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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
Hewlett Packard, once renowned and beloved, has fallen. While the Autonomy writedown, the board spying scandal and the Mark Hurd affair grabbed headlines and our attention, less obvious has been the change in its core values and actions reflecting those values. Simply put, the company has strayed far from its roots of what once made it great. As an exercise, let's take a look at some remarks by David Packard (taken from his early 90's book, "The HP Way") to see if the company still adheres to them 20 years after publication of the book.
"When Bill Hewlett and I put together the initial plans for our business enterprise in 1937. we hadn't yet focused our interest and energies on the field of electronic instrumentation. What we did decide, however, was that we wanted to direct our efforts toward making important technical contributions to the advancement of science, industry, and human wellfare. It was a lofty, ambitious goal. But right from the beginning, Bill and I knew we didn't want to be a "me-too" company merely copying products already on the market. To this day, HP continually strives to develop products that represent true advancement."
Witness one of the newest additions to HP's lineup of laptop computers.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/yeA9OHn.jpg)
Looks awfully similar to Apple's Macbook Air doesn't it? Worse yet is that they weren't even the first ones to rip off the industrial design of the Macbook Air. That honor goes to ASUS and their Zenbook product line.
There are companies that thrive by actively stealing technologies and ripping off designs super aggressively (cough Samsung cough). But to these companies' credit, they go about their duplication and reverse engineering efforts with incredible speed, gutso, and determination. They bar no holds in competing and doing everything in their power to win, and for that I respect them, though I do not admire them.
When you copy half assedly, you get the worst of both worlds. You lose respect and you don't even make money.
When deciding whether to go forward with the 32 bit computer business that would pit HP squarely against IBM's mainframe business, "Bill Hewlett's sage advice had always been, "Don't try to take a fortified hill, especially if the army on top is bigger than your own. Omega was case in point. The project was cancelled ... [but] if we could scale it back to a sixteen-bit machine and simplify the operating system, we might have a promining product. So the Omega development program was redirected and renamed "Alpha." The result was a sophisticated, low-cost, sixteen-bit machine for processing small to medium-sized on-line business transactions. Alpha became HP's first generas-purpose computer, introduced in 1972 as the HP3000. The HP3000 ... is one of the computer industry's most enduring success stories. More than twenty years after its introduction, its descendant machines are just now entering their obsolescent phase."
When the iPad had 90% market share and near complete mindshare of the Tablet market a few years ago, HP lauched the Touchbook, an undifferentiated product at the same price point as the iPad. It was never relevant other than during its brief $99 firesale during the holiday season of 2011.
Since then, products like the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 have shown themselves to be worthy alternatives by offering a lower price point and smaller form factor to consumers. While their overall success is debatable (the Kindle Fire reportedly isn't doing all too well lately and the Nexus 7 still only sold about 10MM units in 2012), they have certainly cemented themselves in our minds as products at least worth considering.
"Just as it has in the past, our growth in the future will come from new products... By new products, I mean products that will make real contributions to technology not products that copy what someone else has done. This must be our standrd in the future just as it has been in the past."
At least in the consumer space, I can't remember the last great product HP has created. I wonder if they have created anything of note after the inkjet printers of the early 90's. Perhaps there have been great technical breakthroughs that weren't productized well, a symptom that Microsoft Research has always struggled with (remember the surface table?). I do hear that HP makes quality server and networking equipment though.
I've ripped on HP throught this post but I want to make one thing clear: I have an undying affection for the company. I grew up just minutes away from its headquarters and my first job in my life was at HP Labs as a research intern. I know that its engineers are talented, wonderful people. It pains me to see it in its current state.
It will be a happy day in my life if and when the company once again becomes a technical leader and a great place for engineers to work.
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Originally posted here
  
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United States22883 Posts
The title made me so worried for a second. :O
I think HP was actually the first to rip off the MBP, before the Zenbooks came out. When they first launched the Envy line, and later with the quadcore stuff, it seemed like they were heading in the right direction. But they never captured that premium feel, which now companies like Acer have even managed.
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HP may never recover really--I mean the PC industry, from which most of their revenue is derived, is such a low-margin one. In fact, I believe the CEO actually said they were going to get out of it despite being the #1 in the industry a few years aback, and then he got a ton of shit for saying that lol. Most of their profit comes from their servers anyway, I think.
Honestly I'm not sure whether they have it in them to do anything ground-breaking and/or change around the company, esp when they're in so deep into such mature, low-margin markets :/ guess only time can tell.
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I clicked here to see if Hawaiianpig is ok.
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Netherlands45349 Posts
What I thought of was Harry Potter, HawaiianPig or H.P Lovecraft
I didn't think it would be Hewlett Packard
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United States32971 Posts
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I was thinking about HawaiianPig lol
Never expected it to be Hewlett Packard.
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On August 03 2013 15:48 thedeadhaji wrote:Looks awfully similar to Apple's Macbook Air doesn't it? Worse yet is that they weren't even the first ones to rip off the industrial design of the Macbook Air. That honor goes to ASUS and their Zenbook product line.
holy shit it really does kinda look like a notebook.
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5673 Posts
Came here looking for HawaiianPig as well. 
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
oh hahah I didn't even stop to think of the HawaiianPig convolusion!
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They make money with printers and ink cartridges nowadays, not computers, that's a train that already departed, you could say. Doesn't surprise me they don't even bother investing that much into it, just be present and try to steal customers from Apple :3
Source: Aunt works for them.
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There's no honor among thieves in the corporate world.
Honestly, if people want to buy shit that looks like Apple shit, it's harder to sell something that looks different than to copy the design.
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Everyone rips each other off, the good side of that is that hopefully they rip off quality. I frankly don't care when it comes to massive corporations. And I have great doubt in Apple since jobs died, good luck finding someone with as great a appreciation and intuition of quality.
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I agree; I don't mind some quick reverse engineering to put out a similar product but doing a half-assed knock-off is just cheep and lazy.
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Wow that's a lot of hidden Apple fanboyness. :p
Yeah the nexus 7 and kindle fire didn't instantly kill the iPad, but with android tying the iPad and windows already around 6% or so both the competitors are doing fine. Hopefully we will see some kind of balance soon.
Yes the zenbook is a wedge like the MBA but if you confuse that concentric design with the MBA's solid white panel you're also confuses. There are only so many ways you can geometrically crate a notebook, and apple should have no right to patent geometry. They do well because they've earned it and until recently, their build quality and service were top notch and unmatched. They are still top notch, they have just been matched.
Edit: on the other hand, I don't mean that stealing is okay or anything. There's just only so many things patents can protect. If apple did something proprietary to get a wedge shape for example, they should have rights to that proprietary method. They shouldn't have rights to the shape itself though. Some things are just natural.
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thought it was gonna be about hawaiianpig sigh
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infinity21
Canada6683 Posts
Am I the only one who thought it was Hewlett Packard? lol
They haven't done anything innovative that will propel the company forwards in quite some time. Time will tell if HP can turn things around
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I am the only one that came here expecting this 
Only reason I did so is because I am currently reading about HP in the biography of Steve Jobs.
I do agree that most companies are just copying which is a shame. If we go back to the days of IBM and Apple we can see that IBM made a ton of rip-offs of other company's computers. Steve Jobs did his best to control his products and the consumer experience (everything really) to prevent this from being rip offs of Apple. He also worked the employees' butts off to get only good products out and to keep Apple's goals straight.
HP and other companies are just copying to try and survive. When Apple was lost from Steve there were so many copies of the Macintosh in production at once that when Steve came back he was just like 'wat' and started yelling and screaming at people to get rid of most of the projects because he knew that this loss of focus is why they were almost going bankrupt.
I will note that Jobs set things up so that he could see what Apple was going to be releasing in about the next 3 years (in development of course). So I would say that we won't see a huge change until around 2014-15 unless staff changes at Apple after Steve left were severe.
" good luck finding someone with as great a appreciation and intuition of quality." -MarklarMarklarr
Actually, the head of design when Steve came back(still working right now) has the same appreciation and actually used his own intuition in place of Steve's. They worked and designed the iPod, iMac, iPhone etc. together and had 1 room where Steve spent most of his time in, overseeing and commenting on the designs for all the products of the next 3 years. I would say that Apple still has a great chance of getting some really good quality stuff out.
~Apple Fanboyism~
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They gave up on webOS way too early; same way Nokia hedged a difficult bet dropping a new Symbian and then Meego. Took Envy to copy Dell's Alienware acquisition and never really did much with that either. It's one thing to acquire IP, but another to utilize, market it and get it out there.
webOS, Envy/Alienware, Meego, were all "popular" in their own right, but without influence and power behind them, of course they would fail. But abandoning them and having no follow-up made it way worse for all those companies.
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I used to be a big Dell fanboy back in 98 when I went to college; and most box-cookie PCs have lasted longer than any custom gaming rig I have made throught the years. I never really dealth with HPs until recently when I got a z820 workstation at work and was pretty impressed with the build quality and general tower inner construction and organization. Laptop-wise Thinkpads are still top in build quality I think. THe MSI gaming laptop I have now isnt bad (GT70). Tablet-wise. Apple over all!
/endpersonalopinions.
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EPT
