers and cheap ribbon cartridges.
Over the years, I've grown to hate HP products mainly because of the printers. Why so many different types of printer cartridge from one company? And I wonder how much money they've made from the extra small part of a page that prints just about every time you try to print a web page? Or the extra pages that had to be printed because the right side of a web page was cut off? The feds really need to investigate price fixing in ink cartridges industry-wide.
I can think of 3 different model HP "all-in-one" printers that died in the past 2 years, at different locations. When the printer mechanism go out--forget being able to use the scanner. Another thorn, the software driver installs off CD, like for HP Director, are a pain in the wazoo ... bloat-ware royal.And canceling print jobs should just cancel the job--and not lock out the printer. Oh yeah, there should be a fast draft mode print button. Yada, yada, yada.... Grrrrrrr!
HP is just no longer worth the headaches. In the past 2 weeks, I've had the pleasure of suggesting alternate manufacturers other than HP for a large 36" plotter/scanner and a blade server. I hope the company turns around--but I'm not holding my breath.
If they have been rigging print cartridge prices, besides huge class action suits, there should be community service penalties to replant the trees and forests that have been wasted. And I hope their stockholders read digg so they can see it coming. - soreyes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0No computers on Hewlett's desk, no blotter on my desk. Nice pictures, but sort of annoying that there are only 10 at a low rez.
- dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2 Generally speaking it's pretty rare for any CEO to ruin a business that quick, I'd say it was her predecessors and she got the blame after stepping into the flames, and being a woman in business she would probably be blamed by her peers for any problems however small they were.
Large corporations are big lumbering machines if you invest at all you know it takes a few years for the policies of new management to take effect, it doesn't happen instantly. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Do you remember when hp made manufactured pcs out of low grade parts and sold them at best buy for wayyyy more than they are worth?? oh wait, they still do
- wireflyer, on 10/12/2007, -25/+1I hate hp ive dealt with the same ***** hp hardware for 8 years and have had nothing but problems, finaly im moving up to a more recent pc
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