The Decline of HP...What Happened?

[@alebaba12]

I have been working at HP for about 2 years now. Ever since HP hired Enrique Lores as the new CEO, they have been making a huge push to treat their employees better. HP has been working very hard to repair their image these past few years in my experience.

[@Pikminiman]

Interesting. What's been changing?

[@alebaba12]

@@Pikminiman additional bonuses during the pandemic, extra PTO, and lots of WFH flexibility

[@ThaKnopMe]

@@AnaGolightly i don’t think a active 11 year old account is a bot dude

[@jamesperry4470]

They built laptops with poor build quality and I wrote them off after my second

[@iamagi]

@@jamesperry4470 All HP laptop gets a 9 or 10 score at Ifixit they are clearly on top.

[@tedjohnson64]

Worked at HP for nearly 3 decades. The company really went downhill when... they hired the first CEO from outside the company: Carly Fiorina. She made many poor decisions designed to juice stock price, and treated employees like crap. Outsourcing became the primary tactic, and much internal talent was lost. Many other subsequent CEOs followed the same destructive paradigm.

[@davej.meister5421]

Carly was also a failed POTUS and VP candidate in 2016. Ted Cruz named her as his running mate in 2016.

[@jimslancio]

@@davej.meister5421 The one thing that could've made Tez Crud even less appealing.

[@The_Notorious_CRG]

i worked at HP in the 90s and 2000s and you are right. Once they hired Fiorina it was over. They started to buy and acquire rather than innovate from within...and started the treating the employees as disposable. Mark Hurd continued the fall and now the once proud business is now part of Company Man's video series of declining companies.

[@jonjohns8145]

I was witness to this. I didn't work for HP directly, but I hung out with HP engineers (nature of my business) a Lot and I could see the change in their spirit once Fiorina took over. They also went from being one of the most generous benefits providing companies to one of the worst. Hated Fiorina for what she did, not just to HP but also Compaq.

[@tonysheerness2427]

Same happened to IBM relying on contractors and semi permanent staff.

[@tropictiger2387]

HP used to make pretty okay laptop heater combinations. You could keep an entire room warm by just having a laptop switched on.

[@arghyaprotimhalder5592]

Lol motherboard died they blamed me and refused warranty not gonna buy I had hp backlit keyboard the lights gone in 6 months, i am not crazy to go for warranty claim

[@ashii_ii]

​@@arghyaprotimhalder5592 yet I have HP laptops from 2005 that still work fine (HDD and battery had to be replaced, which is fair enough)

[@K11micra_mcr]

@@ashii_iifrom 2013 actually, I have a G6 and it runs perfectly to this day

[@oldchannel9911]

the power delivery board in my old hp caught fire, and it never shut off because there is no temperature sensor on that side of the laptop. worked fine after replacing the board but still super sketchy

[@gelatinous6915]

As long as you had a supply of cooling fans

[@thatunicornhastheaudacity]

My Mom worked for HP and she really attests to the fact that Mr.Hewlett and Packard really stood by their employees. She started as a janitor and worked her way up to a graphic artist. She did alot of designs, photography and general advertising to other commercial prospects, (slideshows and meeting pitches, ect.) She would take the new graphic design software they were tinkering with and make sales pitches of it. She was a training to be a draftsman, (they actually changed the title to drafts person in her branch because she was the only woman. Pretty progressive for the late eighties, early nineties I'd say.) My Dad did plating and assembly with HP, which is actually how they met. Both have told me after Mr. Hewlett and Packard left, the company started to go down hill. My Mom still gets teary eyed discussing that part of her career life.

[@My_Old_YT_Account]

That's the way a lot of companies used to be, it's genuinely sad how they all are today

[@Freestyle80]

yeah my uncle was actuall Hewlett he said this is bullsh*t made to farm likes

[@albertwiersch9852]

Now it's all about short-term profits.

[@Woodland26]

HP used to stand for "best or nothing". I had a 32e Calculator and few years after I bought it, I was told there was an upgrade to the keys membrane. It was performed for free from a dealer who didn't sell me the caculator.

[@henkholdingastate]

@@albertwiersch9852 special the bonussen

[@IMSAIGuy]

I worked 25 years with HP. Carly killed it. The board was stupid to hire her and to break up the company. They should have kept the company together and promote Ann Livermore to CEO.

[@charlesgantz5865]

Actually, IMO, breaking up the company was a good thing. It's just that HP should have been the part of the break keeping the chemical and test instruments, and the other part would have been the computer services. The computer services part would then have withered away like the current HP has done. But no one would have noticed since the name wouldn't have been famous. Also, HP, the original company, didn't get into computers for the general public. They got into computers as test instrument controllers. Remember HP Basic, now HT Basic. Those were good products for the time, and really needed because they lead the innovations in test instruments. And of course, that eventually lead to HP developing inkjet printers.

[@oosha2000]

Is it me or are female CEOs worse than male CEOs in terms of management approach ? Pardon my stereotype though.

[@BlueRidgeBubble]

​@@oosha2000 Nah, threes just fewer of them, so their screwups are more noticeable. We also do live in a patriarchal society, so matriarchal lines of thinking when it comes to companies may not jive with society There's also the fact that some of them may have just been promoted to fill a quota, and got Peter Principled all the way to the top. Who really knows. But male CEOs have brought down entire economies, I think ladies have a ways to go to catch up lol

[@ThermalVoid]

​@@oosha2000 Yes, when you let a woman take the leadership role in any business is when the company nosedives towards bankruptcy.

[@femboichik]

@@ThermalVoid what a bullshit

[@allenwiddows7631]

I know the quality of HP products are not what they used to be. For the longest time, you wanted a quality printer, you got an HP-that has not been the case in the consumer market in a long time. I purchased an HP-11C calculator for $60 back in 1982; it still runs like a champ forty years later, while those HP calculators bought by friends in the past decade have not lasted much past a few years. Back in the late ‘80s, I worked at a company that used HP 3000 mini computers (talk about a long-dead niche) and those machines are still running, 22 years after HP stopped supporting them. (Third party suppliers are maintaining the OS and supplying parts, when needed.) This type of longevity for products just doesn’t seem to fit into the HP of today…

[@modelrailpreservation]

I got out of IT work shortly after Windows 7 came out, and I had small businesses I did contract work for that had old HP Laserjet 4s that were solid as a rock and just kept going and going. With a little work, I got those to work under Windows 7, don't remember what I did, I might have found an XP driver that worked, I don't know, yeah their old printers were solid as a rock and dependable. Nowadays though, they seem real cheaply made, the mechanisms are junk. I've gutted old printers for motors and other parts for model railroading purposes. The old motors that drive the older HP printers, those things had LOTS of torque.

[@PashPaw]

No, they don't. The HP-50g is a good calculator but compared to my parents' HP calculators (another 11c, a 12c, and a 45!), it feels really cheap. It works better than my TIs but I expect the Voyagers to outlast me and definitely the 50g.

[@someguy2135]

Notice those hp calculators in the video didn't have a key with and equal sign? For a long time, (as some in this tread know) all hp calculators used "Reverse Polish Notation" or RPN, which some really preferred, since it used fewer keystrokes for certain calculations. It did require a steeper learning curve, but locked users into their brand.

[@someguy2135]

@@PashPaw I agree about the quality and durability of those early hp calculators. I owned an 11c, 15c, and still own a 10b. Each has an oddly satisfying "chunk" with every button press.

[@allenwiddows7631]

I love RPN, thanks to my 11-C; I even have a RPN calculator on my phone-it’s just faster…

[@AlvoriaGPM]

Ah HP. The company that builds printers that lie to you about your ink levels so that they can sell ink at a 10,000% markup, creates laptops deliberately made to not be upgradable, and where everything is designed to fail right after the warranty expires. Super shocked that CM didn't mention them being taken to court, repeatedly, over these shenanigans. *EDIT:* This post has really blown up and it's wonderful to see all of the good points in agreement as well as those in objection to it. The replies have become a rather good list of HP products, laptops in particular, that are more reliable than others. If you want to go with HP for some reason, check below for a recommendation list.

[@blanknam3d]

> creates laptops deliberately made to not be upgradable ...eh? I have a ENVY 15m-eu0023dx. It still has user-replaceable RAM & storage. They make the instructions on how to do so vague, and they put EMF shields over the sticks as well, but you can still replace the RAM & SSD in most of their ENVY & Pavilion lines.

[@dylanc2806]

@@blanknam3d yeah you shouldnt ever need to replace the ram or ssd because the hinge screwed into plastic will fail long long before you need more ram or another ssd

[@blanknam3d]

@@dylanc2806 1. a screen hinge is not something you upgrade, you should be talking about repairability & build quality in that case 2. doesn't seem they even do that anymore, at least my ENVY x360 15m-eu0023dx has the hinges screwed directly into the aluminum chassis. then again... the chassis of it is also mostly made of aluminum to begin with, so perhaps that's just because there's not much plastic in the frame to start with

[@dylanc2806]

@@blanknam3d i was referring to the whole shibang with HP a while back where the hinges that screwed into plastic (most HP laptops) would fail constantly, of course no one would upgrade it, unless....you were rebuilding it the way it should have been built lmao. but yeah glad you have a aluminum one, my god those hinges were bad. most hp laptops hinges ive seen were direct to plastic

[@forgotten1s]

Cm isnt a researcher he does the bare minimum hes good for surface level analysis

[@ReaverPrime]

I haven't had too many issues with HP computers. They have been relatively reliable. Their printers on the other hand... Dog water of the highest degree. Not only are they expensive, but they break down fairly often and the ink is costly.

[@Matteo_the_Plague_Doctor]

Same! I have a 11 year old HP ENVY desktop and it still runs fine for the most part. Bought an HP printer once and it got used 3-4 times before we junked it. Guess these are different divisions then.

[@Kanga1974]

I have hp 4200 laser printer for 15 years and still working.

[@IndyGuy65]

I could not agree more. I have a HP laptop and it runs great. I put cheaper non brand HP cartridges in the printer and that was the end of that. I made sure I got a printer that takes cheap ink!

[@xxxxMonkeyGirlxxxx]

Yeah my HP laptop lasts a long time. Zero problems with any I have bought but the printers definitely suck.

[@blanknam3d]

100%. I'm surprised my mom's OfficeJet 7612 is still working, hell, with third-party offbrand ink, after I managed to fix the damned thing.

[@kazik5785]

As a person who was tied to HP heavily, the hire of Carly Fiorina in 1999 was the start of the destruction of HP. She pretty much destroy the original HP structure and blew up the whole company. It never recovered from her.

[@skataskatata9236]

woman was not the problem. dumb was the problem

[@greg6500]

@SayMyName699 Republicans.

[@chivalryremains9426]

@@greg6500 No. Women.

[@Manlikerik8]

​@@chivalryremains9426even worse both

[@Zhongligeoarchon]

@@chivalryremains9426nah, men

[@SaltyPirate71]

I'll tell you what happened to HP in 3 words: Compaq, Carly Fiorina. She destroyed HP's corporate culture of humility and personal accountability and tried to replace it by counterfeiting Hewlett and Packard's "garage engineering" like waving a magic wand. She kept a copy of their book, "The HP Way" at hand, but was mentally incapable of grasping the point. Carly was the first HP ceo that was from outside the company and her management style was like some amateur cook who thinks they can become a chef by buying more kitchen gadgets. Her decision to merge with Compaq was done against the wishes and advice of the people who had built and driven HP for 60 years. The Compaq merger was like tying an anchor around the neck of an Olympic swimmer and wondering why he started drowning. In her mind swimming=water=boats=anchor. She destroyed the corporate culture that had been extremely successful by replacing it with a business school derivative that she tried to convince the employees was just a more efficient restyling of the original and then gave them an anchor when they needed a lifeline and inspiration. Her brutal business school management made employees feel mistreated, over worked and unappreciated. That is how you destroy a blue chip company, not re-energize it. Carly Fiorina is a textbook example of someone being educated beyond their intelligence.

[@angrydragonslayer]

Business schools scares me, any graduate of one tends to be clueless They seem to be completely business incompetent, almost as if actively trained to collapse companies

[@SaltyPirate71]

@@angrydragonslayer You're right. They're taught profits must increase every quarter at all cost, even if you destroy the company, like Mary Barra has done to GM.

[@angrydragonslayer]

@@SaltyPirate71 and you're giving good examples, most of the ones i met got massive loans (one guy somehow got 60 mil from a bank) and then wasted it all faster than you could trade it away on the stock market

[@NUkiwi]

100% agree. Pretty much just wanted to write the same and then saw this comment. Started with HP in Germany in 2002, got introduced to the still great but as it turned out rapidly declining overall company culture. The acquisition of Compaq wasn’t too bad for me personally in the Services devision as it meant, no more NetServers but ProLiants instead 🎉. We also got a boatload of awesome new colleagues plus their customers. But from then on the whole company culture kept declining further with Mark being the nail in the coffin.

[@ignaciomenendez8672]

F

[@thewiirocks]

You forgot about HP’s commitment to the Itanic which killed their high-end business about the same time they bought Compaq and tanked their (very profitable and amazingly quality) printer business. Not to mention effectively eliminating their calculator business which TI owns the marketshare for to this day. Fiorina did a real number in her time there. It only went downhill after.

[@sexagesimalian]

Any company that doesn't sell oscilloscopes (or at least other scientific gear) is not truly "HP."

[@halnwheels]

I had to look this up. Thanks for mentioning it.

[@bloqk16]

@@sexagesimalian Ah! That's good of you to mention that. Seems there were two distinctive personalities of HP, as I wrote above; an early era of industrial electronics with few consumer products. Then the PC age with many consumer products. Early era of HP - happy employees. PC age of HP - contentious employees

[@AbortedRepublic]

@@bloqk16 curious what about year you'd split those eras in?

[@bloqk16]

@@AbortedRepublic The early era of HP would be from the 1950s (when HP had a rapidly growing presence in the Stanford Industrial Park) to the 1980s; as HP was primarily electronics for business; science; and government sub-contracting work; and not much into consumer goods, save for the calculators. In the 1980s, when HP was getting into the PC and printer business, with becoming a company with consumer goods, is when I sensed a change with HP; which was basically hearsay from those that worked there, as I lived in the region. Considering Bill Hewlett and David Packard were aging at that time, executive management duties had already shifted to younger executives in the 1980s.

[@zeroelus]

It seems so similar a story to Boeing. A well regarded powerhouse of engineering and innovation with a flat structure, that got "modernized for the shareholder" and then immediately lost the thing that made it special.

[@dhruvakhera5011]

but boeing is still the leader isn't it?

[@crissto8591]

@@dhruvakhera5011 not really. Airbus took over

[@dogphlap6749]

True.

[@every1665]

Shareholders are a bit like voters - they get what they vote for and it often isn't what they wanted.

[@Blank00]

It's also comparable to Pratt and Whitney, whose slogan was "dependable engines". The last good PW product was the PW4000 for A330. After that, there was the PW4000 for 777 that caused UA328, GP7200 for A380 that caused AF66, and the PW1000G engines that caused problems for some airlines that use A320NEOs and A220s.

[@DrElectron1]

I worked as an engineer for HP from 1976 to 1984. Those were the days when employees would say HP stood for "Happy People". Focusing on technology, innovation, and quality, HP continued to prosper into the 1990s. The beginning of HP's demise came when the Board brought in Carly Fiorina as CEO. Up until that point, all HP CEOs had been HP engineers with technical understanding but more importantly, an understanding of the culture of the company (aka The HP Way). Carly was a marketing person. She touted innovation in ads with pictures of the garage where HP started. However, instead of using the innovative horsepower she had within HP to grow the company, she elected to buy Compaq. After the Carly debacle, the Board brought in another outsider, Mark Hurd, who was strictly operationally focused. With all of the layoffs, Hurd had some improved short term financials but at the cost of employee morale.

[@ryanjohnson4565]

This is so long I needed to take a bathroom break half way through. Good stuff though.

[@v8pilot]

I worked for HP in Britain in the 1980s. I visited HP Palo Alto and I saw an email stapled to someone's wall. It was a reply from Dave Packard. Someone had written "Dave, is it true that you once said you would fire a manager if he sacrificed quality to meet a deadline?" Packard had replied "Yes, and I meant it".

[@pokerpig9069]

We were probably colleagues then. And if you flew single engines, then I know exactly who you are! (Sorry I left for Australia mate!)

[@EduardoSantos-qn2co]

Former HP employee, joined right after Carly was ousted and left in 2010. First time Hurd met with us, I asked why HP was never included in Best Places to Work. His response to me was “That list is not anything we care about or track”. Spoke volumes.

[@jeffhartman7000]

My experience with HP goes back about 50 years: first using their oscillators and oscilloscopes, then their calculators, and a succession of printers starting with a LaserJet III. The common thread to their products was a combination of performance, quality, and reliability. The 200CD oscillator in my basement is about 70 years old and still works flawlessly. My first calculator was an HP-67 that was stolen; the HP-25 that replaced it still works today (as do the dozen or so successors I have gotten over the years and still use today). Unfortunately the quality and reliability have taken a nosedive as the company has evolved from largely focusing on making engineering resources, to becoming a consumer product manufacturer. This, along with the drift from “the HP way” to a shareholder driven corporate mindset, has destroyed their once incredible reputation. In short, they lost sight of who they were and what made them special.

[@alandickerson3379]

Jeff, you just wrote a great description of what happened to my company, Tektronix. Tektronix and HP were friendly competitors for many years. Bill Hewlett and David Packard were friends with the main founders of Tektronix, Jack Murdock and Howard Vollum. I met David Packard at Tektronix years ago when Howard Vollum gave him an award and toured him around Tektronix. Sadly, like HP, Tektronix went on a long downhill slide. from 24,028 employees in 1982 to about 700 now. I live in Vancouver, WA where HP had a huge printer manufacturing operation. Those buildings are still mostly empty. There are still a few HP employees on 164th Avenue. Vergreat companies.y sad times for both these

[@pdsnpsnldlqnop3330]

Sad but the fortunes of HP follow the fortunes of America. In a word - deindustrialisation. They had great appeal because scientists and engineers used their tools. HP computers came with the professional heritage, it was quality stuff, if 'highly priced'. Then it all went consumer and nobody needed printers no more.

[@raym909]

Me too, at Hughes Aircraft co. i out of pocket got a HP-45 calculator. and a Desk Jet printer in the 80's

[@fredsmith5473]

The rot started in 1974, when they put Dacron gears in the tuning mechanism of the 8640A signal generator to save a dollar or two. Forty odd years later they crack with age and are difficult and expensive to replace........ Seriously, what you've said is true, but the whole electronics industry, (even most of the instrument business) , has gone that way. For instance, in the fifties what would today be considered a very crude and limited oscilloscope, would be a thing a private individual such as the average radio ham, could only dream of. By the mid 80s there were pretty good 20MHz scopes for $200 or so, and of course a lot of used stuff on the market. I'm sure the last analog scope HP produced was in the late 70s. Companies like HP and Tek were increasingly competing at the very top end. Furthermore the amount of human manufacturing content reduced with larger scale integration, ASICs and SMT. It's not just instruments, but consider TVs from the early 50s to when analog TVs were phased out, about ten years ago. From the fifties there was a thriving repair industry. By about 2010 hardly anyone had TVs repaired. I found a couple of working ones thrown away.

[@TrueDetectivePikachu]

I have an HP 15 laptop, really wish it had an extra ram slot. Cheap laptop, would be nice if hp went a more modular direction and allowed more repair than what other laptops allow. The XPS line from Dell shines in being easy to upgrade/repair, something that I find somewhat tricky for the hp 15 model. Despite that, my hp laptop did the job back in highschool and a year and halve on college before i had to upgrade. 4GB ram nowadays is playing resources on hardcore mode.

[@Thermalburn]

My wife exclusively used HP laptops for work because we found them to be the best when it came to price-performance scale. The last one we purchased about a year ago has been terrible. Constant hardware failures, leading to us sending the laptop in for a new one; mind you, I work as an IT engineer so I know what Im doing when it comes to PC troubleshooting. I ended up finally buying her a different laptop from another manufacturer. And dont get me started on the HP printer we have at home, which is a higher end "enterprise" printer not an average home printer; I would have hurled that thing out the window by now if I hadnt spent so much money on it. Absolutely garbage tier products

[@Alex-yj9xl]

That's unfortunate. Which one was it? I've always had a great experience with HPs, although the last time I purchased one was 2018.

[@mitchellhorton9382]

Lenovo are the best laptops in my opinion

[@badmoose01]

@@mitchellhorton9382 asus is pretty good too

[@Waynestarr]

I can't lie, my HP Laser Jet Pro M118dw printer works like a champ! Better than the Canon printer I had before it. Prints super fast, and never had any technical issues with it the 3 years I've had it. Probably depends on the manufacturing plant that made it. Who knows?

[@theviscount4622]

I used to like hp until i got an msi laptop

[@wiregold8930]

I grew up in Cupertino back when it was part of San Jose. HP was everywhere and everyone knew a neighbor, friend, or had a family member working for HP. As a kid I actually played with an HP35 before it was released and I knew then I wanted to work for this company. I started for them in the mid-80s when Bill and Dave still ran the show. HP ran on net 10% profit and poured the rest back into employee benefits, salaries, and R&D. It was the best job you could want. I was able to afford a 3-bedroom home with acreage on a technician's salary. The spiral down began in the late 80s when it was decided individual performance would no longer be measured and HP would take 20% net profit. Your pay was frozen essentially with annual raises of

[@duradim1]

And don't forget Bill Clinton handing over MX missel technology to China giving them the ability to target our cities with nuclear warheads. But at least the Clinton Foundation pocketed Millions in speaker fees paid by the Chinese. WHAT A PRICK!

[@TheRVSN]

There are two subjects of global politics: 1. Global predictor (concept of fascism) 2. Russian Bolshevism (concept of social justice) - is not Communism Because state "elites" of USA were confusing foreign politics of USA with global politics (they thought that it is them the subjects of global politics) global predictor decided to dismantle Pax Americana by moving: - Euro-Atlantic control concentration center to China; - Euro-Asian control concentration center to Iran. That is why you were ordered to send digital signal analyzers. Global predictor ordered Marxism as a replacement for Biblical project. Global predictor invented nationalism and the right of nations to self-determination in 19th century. WW1 to destroy empires and implement an new world order based on Marxism at expense of Russia was tested during the Boer War in Africa. Karl Marx wrote the Manifest of Communist party in 1848. Communist movement was created via the First international in London. WW1 was propagated via the Second international in Paris and Brussels. Term "bolsheviks" was created in 1903 when bolsheviks confronted mensheviks (communists) in РСДРП party in Russian empire. Bolsheviks insisted on party members being competent in management of state and using those competencies to manage Russia. Communists would like to make anybody a member of the party. Bolsheviks destroyed plans of global predictor and saved Russia. The mob-"elite" system as implementation of fascism is drawn on bank note of value of 1 USD: conceptually powerful global predictor as the Eye on the top of the headless pyramid, and the headless pyramid of privileged ("elites") and unprivileged mob. So "elites" are just puppets as well - knowledgeable only to the extent they were told. Both subjects of global politics are conceptually powerful. "Conceptual power is the power of ideas that have dominated human society for thousands of years and the power of people who are able to generate such ideas. It is the highest intra-social type of power out of 5 existing ones: conceptual, ideological, legislative, executive, judicial. Conceptual power: - recognizes factors affecting society - introduces them into his system of stereotypes - forms vectors of goals in relation to each society - forms management concepts for achieving development goals It is autocratic by nature and ignores the "democratic" procedures of society, which do not see and do not want to recognize its autocracy."

[@jaredwilliams8621]

This is essentially what I suspected from the video. A company highly driven on innovation begins to stop reinvesting in itself and guts its R&D budget so that they have more profit to offer investors. It works well in the short to medium term, usually long enough to make a CEO look good and move on to another company to do the same, but typically puts the company in a long-term stagnation/decline.

[@foothilldave]

I was also a 30+ year employee starting in 1980 (good times back then) and I think this article does hit the main points right on. I'd add one more that is a side-effect of the "only stock price matters" attitude - HP started dumping it's engineering brain power with the assumption that everything can be subcontracted. The engineers, trained and HP-in-bred that innovation was everything, were really the driving force behind HP, as Bill and Dave would tell you if they were still around. You can't buy that, especially on the cheap.

[@andrewcopple7075]

In the 80s they let go of SO MUCH of their research staff. My professor at ASU who worked at several semiconductor industries was told by his HP manager that the work he wanted to do on semiconductor technology, pioneering new technology, would only be done in the future at universities. They and many other companies seem to have chosen to offload their R&D to universities. A truly depressing choice.

[@HomebrewHorsepower]

I worked for HP for 3 years. Their strategy at the time was to squeeze every dime out of employees, products, contractors, and whatever else they could without investing anything in the future. The company was run, at the time, like they only planned to be in business for 2 more years.

[@pauliedweasel]

After my 22 years 2 months and 19 days with HP I couldn’t have stated it any better!

[@SmartSnake]

I worked as an HP sales representative for a year. In all of their weekly HP employee update videos and training videos they always talked about innovation and how it was 'the core of their business model', but tbh I did not see any innovation, the 'innovation' they presented was little things that all the competitors already had; built-in fingerprint reader, 360 touchscreen, latest intel processors. I came to realize HP's entire business strategy is just: Throw money at marketing, and if that doesn't work, just throw more money into marketing.

[@foca2002]

Or buy someone and then write off later.

[@Blox117]

their laptop was the only one that had OLED at the time so yeah

[@lifeisshørt_420]

@LOU ALEX Nah as of late their MacBooks have been more innovative with the release of their M1 chip

[@Markimark151]

HP was doing so amazing until their hired Carly Fiorina and made the worst acquisition of acquiring Compaq, which caused massive layoffs and management problems. And then they started outsourcing their in house computer production! And their later management team make other bad mergers and even wrongfully splitting the company, similar to Xerox’s split.

[@BongWeasle]

When the real HP split and Agilent Technologies was born was the beginning of the end. I was an HP engineer for 30 years. The drop in quality after that point was visible , shipping kit we knew was faulty just to meet targets. Also outsourcing manufacturing to third parties and badging kit was also to blame. Also they stopped the free donuts on a Friday…! A sign of things to come.

[@machupikachu1085]

No more free donut day??? I would have bounced...

[@pauliedweasel]

One of my former managers at HP referred to the Agilent logo as the sytlized asshole and called it Flatulent Technologies. 😉

[@helloworld6126]

When HP cannot sell their HPUX and before the era of Linux came, HP did not know how to react. They turned to spin off Agilent and bet on poliant servers and windows. The turning point of their fall was in year 1999.

[@pauliedweasel]

I started with HP in January of 1973 at their Fullerton office as a trainee technician repairing the HP35 electronic slide rule and as a 19 year old fresh out of his first semester of JC I thought I was on top of the world. The refrigerator in the shop kitchen had the top half filled with sodas and the bottom filled with beer and every day was donut day. But two short years after that you could see a definite change in the company which started out slowly but as the years rolled by it picked up speed and by the time I left it was obvious that both the test equipment division that I started in and the medical products division where I worked when I left were going to be sold or spun off which they both were several years later. Some of the changes that occurred over the years were just a result of the way the industry and the world were changing but a lot of it seemed like it was due to poor decisions by management. At least the railroad industry that I left HP for turned out to be a good move and has given me a nice retirement.

[@premikyam2726]

@@pauliedweasel prior to the 1999 HP - agilent spin-off we were kept excited for months by management referring to "NewCo". When the name and logo were finally announced , it took a millisecond for a creative marketing intern to figure out that Agilent was an anagram of Genital. Employees were sent a strongly-worded cease and desist warning email.

[@e.pitmangallup6161]

I joined HP in 1978 and retired in 2008, 31 years. It was the best company I ever worked at. I enjoyed going to work each day. The company began going downhill after Bill and Dave died. After that the concept of growing from within, both products and people. Top management was hired from outside and didn't understand the principles of "The HP way" and " management by objective". The original part of HP, test and measurement, we spun off as Agilent Technologies in clouding a good portion of HP Labs (you never mentioned thus). Much of the diversity of HP was.lost and al their eggs were put in one basket .

[@arh3733]

@@supernovahm1178 The video maker can't see past anything that's not a PC.

[@rahb1]

@@arh3733 Just like Carly!

[@isaacgentz3319]

I worked for Hewlett Packard Enterprise as an intern in college from 2017-2019 and then full time from 2019-2020. During that time there were 4 layoff rounds and restructurings, and then I finally got laid off on 2020. I think the biggest issue was they are constantly changing and reorganizing. They wouldn't stick with anything long enough to see it through. It is sad because I actually really enjoyed working there. Great benefits, good culture, great pople. You could see the "old HP" shining through on occasion, but sadly the constant restructuring kept undoing all of the hard work and progress that was made every 6 months. It made it very difficult to get anything accomplished because your team members were constantly changing.

[@Carvin0]

The rot started with Carly Fiorina. She was the first hire from outside the company and did not really understand HP's business. Ultimately it was the board of directors' poor judgement in hiring her that was the problem.

[@DhrubajyotiRaja01]

*She was Probably hired because of Diversity* .....

[@TheCatherineCC]

She understood, she was just a MBA sociopath.

[@joevining2603]

Ding Ding Ding - we have a winner!

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

@@joevining2603 Yep!

[@rheticus5198]

Carly the presidential candidate. Creepy Carly.

[@crosscompiler]

We'd been dealing with HP since the early 70s (expensive test equipment, mostly) and had many friends that worked for them. We completely stopped buying anything from them by 1999, basically because all of the good employees (and friends) had already been forced out and dealing with the ones left was impossible. From world-leading expertise and professionalism down to Comcast-level of incompetence and slime in 25 years (to be fair, many companies have done it quicker). Nothing that followed had anything to do with the real HP, it was just a playpen for incompetent CEOs.

[@barryf5479]

Your appraisal is very correct. I won't go in to why I know that but you can read between the lines.

[@bogusharris]

started with Compaq, and when HP took over, work was no longer enjoyable. It was as in the video description, employees were expendable. India became the go to for tech support, Mexico for accounting, .. on and on, thankfully I was laid off with a package.

[@ATCOregon]

I live in a former HP town. Giant campus that employed a lot of people. They were super awesome to staff in 80's and 90's but when Carly Fiorina took over everything there went south. Their facility provided fantastic jobs to people in 4 local towns but it's all gone now. I think they have a few things left on the campus but for the most part it's gone. Weird, it was such a big part of the community, huge, and now it's just a memory compared to what it was.

[@rahb1]

Roseville, CA?

[@m80116]

HP was at its best when it comprised all the different technologies they were mustering: frequency counters, spectrum analyzers, mass spectrometers, printers, laptops, monitors.... it was THE Company, and it was called Hewlett-Packard, and everywhere you saw their logo you knew there was a properly engineered machine. Nowadays go figure what's inside an HP machine... half of the company spun off into many pieces, the other half disbundled... they have three different laptop line ups! All with the same characteristics and very confusing designs. How can I trust a company like this anymore !?

[@tommylugaresi7431]

My dad worked for HP back in the 90s. He got moved into their subsidiary Agilent. Electrical engineering. He helped create modern optical mice. I remember using one of the prototypes he got to take home.

[@flintfrommother3gaming]

Is it still intact? Just wondering.

[@tommylugaresi7431]

@@flintfrommother3gaming don't know what happened to it. That was a long time ago. If I ever did find it, I'd definitely want to keep it.

[@guyracine7998]

I have one of those and it still works 😁

[@BrilliantBatgirl]

I was also with HP originally and ended up at Agilent after the split. I worked in medical devices (most people don’t even know that HP made medical devices).

[@theredneckalien5964]

I worked at HP for 5 years (2000-2005). I agree with just about everything you said but would also add one "6. Internal Politics". HP was founded with a belief system called "The Rules of the Garage" with like 10 ideas that made the company what it was. One of those was "No Internal Politics". That ended under Carly Fiorina. Different divisions started to fight with each other, hide things from each other, and copy the devices that each was creating, among other things. This was one of the big downfalls for the company. A company is supposed to compete with other companies not with itself. That is just a waste. Maybe #7 could be too much outsourcing, offshoring, and H1-b visas that made employees constantly worried if they would lose their jobs. That is what happened to me. My whole product line went to India (95% of software development and testing, manufacturing was already in Singapore). Company used to be one of the most loved by employees. Now it is the punchline of jokes with my former team members.

[@billamos5125]

Amen to all that. A lot of my department's work was outsourced to Shanghai.

[@Shauma_llama]

@@billamos5125 Happened to my ex as well.

[@leeatkinson9280]

...you do realize that Carly wrote those "Rules of the Garage", don't you?

[@Crazy--Clown]

Lol I've heard to this day they still compete with each other internally. Also heard that many of the staff are taken over by Indians who are liars and promise the world and are running the company to the ground. Bill and Dave would be disgraced on what it is today...

[@modifiedcontent]

I've interviewed several HP senior managers at a conference around 2006-8 including Mark Hurd. Don't remember much of it, but for my story I was trying to pin them down on what exactly HP's core business was. Everybody gave a similar dismissive answer, that it was all of the above, whatever brought in revenue and that it didn't matter. They thought I was really annoying. Lack of strategic focus was their downfall imho.

[@sor3999]

Sounds like they just didn't know and were annoyed you were possibly exposing that.

[@Shauma_llama]

HPs fall can be traced back to one person: Carly Fiorina. I was living in the Silicon Valley at the time, and knew people working at HP, soon to be laid off, and hearing the drama in the news. Christ, Meg Whitman too? Surprised they're still in business at all. I'm still using the HP Financial calculator, 40+ years.

[@sams6090]

Yup! She was basically the worst possible CEO as well as person in general. Just every single thing she did was awful and led to the downfall of the entire industry in a multitude of different ways but mostly because of the push for outsourcing and pay stagnation.

[@davej.meister5421]

WTH was Ted Cruz thinking when he named her as his VP running mate in 2016? What an awful choice!!

[@silverXnoise]

@@davej.meister5421 I dunno, seems like a natural match for the most openly despised person in the Senate.

[@davej.meister5421]

@@silverXnoise Schumer, McConnell, Romney and Joey Boy's "trusty" cackling female sidekick (a former U.S. Senator herself) are the most openly despised U.S. senators.

[@silverXnoise]

@@davej.meister5421 Well, I'd venture to guess that it's a tight race either way, as being a human equivalent to an abandoned porta-john seems to be a prerequisite to running for Congress...but just for fun, let's cite some sources: In March 2013, John McCain called Cruz (among others) "wacko birds" whose beliefs are not "reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans". During the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, John Boehner described Cruz as "Lucifer in the flesh". In an interview, Lindsey Graham said, "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you." On March 14, 2013, he gave the keynote speech at CPAC, and even with the benefit of his headline speech, he tied for 7th place in that year's CPAC straw poll, winning just 4% of the votes cast. Conservative media outlet The Hill's co-founder Rick Wilson said “We all know Ted Cruz is sort of a political force of nature. He is what he is. You either hate him or you hate him,”

[@ElectricalInsanity]

HP used to be a serious high-tech company. This was only alluded to in the video, but they sold some extremely expensive and specialized equipment for the RF (think satellite or cellphone communication) market. I'm still referencing some of their application notes today! It's the major pivot away from this core business to consumer computers that really lead to the decline of the company IMO.

[@Big_Tex]

HP was like Motorola - in the right fields at the perfect time yet finding a way to underperform and disintegrate into a shell of its former self.

[@stevens1041]

Motorola is sad. Wish they were still an American company, they completely blew it. May as well add Nokia in here too.

[@StephenCastleberry]

When I went to college (2005), HP was such a great brand it was the only company I considered buying my first laptop from. Now, I literally didn’t know they still existed.

[@everest4760]

Well, HP is the second laptop brand by market share in the past few years and this moment.

[@Shauma_llama]

Funny you should say that, I wonder from time to time if they're still around as well.

[@DaddyBeanDaddyBean]

I worked at EDS when it was acquired by HP. In the transition to HP's payroll system, a buddy's job code was translated incorrectly, inadvertently demoting him a level; this put his pay well over the maximum for the incorrect job code. Rather than just fix it, he was forced to take a 30% pay cut. It took them almost a year to correct a simple clerical error and "promote" him to the HP job code he should have been in anyway... and then despite repeated promises, they refused to reinstate his pay, even just going forward let alone retroactively. He immediately gave notice, and immediately landed a better job, closer to home, with more responsibility, making 20% more than he was making BEFORE the clerical error pay cut.

[@andyscott7186]

Pay cuts were really common when HP took over EDS, give less money but give more responsibility seemed to be their business plan back then.

[@Inkling777]

HP illustrates a military adage about too much change: "Order, counter-order, disorder." As one of the founders had noted, one of the strengths of the company had been focus. That was lost with this changing leadership, acquisitions and separations.

[@MistaMaddog247]

My biggest beef with HP, aside from their disposable printers that require expensive ink carts, was definitely the Compaq buy out. When I worked as a server administrator from 2000 to 2002, we had Compaq servers and had great service from them. But once the "New HP" took over, the quality of their tech support became so abysmal that our company switched contracts and bought servers from IBM instead. But we still had the old Compaq servers running NT 4.0 that still had to be serviced and I had many infuriating phones calls with HP. So yeah, HP went downhill since Carly Fiona came along and since then had started a trend of CEO's that purposely bankrupt companies to get severance checks...

[@adriaanstolk4487]

“Welcome to Compaq, part of the new HP” haha I just remembered hearing that when I called Compaq

[@brianleeper5737]

They did a nice job on EDS....

[@billspangler2685]

Without watching the video first, this is when I first recognized them as a company in decline. My First new in the box PC I saved for as a kid was an HP, and soon after they absorbed Compaq. Seeing their products drop in quality and increase in price after that was kind of painful as a fanboy. I'm really surprised it took as long as it did for them to get where they are now.

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

I was a system/network admin back then. I saw just the opposite. Compaq servers were crap by then, and their support even worse so I proceeded to buy some HP servers (actual HP, before Compaq) which were much better. But what happened after they got Compaq? Instead of keeping their products, they ditched them and relabeled the Compaq junk.

[@nine7295]

Compaq service was good because they bought out Digital and DEC's service division was very good. I was there at DEC and went through the merger, luckily I left before the next merger with HP.

[@alexthesniper1952]

Carly Fironia was the downfall of HP she tried to sell the only thing HP was good for and that was printers.

[@ianthomasdooley859]

Bill Hewlett knew she was going to be the death of the company.

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

Actually she tried to trade of the name and reputation by destroying it in the process with inferior products. Just another quick-buck artist with no long term vision. It was all downhill from there.

[@barryf5479]

Oh. Don't forget Carly's "Gwen Stefani" relabeled product that never sold.

[@dharmachandra9131]

Carly Fiorina also ran Lucent Technologies into the ground because of misleading business deals.

[@MrTweetyhack]

Bet she made a bunch of money though

[@waterbourne9282]

Yep, I worked for Lucent on a 6 month contract on a CDMA deployment. In that time the share price dropped by 50% to USD12, after it had been up around USD90, and after I left the staff numbers were massacred,

[@paulfri1569]

@@MrTweetyhack lol

[@Call-me-James]

Back in the 1970s, I worked on different kinds of HP equipment, and I came to realize that the engineering design of the equipment was simply amazing. There must have been some really, really good engineers at HP. Steve Wozniak - who went on to be co-founder of Apple - was an amazing engineer, and there were probably a lot of other people like Steve at HP. In those days, the leaders of HP - William Hewlett and David Packard - were engineers. The downfall of HP was caused by the fact that the leaders who followed Hewlett and Packard were not great engineers. Today, companies like Google and Tesla are led by top-notch engineers, and it is extremely unlikely that a company can do first-rate engineering without having first-rate engineers running it. When you put salesmen or "managers" at the top of a company, these people just don't understand what it takes to do first-class engineering.

[@steveweinstein3222]

The curse of the business world are business school types who believe that their "management skill set" is more important than nuts-and-bolts knowledge of what they're running. When I worked in book publishing, the company brought in a young hot-shot to run our division. His experience had been running a shoe manufacturer.

[@pauliedweasel]

Well said Jim, I stared with HP at their Fullerton office in January of 1973 as a nineteen year old trainee technician repairing the HP-35 calculator and you are correct, as soon as Bill and Dave left the long slow decline of the company began in earnest. It was said to watch but I worked with a lot of great people over the years and learned a lot which helped me with my next job as a telecom tech for the AT&SF Railway after I left HP in April of 1995.

[@aretard7995]

you tripped at the finish line...

[@MajiggerRose]

My dad owns a fairly small, but successful and lucrative business. I'm almost 30 and I've known most of his employees since I was a little kid--some were there even before I was born. Even the ones no longer with him had to leave due to outside factors or are still family friends we see regularly. It's because he respects them, gives them benefits, livable wage, raises, opportunities to advance, paid time off, sick leave, maternity AND paternity leave, and he provides a good work environment overall. What he pays them is still livable, but I know many of his employees could get higher paying jobs rom larger companies if they wanted to. They just don't, because they like working for him and know there are opportunities to advance. The importance of having loyal, happy employees cannot be understated. Honestly, I can't imagine how ridiculously successful Amazon would be in a five years if they treated their employees better. It might cost a bit of extra money at first, but once they found the perfect balance, I strongly believe that they'd be even more powerful than they are now. Which might be a good thing, but that's just my opinion. They're doing just fine as it is with their high turnover rate.

[@rahb1]

The high turnover rate is costing them money. I cannot believe that Bezos doesn't see that!

[@gregmark1688]

I did phone support for HP's Pavilion line when they were new, and I can tell you exactly what happened to HP. Their shareholders made the rather stupid decision to take decades of hard-earned goodwill (among the best in the world) and trade it for a quick hit of cash profits, to be share, ofc, among the shareholders. I cannot tell you how many engineers and scientists I talked to who told me they bought a Pavilion because there was literally no brand of technical equipment they trusted more. And after owning a Pavilion, they were all pretty convinced they would never buy another product bearing the HP logo. That's what happened to HP -- the shareholders looted it for every penny they could get their grimy hands on.

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

Yep! Blame Fiorina for the destruction of the company's reputation. I swore off HP shortly after she took over.

[@kristensorensen2219]

Sad waste!

[@barryf5479]

Your appraisal of what used to be HP vs. what it is now is very correct.

[@aroraakshaj70]

Very true

[@bobblacka918]

Well said. You absolutely nailed it. Trading reputation for quick cash.

[@iancalandro8180]

I have not only been a customer of HP, but I also worked in sales for them. I didn't work for HP itself, but I worked for a retailer who sold their products, those being laptops, desktops, monitors, but mostly printers. My experiences with that company hasn't given me the best view of them. Their laptops aren't great. They probably have the worst customer service out of the big three computer manufacturers, and not only have I heard horror stories from customers I have spoken to in the past, but I have also dealt with that firsthand. I had an employee discount so I bought an HP Pavilion laptop with it for my sister's graduation. The battery died within a year. After a long back and forth I sent it in for repair, and it came back with some damage to either the board or the ram. i don't know which it was, but they messed something up during repair and the laptop was unusable. After another back and forth I sent it in again, and they sent it back with the same problem. Eventually, after another long exchange, I finally got them to give me a replacement. This was a pretty nice Pavilion laptop by the way. For context I have a cheap Dell Inspiron, and after more than four years I haven't had any problems with it. There's not much I can say about their desktops and monitors. You don't really hear much about monitors unless they burst into flames, and I didn't sell many of their desktops. I sold a lot of printers though, and they're... fine. Printers suck in general, but at least these things weren't as bad as Epsons. However, they were overpriced for what you got, the ink was expensive, they weren't the most reliable things, and HP aggressively blocked use of third party ink. Plus they would engage in the tactic of swapping out their printers every six months or so. Why do they do this? Well I figured out why when a customer came into my store to tell me that her HP printer had died (and she hadn't had it for too long) and that she wanted a printer that used the same ink. I looked around, and we had none that used that ink, as the ones that did use it were swapped out a long time ago. To summarize, if your printer dies and you still have a lot of ink for it, you're out of luck. We sold a lot of HP printers at my store, but the only reason was because they were easy to up-sell people on warranties, and they contributed to our ESP and sales margins. I do have a couple HP products. My main printer is an HP LaserJet P1102w. It's a printer from 2010, and the thing still works great. But I've noticed that after this point the quality of their products gets worse. Now that I don't work in sales I don't have to hold anything back, but I don't think I would advise buying their products.

[@ladybugamks]

I had a very similar back and forth with HP Repair department a few years ago. My screen suddenly died and it was covered by warranty so I sent it in and they sent it back with a new screen but with the touch screen turned off.. Sent it back and they fixed that, but then the speakers on top no longer worked.. Sent it in again but it came back the same. Could never get the speakers to work again. I gave up on it and just used my cell phone as my main "computer". I won't buy HP ever again, that's for sure. 😬

[@bloqk16]

@Ian Calandro . . . Ah! I see you were one of the wise ones that went with LaserJet, that while the initial upfront expense was pricy, you saved a bundle of dollars in the long run with staying away from inkjet. I've always been pleased with HP LaserJet printers from the 1990s to about a decade ago; which was the last time I bought a printer. Color laser printers are a big saver over inkjet when using after-market laser carts.

[@balljointfd3s]

Here's another piece of inside baseball I'll divulge, back in 2013 I worked for a massive Heath Insurance company with the initials KP. We used Dell PC products at the time and had a catastrophic failure rate of 1.8% over three years. HP came to us and wanted us to be exclusive partners for PC's. We agreed on a tentative deal that we would partner with HP if the catastrophic failure rate was 0.1% or less over a three year trial, if they met that goal then all of KP would switch to HP PC's. The failure rate wasn't 0.1%, it was 0.03%! Now this is for Enterprise grade PC's, but no one is better then HP to this day and we tried Lenovo's as a test and they failed bad.

[@billamos5125]

I worked for HP from the mid 90s to 2008, so I got the tail end of the Bill and Dave era and saw its decline first-hand. Suddenly it wasn't about quality or innovation, as the Company Man says, but about market share and shareholder value. They started using laserjet engines manufactured by Canon, they released firmware and software before it had been thoroughly tested, etc. etc. Then with Carly the purges - ahem, layoffs - began and we employees couldn't be sure one year to the next if we'd still have a job in a year, when the layoffs happened like clockwork. We lost a lot of really great, competent engineers. In other words, HP went from being something truly special to just another average corporate entity selling mediocre products. When I was laid off in 2008 I never looked back. In fact, the company I work for now (where I went right after HP) has reaped the benefit of HP's decline by hiring lots of "HP refugees" like myself.

[@pauliedweasel]

Bill, I spent 22 years there and towards the end of my career at HP we had a saying among the group I worked with that related to your current feeling about the company, we called it the ‘Coefficient of HPness’ and either your Coefficient of HPness was ‘Up’ or it was ‘Down’! 😉

[@rahb1]

HP LaserJets from 1984 onwards (except for the very large commercial printers) ALL used Canon engines as they were the easiest mechanisms for users and had the best quality. The advantage HP had was they built the formatter boards with HP PCL as the language. Canon also sold laser printers, but in much smaller quantities as they were not very compatible .

[@jessicas253]

I've been working for hp right around the time the split happened and - oh boy - I totally agree with your list. I've only been working there for about 5 years but all the old employees already complained and were reminiscing about the "good old days" when they still received benefits like team-building trips or small stuff like free sandwiches for breakfast every Friday. At first, I liked working there as the pay was great and I still had a lot more benefits than the average worker in my country. But then they started to spread rumors about possible job cuts and everyone started to get scared. My manager even told us that half of our team had to be fired by the end of the year so some people that had been there for over 10 or 20 years left, using the bonus they offered. Turns out that there weren't any job cuts for our department. It was only the manager that got a bonus for cost reduction by getting people to leave. After this point, I knew I had to leave. All trust was gone and people were only hating on each other. So yeah, the way they treated their people was bad. Even the stupid rating system they had: At the end of every year the managers had to rate their people based on how they performed. The rating went from -- to ++. You only received a bonus if you achieved an average (which would be 0) or higher (+ or ++). The problem was that the manager was forced to rate at least one of his people with -. Didn't matter if everybody worked their asses off. Another weird thing was the "headcount". A manager had a certain number of "headcounts" for his department, which equals the workforce to employ. So far so good. But if an employee went on maternal leave (which can be up to 2 years in my country) that person would still fall into the headcount for this department. That way the manager wasn't allowed to hire a replacement for that person as all headcounts were still fully assigned. So the rest of the people had to do the work of that missing person. But the point that stood out to me very quickly was the lack of innovation. I worked there when tablets became a big thing. Apple was ruling the market with its iPad and Asian companies were slowly joining in with their more affordable options. Also, smartphones were super important already. That's when hp decided to bring out their own "smartphone" which was essentially a bad copy of the blackberry of that time. I got one for free. Trust me it was crap. Shortly after they released their own tablet and oh my that thing was even worse. We had a big release event at our facility and the first time I was able to touch it, I was in shock. It was small, slow, and had a bad screen. This was supposed to be the "next big thing"? I honestly believe that missing that mobile device train was one of their biggest downfalls. Of course, I also heard of some of the scandals. I started when Mark Hurd got fired and stayed until Meg Whitman took over. It was a mess. In the end, hp made me sick. Literally. I suffered from a massive burnout after doing after-hours on weekends just because they weren't willing to hire more people and because my manager put even more work on me although I asked for help for about a year. It was tough but I was able to define my boundaries after this experience. So I guess something good came out of it. But it's still sad to see how much potential this company had and they threw it out the window...

[@adambreitenbach7936]

Speaking from the Enterprise side - I am a systems admin, and for my whole career, I have used Dell Poweredge servers. Lived by them - loved them - and trained my staff on their iLO features……… ………Until I assisted a client last year who already had some new HP ProLiant blades. And my life changed forever. Their HPE (HP Enterprise) brand is nearly flawless in my mind. Physical design is immaculate, iLO features are robust and comprehensive, and support experience was incredible. I’ll be definitely switching to HPE for future purchases.

[@DeWittPotts]

If you look at it, HP has pretty much followed the same direction as other computer companies including IBM with the same results for the most part. They focus on the bottom line and lose sight of what the company was founded on.

[@xkiroxX]

we got a great price on an HP laptop back on black friday 2020. stupid thing just randomly killed off last month. never buying an HP product again no matter how good the price is

[@9852323]

Not very old either..

[@dylanc2806]

same happened with an hp chromebook

[@jacklindsey8400]

I've had 2 HP Laptops, first lasted 3 years, second 2, started buying Lenovo and haven't looked back (Granted that one is still around *knocks on wood* 5 years and counting)

[@jeffwield5286]

Dave Packard posed the thought provoking question, "Does a corporation exist to make money or does it make money to exist?" His answer to that was the latter which was as counter to conventional thought then as it is today. His reason for making a profit was to enable the company to innovate so that the company could contribute to society, the community, their customers, and their employees. Shareholders could come along for the ride if they so chose. If a product idea did not innovate, it was scrapped. Once the company was turned over from the founding engineers to the board appointed accountants, quarter by quarter profits were the goal. We all knew that was not sustainable. I started at HP in 1980 and was on the design team of the first color inkject printer, the first All-in-One printer and the first large format inkject printer. Didn't see much in the way of "firsts" after that. I did live though layoff after layoff until I retired in 2015.

[@bloqk16]

Interesting to read about your recollection of Dave Packard. I lived in Silicon Valley back then, where Packard was a most revered person to be found in the region. Also interesting about you being a pioneer in the inkjet technology with HP. I recall in the latter 1980s that I bought the first generation b&w inkjet printer by HP; as I was loathed to get a dot-matrix printer. That printer cost nearly $800, which was in 1980s dollars; and I was very impressed for its longevity; especially so being adaptable from DOS to Windows OS. I can't recall the price of ink cartridges, but they seemed reasonably priced and lasted a long time; and didn't dry out. I'm stunned at the price drop of inkjet printers since then. But it is also jaw-dropping how expensive the ink cartridges are, too. A decade ago I spent the additional dollars for HP laser printers, both b&w and color, and have saved considerable $ by not having to buy ink carts.

[@duskrider1724]

HP is great! I work on a large contract that uses all HP workstations and I'm getting lots of experience replacing hard drives, fans, motherboards and constantly reimagining (tho that last one is more of an operating system issue).

[@rahb1]

Funny that! If Microsoft ever made a product which didn't suck, it would be a vacuum cleaner. I worked for HP for 10 years from 1986, and it inculcated MS-DOS and Widows in me. Later a co-worker told me about his new Mac and I tried one. Instant convert! Also Linux as a free, and much more stable and secure alternative, to Windows. I use both Macs, and Linux on PC hardware, to this day.

[@_Abjuranax_]

The reason why the company was called HP instead of PH was because they literally flipped a coin, and Hewlett won the toss.

[@xlevix10]

HP Instant Ink and REQUIRING the HP Smart app to setup printers (terrible for businesses) are the two dumbest things they've done recently that really turned me off of HP.

[@Copperlax]

This! Within a year of buying my newest printer they changed it so I had to use the HP Smart App to use the hardware. I was lucky that I still had the original installer so I bypass the app, but that was just chance. I still can't believe they think I want to be required to use their cloud service just to print something on a printer I paid for on my own LAN. I've owned HP's of some sort for decades and that was what ended it for me. Edit: Typo

[@pilottruck1288]

Dude, I hate the smart app too! You know what those smart app printers say as an error when you use them as USB printers? "If there is no connection to the internet, the printer cannot print." I get this error AFTER setting up for USB printing. Thankfully my workplace will be rid of them soon.

[@xlevix10]

@@Copperlax it's super frustrating too because I work in IT and almost exclusively quoted and sold HP printers. Discovering you need the HP Smart app to do the setup while on a client site was a huge blindside and I've made sure we never quote HP printers again moving forward. And to be honest, we're Dell Premier partners, so all of our servers and computers have been Dell, so we have no reason to do business with HP anymore. It's insane they haven't realized how awful of an idea both of those things are.

[@mitchellhorton9382]

@@Copperlax Get Brother printers

[@mjc0961]

My workplace has loads of HP printers and I'm constantly having to check my recently installed apps list to make sure HP Smart hasn't reinstalled itself. I didn't ask for this garbage to be on my computer, stop sneaking it on there behind my back!

[@MykePagan]

Former HP employee. I started in the “old” HP and left during the Meg era. I left when the majority of engineering managers independently confided in me that there was no way they were going to meet any product development promises because 30% of their staff had quit. IMO the worst CEO was Hurd.

[@barryf5479]

It's a tossup between Fiorina and Hurd. Carly divided and conquered the culture of HP that was once devoted to a quality product. Hurd was an evil SOB that didn't care AT ALL about HP employees. He was fired for screwing around with a "consultant" in Spain and fudging his expense account doing it (he was married). The guy made tens of millions and he was charging HP for his expenses with his concubine. A real piece of work.

[@stevenking9357]

As a 20 year veteran, I agree Hurd was the worst. He completely devastated HP labs where all the innovation came from. Hurd is DEAD now so karma is a real thing.

[@davemurphy9468]

@@barryf5479 I thought his relationship with the 'consultant' was closer to a pimp. I was originally at EDS and remember the first email we got when we 'joined' HP was one that told us we made too money and he wanted to give us a 20% pay cut.

[@MykePagan]

@@stevenking9357 I agree. Hurd enriched himself by having the board of directors (which he controlled) write his compensation to be totally based on cost cutting, which is easy to accomplish if you have no intention of having a future for the company. His first year probably coeaned things up and eliminated waste. Then for 3 more years he cut muscle, bone, and eventually vital organs out of HP. But he didn’t care because it netted him tens of millions of dollars in “dynastic compensation.” Meaning he made SO much money that neither he nor his descendants would ever have to work again. And HP became a pure commodity provider, which is not a way for a tech company to survive.

[@MykePagan]

@@davemurphy9468 the improper relationship was an excuse. There was a struggle within the board of directors and Hurd’s allies lost. The new regime wanted him out, but it was too late for HP. The company was beyond help, permanently crippled.

[@offperception]

I worked for HP as a fresh graduate back in 2007 to 2008 in the HP Software division (it wasn't called that name yet at the time, but soon would be). As a new employee I was trained in the software they acquired from the then bankrupt (amidst their own scandals) Peregrine Software. But when I was sent into the field as it were, I was given all sorts of odd jobs except what I was trained for. Then the economic crisis hit the world and the project I was on downsized so much that I spent the next few months "on the bench" and my uncaring manager told me to "train myself". It wasn't until HP purchased EDS where I was also let go as part of a "last in, first out" kind of thing. Funnily enough, the best and most valuable time I had was in the last month where I was actually allowed to work with the software I was trained for. This particular division was also split off and became what is called Microfocus today.

[@MihaiD259]

I worked at HP between 2009 and 2013 and the one leader that was a total mess was Leo Apotheker, what a total shotshow, he announced that HP will sell the laptop division then he retracted it, they wanted to get on the tablet craze and they changed their mind so on and so forth, all in all shares dropped a lot under his 10 month leadership HP lost a lot and he got out with a 20 million bonus. It is incredible that someone would perform so badly and still get such a huge bonus.

[@machupikachu1085]

Agreed. This happens all the time in the corporate word. 20 million for doing a lousy job for less than a year. It's repulsive.

[@rahb1]

@@machupikachu1085 Weird; if I do a lousy job I get fired!

[@rahb1]

On the plus side, HP had a big, successful software business, which he championed, although he should *never* have bought Autonomy. But all the great software, including HP OpenView, was later sold to MicroFocus for a song, and they simply don't have the reach of HP.

[@marcosmercado5648]

I also worked at HP on those years and I agree with you. Leo Apotheker and the board of directors were a joke on those years. Also HP have burned too much money acquiring other companies like Palm, Autonomy, EDS, etc. to later doing not too much with them.

[@CorporateSycophant]

I remember back in '03, I got my first HP Desktop after having upgraded from my Gateway Essential. It had WinXP Home, 256 MB DDR RAM, 64 MB shared video memory, and a 64 GB HDD. The thing I remember most about it was the case. It had the coolest looking power button. It was a giant, semi-transparent button that glowed blue when you powered the machine on. The case itself was silver and black. I loved that thing. So much Diablo 2, so much RuneScape.

[@samwill7259]

Well HP declines when you take damage. You just need to take a health potion or a short rest to recover your HP to normal. (:

[@bloqk16]

I lived in Silicon Valley in the 20th century, since moved, and I'm very familiar about HP, as well as an uncle that worked for HP up until the 1980s, where HP could almost be divided into two eras: 1. The era prior to PCs prior to the 1980s; which was on an industrial footing & scientific equipment with few consumer products. 2. The era of the PCs in the 1980s where HP made its name with consumer products. For people living in the Silicon Valley region of California from the 1950s through the '80s, getting a job at HP was highly coveted, as Company Man explained about some of the benefits they had. My uncle was fortunate to gotten hired there; and he informed me of his impressions of the company. But prior to his hire at HP . . . My uncle had a previous attitude of always wanting to run his own business and never wanting to work for someone else; well, after several business failures and in his 50s in age, was hired at HP in the late 1960s as a sheet metal fabricator. To hear him tell it, he no longer had the adversarial attitude of working for an employer; but instead, had nothing but positive raves about HP, it was like employment heaven for him. He strongly encouraged me to apply for work at HP, which I did in the mid-1970s; but alas, at the time I lacked the skill-sets and work experiences to be a hiring candidate at HP. Some of the employment highlights he positively raved about . . . He told me that HP had a _no layoff policy;_ that when a department had to be downsized, the employees would be sent to other divisions within HP that needed positions to be filled. With HP being a Silicon Valley company, it meant the impact of employee relocations were nil. It also gave the employees a reassuring sense of job security. Sick leave could be accrued indefinitely; never forfeited; and cashed-in upon retirement. In my uncle's case, he had over 90 days of sick leave that was paid out to him in full upon his retirement. That's over three months salary paid-out on top of his retirement pension from HP. All other companies I'm familiar with would never allow the accrual of sick leave from one year to the next. When it came to the employee breaks for the mornings and afternoons, food/beverage catering carts were brought into areas of the buildings for employees to enjoy snacks, beverages, fresh fruits, and pastries during those break periods. That I can attest to firsthand as I worked as a temporary contract staffer at HP in 1983 and enjoyed that benefit. All the above was back in an era when HP had few consumer products, with the bulk of their electronics being for industrial, scientific; or governmental sub-contracted work. There was never a critical word from the local media press about HP up to the 1980s. But, it seemed coincidental that when HP got heavily into the PC market and consumer goods, that critical whispers about the running of HP leaked out. And as Company Man explained, HP had many issues to contend with when Bill Hewlett and David Packard were out of the picture. I was acquainted with some people that worked with and were friends with Bill Hewlett and David Packard; where to hear it from those individuals, both Hewlett and Packard were low-keyed unassuming guys that lived in upscale homes that were unassuming; and NOT the ostentatious dwellings seen among the newer generations of high-tech leaders. Packard's house in Los Altos Hills, what was known as the Taaffe House, was a large scale California ranch style home in the middle of an apricot orchard. I was part of a civil engineering (CE) surveying crew that did work in the area in the early 1990s, and was most impressed with the modesty of the home and those well-manicured apricot trees; they were the best looking fruit-bearing trees I've ever seen. But then, when you have a multi-billion dollar wealth as Packard had, he could get the best arborists to care for those trees. The harvested apricots from those trees he shared with others; Packard would bring some to meetings he had with the CE planners for all to snack on in the early 1990s. Those meetings were for the viability to turn the Taaffe House into the HQ for the Packard Foundation after David's passing.

[@grbloopers]

I worked in government owned biggest company in Greece, R&D dept in electronics. We already had o lot of HP and Tektronix lab instruments, but we wanted a logic analyzer and a digital scope. So we visited HP hq in Greece to discuss it. Remember those middle 80s huge color page HP CATALOG books with hard covers, listing the edge of technology in lab measurements and instrumentation, including microwave semiconductors and modules? Well, forget them... They sell crap printers now. And they force users to buy unreasonably expensive replacements. I miss the good old HP.

[@jamesrusselleriii8284]

My sister worked at Compaq at their Houston campus in the late '90s and early '00s. The merger sent morale plummeting into the ground and everyone was left wondering when the other shoe would drop. The sense was that HP "conquered" Compaq and Carly Fiorina's visit in 2002 was really more of a victory lap - they had scrubbed practically all of the Compaq signage for that visit while the CEOs toured the campus in a golf cart. Ironically that merger did little to help HP's market share, they were beaten by Dell by the end of the decade.

[@tqc26z6]

In the 80’s, as a student in electronics, HP was my dream company. I bought an HP 41C calculator that still functions to this day. All their lab equipments were the best that could be found ( together with Tektronix and Fluke). Their PCs were built like tanks, and reliable. When I think about HP, back in those years, the word RELIABILITY is what comes to my mind.

[@raym909]

me too

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

We used to say HP meant "high price" but people still preferred their products then because they were superior and worth the premium prices.

[@crapphone7744]

Fluke! Yeah baby! Ask me about my 30-year-old multimeter that still runs like new.

[@tqc26z6]

@@crapphone7744 same for me, my Fluke multimeter is a workhorse.

[@jimmyc3238]

HP was once a leader in making analytical laboratory instrumentation. The HP 5890 gas chromatograph was, and still is, a lab standard. Ever seen "My Cousin Vinnie"? HP spun off that part of their business as "Agilent". As a retired chemist, I would find that story fascinating.

[@InssiAjaton]

Right! But it did not stop there. The semiconductors (leds, optocouplers and microwave) were further spun off. And so were the electronic instruments that had started the whole business. Keysigth is now the carrier of that torch. I guess I am responsible from my tiny part about the Compaq deal, as I voted FOR it with my few shares. On the other hand, I still have the results of the various splits in my IRA and presently they are all on a little positive territory. The semiconductor business excluded as it was apparently sold early on (by Agilent?) completely separated from the family. As to my early connections with HP, I had access at my first long time employer to an HP 5245 counter and a DVM plugin for it. My first personal HP item was the famous 35 pocket calculator. And a treasure of lasting value is in my book shelf -- a dozen or so of HP catalogs, up to the last one they published. They have been very handy as I have collected various flea market treasures, also called vintage instruments.

[@JerryDurante]

I was in IT for a while. HP used to make good hardware and lousy drivers. They have upgraded to making lousy hardware too. I side hustle by fixing PC's and laptops and wont work on HP products. In my opinion what is killing HP is the untenable desire of our stock market to punish companies for not growing each and every quarter. Sustainable profits are no longer enough companies have to grow every quarter or the stock market punish them. I'm seeing that with several companies. Corporations no longer care about the long term the only thing that matters is short term greed.

[@kevinmach730]

25 years in IT, their drivers are among the worst and getting worse.

[@Treblaine]

Idiots: "why is this 40 year old company not growing at the same rate as this other company founded only 4 years ago!"

[@stevens1041]

I remember one of my professors at University once dropped an idea that perhaps, it might make more sense to do two financial reports per year, rather than the current four quarterly reports the accounting world relies on (and that the law requires for listed companies). The reason being, exactly as you said, having four quarterly financial reports takes away from any long term focus and forces management to really pull rabbits out of the hat nonstop to keep profit going higher and higher. It seemed like a revolutionary idea. I thought surely I will hear about this concept again. Well, 20 years later and no one ever mentioned this concept to me again but it stuck with me.

[@lornetc]

What happens with nearly every company. When the original founders leave and they take the company public, the new board decides that profit > everything else so they maximize shareholder profits to the longterm detriment of the company. This leads to the company HAVING to vertically integrate because the CEO and board have to *enforce* changes rather than having a leadership team that decides on what direction to take the company based on what will be best for the long term.

[@JasonAdank]

I worked at the Corvallis OR campus from the mid 90s to the early 00's and I remember my experience there very clearly. To sum it up simply, HP's demise started in the 90's when the company transitioned from being an engineering innovation company to a commodities (ink selling) company. The culture also became corrupt during this time - lots of unqualified people getting into positions they had no business being in. Ass kissing, poltick'ing, alliance forming, favoritism, and nepotism really gained a foothold in the company culture. Meritocracy was thrown out the window. Rejects in the manufacturing departments who should have been fired were instead moved into positions in R&D. Promotions were all about who you knew, and who liked you. IN terms of your actual job, you just needed to 'barely' perform. Everything was about the politics. I remember how much 'virtue signaling' I used to see there. This was long before that term even existed. People talking the talk about The HP Way, but at every opportunity did things completely opposed to that former culture. Its like you were surrounded by fakes who were posing. Imposters and fraudsters were all over the place. But they all knew 'the talk' - ie how to say all the right things to 'seem' like they were competent. The cultural corruption went into overdrive when Carly Fiorina was brought on board as the new CEO in 2000. And around this time is when HP decided to spin off the T&M division (Agilent), acquire Compaq, thinking it was a good idea to try and compete directly with Dell in the consumer PC space. T&M was literally the foundation of where HP's innovations all came from. Inkjet tech came from T&M. But no more of that. The well was drying up as far ask ink sales were going, and with Fiorina's ouster came one failed non-engineer CEO after another. Blunder after blunder of acquisitions (if you cant innovate, just buy it!) because you had a bunch of MBA's who didnt know phuck all about engineering spending billions on failed 'business' strategies. I left the company in 2002. At the time, I was a bit sad about it. Looking back on it now, damn Im so glad I left. Then you had the scandals around 2006 like the pretexting scandal. This was the first public display of the culture of corruption within the company. I wasnt at all surprised based on my time there, and I was a low level employee. I knew all the crazy corruption I was seeing at low levels and mid levels in the management that it was only a matter of time before something like that would happen. Bill Hewlett and Dav Packard would be spinning in their graves to see what their once wonderful and amazing company had devolved into. Its really sad actually. Every once in a while I look up some of the scumbags I knew when I worked there. Amazingly, many of them to this day still work there. God knows how much ass kissing incompetent backstabbing theyve done to hold on to their jobs for this long. Its like a ponzi scheme of parasaites and leeches sucking the company dry before the host dies. But knowing that people like them are still there explains everything about HP's implosion. The cultural rot is all thats left. And this same culture of corruption goes all the way to the top. All the top talent that I remember either left on their own accord, or were being ousted as perceived threats to some incompetent but connected manager or coworker. Oh well. Such a crazy fall from their heydays in the 80's. Am I sad to see them go? No. Long overdue imo. But I am saddened by whats been done to Bill and Dave's legacy. They truly were innovators of a time long since passed. RIP

[@IsmaelWensder]

Cool! Reading your comment made me understand something... Back in the last decade hp brought a phone company, their employees were working hard to compete against android, and they done some innovation, but hp didn't wanted to spend the money to make nicer phones, soon later hp drop everything saying they're focusing on software from now on. I mean, wtf?

[@Marty1776.]

A good one would be “the decline/what happened to Packard Bell?” They were a big seller of PCs in the late 80s till the late 90s. I remember them being big as a kid and would always confuse them and HP.

[@someguy2135]

They were popular because they were so cheap. You got a lot for your money in terms of specs.

[@briandavis6898]

I had a Packard Bell. Was a really good PC at the time back in the day

[@LouisSubearth]

Packard Bell was bought by Acer and supposedly spun off back into their own company.

[@jb888888888]

Worth noting that the Packard Bell of the 1940s and the Packard Bell of the 1980s-90s were two different companies in all but their name -- literally. 1990s PB bought the name from the corporate conglomerate which owned the original company (Teledyne) just so they could have a name brand to go with their computers.

[@dr.elvis.h.christ]

@@briandavis6898 I worked for a dealer then that sold a lot of Packard Bell. ISTRt hey were OEM products from someone else with the name pasted on them.

[@dane1382]

It seems like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises is the real successor to the parent company and HP is just a reincarnation of compaq.

[@thegeforce6625]

Sounds like it.

[@Benni777]

HP isn’t all that good. I bought a computer for college 3 years ago, and one of the keyboard letter popped off, and my HP printer just stopped working altogether. A computer and printer shouldn’t just stop working within three years! That’s insane to me🤷🏻‍♀️

[@snikrepak]

Hmm I have computers and equipment from over 12 years ago, still works. Could be just you .

[@kenwallace6493]

I spent half a career at IBM. It has a similar history. Wall Street CEOs took over in the age of financialization. Innovation tanked and shareholder return was first priority. Now they are just zombies with no clear mission or product yet executive compensation is greater than ever. It's one sorry tale.

[@pokerpig9069]

15 year career with hp from 85 until 2000. I kept up with what was happening inside my beloved company for several years after and was saddened to watch it decline. Bill and Dave never would have let all that happen. I never worked for another company after hp as an employee. Nobody came close to the “hp way”. Sometimes I wish a bunch of us 80’s and 90’s middle managers would march into the board room and take over now to get it back to how we know Bill and Dave wanted things run.

[@cheesemonger6378]

Bought an HP for school last year, never again. They have automated shipping time estimates that are meaningless, every order gets the same time because its just a standard wait they apply to everyone. Their laptops are ok at best and you will find something much cheaper without having to wait months with no communication.

[@blockstacker5614]

when I got mine two years ago it showed up as "waiting for parts" for months, I blame the chip shortage.

[@pertang630]

I was working for Compaq at the time of the HP acquisition. It really didn't work, the 2 cultures were so different and they ended up keeping 2 teams doing the same thing, chasing the same clients. It didn't go well.

[@ajt2906]

I'm watching this on an HP. It is a mediocre computer, but I've had it for 2 years and I haven't had durability issues.

[@luodeligesi7238]

My college HP laptop still runs after 12 years - super outdated specs, but still runs.

[@tannhauserr]

Ironically, Newer HP models will break in half a year

[@power-max]

@@luodeligesi7238 I got a Compaq Presario C700 on Christmas of '06 or thereabouts, it still runs! I've since upgraded the CPU, RAM, and storage from a Pentium T2310 to a Core 2 duo T7800, from 1GB to 5GB of RAM, and a 120GB SSD. It can still keep up with web browsing for the most part! Battery lasts about 30 minutes and I don't think it was much better new haha

[@basketofbuckets]

@@power-max why would you spend money upgrading it?

[@luodeligesi7238]

@@power-max nice! I think mine is HP Pavilion dv6000. Hard drive failed, so swapped with 128GB SSD, and swapped out battery to a third party model that gives it a good four hours of battery life (it’s a big one, so it also raises the laptop a bit from the back and helps with airflow)

[@kamra99a]

There was a time in the 1970s when many people (like me, for example) when considering the purchase of ANY kind of product, if made by HP, would buy that one. No other brands would even be considered. I knew I would be buying the best if I got the HP version of whatever it was. Then there was an abrupt change. They went from making the very best of everything to making crap that I wouldn't want to buy at any price. I have no idea what the current product quality is, as I haven't bought anything with the HP label on it in the past 20 years, and very likely won't ever again.

[@mikeconnor7273]

I worked for HP for 28 years, until 2005. My opinion of why HP declined is that the board of directors and upper management changed the measure of success from long term to short term. ie, rewards were based on the results of the current, or recent, quarter. As a result, long term planning, investment, and results suffered. Many (most?) of the reasons reasons listed in the video, and elsewhere, are consequences of this change.

[@jimboha]

I worked for HP as an engineer for just shy of 24 years in printers and scanners. I'd agree with everything you've said, but I'd add quality issues, and the "quick buck" mentality. My least favorite CEOs? Fiorina, Hurd, and Apotheker. When they laid me off (on my birthday, no less!), they did give me a rather large severance payout and I ended up in a better job with a 25% pay raise. So it's hard to be bitter about it. My friends still there (HP Inc.) tell me that things seem be actually getting better for employees.

[@wall-e3313]

I worked for 3Com Corporation between '98 and '02 until about 50% of the IT department got the sack, including me. They eventually became a 'tiny little division' of HP. I can tell you my favourite HP product was the LaserJet II printer. It was one of several still in operation at the place I worked before and had about 600,000 pages on it when I left. I had a stockpile of spare parts an figured out that all you needed to fix a worn feed roller was a thick rubber band and some Crazy Glue. Parts were not easy to get if you werent an authorized HP dealer.

[@ianp711]

You didn't mention how their PC products in the mid to late 90's started to become overcomplicated awful plasticy PoS. I worked in IT since the early 90's in network/server/desktop and I liked Compaq equipment, but HP oh gawd no. Pain in the behind to work with their hardware especially their laptops. So much tech/user employee downtime related to their products. Pre Y2K I moved up the chain and ran the IT dept for a 50k+ user company and I specifically had us move from any HP's to Compaq/Dell/IBM(thinkpad/laptops). Post Y2K I didn't want a single HP PC/laptop product within my sight, anything in inventory was to be donated. I knew other peers in the industry in similar positions, and they did the same thing. We lost faith in their PC products which were going further down in quality/workmanship/ease-to-work/fix fast. I can't emphasize enough how much I hated HP products in the late 90's. Compaq did have "some" good stuff tho .. and then the merge and their PC products became awful too. IMO you missed this major fact here, Enterprise lost faith in all of their product lines outside of case-by-case server & printing solutions. Edit: writing this brought back memories off their ass backwards chassy on their PC's and laptops. Sooo with most other manufacturers if a hard drive goes bad (which happened all too often on HP's due to their excellent choice of bottom of the barrel WD/Seagate drives - we kept a 6ft tower of them in jest) the vast majority of the time you just pop open a backplate on a laptop, or unscrew/pop-open one section of a pc case - and bam the bad drive is there to swap after removing some screws. But not with HP, after you deal with opening the jigsaw puzzle of the outer case you had to unscrew 1 or more sections of the internals to get access to the hard disk which is located within another cradle! Lost count how many times my fingers would get cut up accessing those things. Absolute PoS! They should have copied Compaq which had some great tower/micro desktop designs.

[@johnathin0061892]

HPs were a "delight" to work on, especially the smaller form factor Pavilion desktops. Sometimes even had to remove the heatsink from the CPU just to get to the drives.

[@dylanc2806]

oh that must have been so easy to work on compared to the new ones. gotta take the friggin keyboard apart now to get to the drive

[@modelrailpreservation]

I remember working on a couple old HP Vectras back around 2000 when I started out in IT work (Which I have since gotten out of) and those things refused to boot at all, not even get as far as POST screen, if no floppy drive was attached. They were pretty solid machines besides that, though as they were Pentium I machines they were getting old even then. I lost count of how many times I'd replaced failed hinges on HP laptops though. Metal was very poor. Couple times I saw extensive crystalization of the metal at the break points. My true calling turned out to be repairing and restoring antique model trains, and we call it metal rot, from bad metal mixes in die cast parts. Common on prewar trains, but the cause of metal rot was known by the 1950s, so HP really had no excuse there. Ianp711, you ever work with those old Compaq Deskpro EN types. I called them "Deathpros" because the things were so heavy you give yourself a heart attack carrying them. I think they were built from tank steel. They were not bad machines, they were more upgradable than people tended to think, but God, they were HEAVY. Especially carrying them around an office building and up and down stairs.

[@nine7295]

You ran the department for 50k users and you had to get your hands dirty?

[@ianp711]

@@nine7295 Didn't I mention "Pre Y2K I moved up the chain"...? Oh!! Well yes I did and you you can't read, understand a timeline, and/or are a troll. But yes, even when I eventually hit director level in IT I enjoyed "getting my hands dirty" and still do in spite of now relegating myself as a part time consultant who out of boredom watches too much youtube and plays video games most of day. Hint: Don't ever get into MMO's, it's like crack cocaine for nerds! /s

[@donbritain6476]

I worked for DEC and then Compaq then HP. At a board meeting Carli said "customer service costs too much, we need to get rid of it. She was clueless about what makes customers come back. That's when I decided to leave.

[@MLFranklin]

What happened? I bought an HP41CX calculator in the early '80s. Absolutely loved the calculator and the brand. In 1985 I ran an HP 5793A gas chromatograph. Impressed by the quality and the depth of reliability to support scientific research. I bought my first inkjet in 1991, and once I figured out that paper smoothness mattered a lot, I absolutely loved the printer in the brand. All products had outstanding reliability and were worth at least a 20-35% price premium. Then, starting in the 2000s I started buying printers and had mixed results. I thought I'd just gotten a lemon and was unlucky. Then, after several more printers, I realized that I wasn't just unlucky, I was being stupid. The last straw was when my laser printer would tell my to order more cartridges more often than it would print successfully. It would frequently forget and lose its drivers. Horrible product and networking software. I bought a Brother printer. It has been so awesome. I advise friends and family to not take a risk on HP. The once great company has been cash-cowing the brand rather than growing the quality.

[@mishi6525]

My Pikachu’s HP declined too

[@FunkyDPL]

HP equipment was of the finest quality and reputation all the way through the 70s and 80s. Entering the PC market was the first step in their overall decline. They then became known as purveyors of cheap and cheaply made PCs and printers. Buying Compaq, which was another maker of mediocre PCs, did not help matters. Mark Hurd and Carly Fiorina were terrible CEOs that accelerated the decline and destroyed what morale was left at the company. Meg Whitman was handed a turd and has tried to make the best of it. Splitting off HPE will proved to be a good decision, event if it doesn't produce miracles. The soul of the original company kinda lives on through Agilent, but even they have struggled in the marketplace and that is a shame.

[@InsaneFire10YT]

HP laptops all have this common trend of being loud even when doing nothing. I’ve experienced 4 HPs, ranging from 2012 to 2021 and all of them have had audible fans when doing light or no tasks. My current lenovo on the other hand is silent during normal use, and only becomes audible with heave tasks

[@jamesperry4470]

I think it's because they pack in conponents without proper cooling and they run hot.

[@datachu]

Oh no, that's not an HP thing that's Intel's fault. I work with laptops and desktops a lot, trust me it's not just your HPs An HP Envy with a Ryzen will treat you well in that regard. Sadly the Spectre line which is my favorite is Intel only.

[@jons2614]

@@datachu - You are EXACTLY right! I have a 2020 HP Envy x360 13 with the Ryzen 4500u..........................it is very rare for my fan to even kick in unless I'm doing some solid gaming (like Madden 19 - and yes the onboard vega graphics handles the game just fine). Most of the time it's silent, never gets uncomfortably hot, very reliable and build quality is great with the all aluminum chassis. I use it for business travel and as a second computer in my home studio (I'm a composer and conductor), and I much prefer it over my previous tablet computer (Surface Pro 4). Overall I love my HP Envy, and highly recommend it (just make sure you choose the Ryzen processor, a MUCH better value)!!

[@Xalgucennia]

@@datachu Looking back that very true for me, I used to buy i7 because I thought they were the best but they were always obnoxiously loud, and the and a series even were much more suitable for daily use, I've never even had a ryzen.

[@RK-um9tu]

Wrong. My 2022 HP Spectre x360 is quite as a mouse.

[@iconsoul1753]

The reasons behind HP, are absolutely spot on. I know how it used to feel with the company. Leadership really killed it.

[@henkholdingastate]

HP is so afraid of the shareholders and considers its own bonuses so important that they have decided to go down the road to the abyss. Burn very brightly for a while and then......off

[@IsmaelWensder]

One day they may sell the business for crack, listen what i say lol 😂

[@DubYuhGChoppa]

Bro I've had an HP laptop since 2019 that I genuinely put 5,000+ hours on, 30,000,000+ keystrokes on and the thing was never high speck but it still runs almost like the day I got it for what I need it to do still. These laptops are durable beyond any other brand I've ever had by a long shot.

[@westx68]

I started with Compaq, survived the merger, Carly years and Mark Hurd cost cutting. Left the company about a year before the split and rejoined (HPI) about a year after the split. The strategic focus and employee morale was so much better in the new company. We have also been more profitable since the split. Definitely a great place to work now.

[@MrHeman2025]

This easily can be a solid addition into the "Why They're Hated" series.

[@NopWorks]

Better just make the "Why Printers are Hated" episode at this point. Still wonder why there's no company that want to tackle the printer problem yet.

[@DevSodDribble]

I was a temp. employee at the Andover Hewlett Packard plant in 2010. The second or third week I was there, they called a bunch of people in my little packaging department into a meeting but told me to keep working. The full time employees with benefits came back half an hour later, saying that they were all getting let go in a few weeks. They were being replaced by the temps who got no benefits and $8.00 an hour. Six months later they did the same to us because 'things are slow.'

[@NightDragon2383]

The Compaq merger was definitely the beginning of the end for HP, the quality of all of their desktop and laptop PCs took a nosedive after than, and Compaq already had a reputation for releasing low quality PCs at that point in time too.

[@Antonio-bf2pc]

HP didn’t buy Compaq for their consumer line. HP purchased Compaq because They were the leaders in Enterprise Server business. So they got that hardware and those customers too.

[@Choralone422]

Ahh HP. I could give a dissertation on them seeing as how I had a lot of contact with them in my 20+ year IT career. I'll go into some highlights. 1. The Compaq merger. It was a nightmare for those who did warranty repair work on HP & Compaq equipment at the time and for years afterwards. Warranty claims had to be entered into multiple different systems depending on the target audience or what company originally sold it. It added a huge amount of complexity to doing business with HP as a warranty service provider! 2. HP's support of Intel Itanium (which cost HP billions!) It along with the Compaq merger killed the DEC Alpha line of RISC CPUs and basically erased DEC as a whole. At least AMD was able to license the EV6 bus the Alpha 21264 CPU used for use with the original Athlon, Duron and Athlon XP line. 3. Carly Fiorina. In my dealings with various HP employees back in the 2000's I never once heard anything good about her being the CEO. She did whatever she could to shake up the culture at HP but she sure rubbed a whole lot of employees the wrong way! its

[@malcolmapplet4313]

I always wondered what happened to DEC. Not enough to look it up but at one time they were big, seemingly untouchable.

[@Choralone422]

@@malcolmapplet4313 Compaq purchased DEC in 98 and then the HP Compaq merger ended DEC for good. It was a shame since throughout most of the 90s they were really innovative.

[@maxpowr90]

HP is a common case study in MBA programs too. It's ironic because most MBA grads won't heed the case's warnings of what not to do to a company.

[@nine7295]

Yes, I was at DEC during the Compaq merger. It was chaos to say the least. There was also Tandem that Compaq bought earlier too.

[@fredsmith5473]

Fiorina was behind the Compaq merger. Before then she attempted to acquire PWC for a similar sum but failed. It looked as if she needed something disruptive as a smokescreen for her incompetence. She rose by curious means through the hierarchy at AT&T. AT&T was heavily unionized, nothing like HP. She got out of there just before of the dot com boom, where she had been involved in vendor financing. Her background was marketing, and she had no experience of running a company, leave alone a large complex company.

[@baosli]

I recently took over an IT department and first thing I did was get rid off all the HP hardware. The Elite laptops they had... a laptop that costs that much shouldn't be made of plastic. At a previous company, we ordered HP servers and the internal components... were not inside the servers... we had to contract a HP certified tech to come install the CPU and memory otherwise the warranty was void... garbage, garbage, garbage....

[@VelvetCondoms]

The problem with the Compaq purchase was they did not retain what made compact so successful: quality. They just turned into another brand name for HP.

[@hankqadir1528]

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook! HP started lagging in technology after Fiorina changed the culture from innovation to volume x profit

[@ckfinke7625]

Never thought HP would be bad, I guess they've fallen because we now have Macs and Chromebooks. Next time you do a computer company video, please do "Apple - Bigger Than You Know".

[@mattyian1208]

Good idea

[@BookClubDisaster]

Not in PC's. Macs are still only about 10% of market share in the US. Also you know Macs have been around since 1984, right?

[@9852323]

Chromebooks are trash and only for computer illiterate people to get online..

[@ckfinke7625]

@@BookClubDisaster Right, but since that "Get a Mac" (AKA "Mac vs. PC") campaign came on, we were more into it so much - would you rather get a PC or a Mac? And Apple has grown beyond computers over the past two decades (and that's why they dropped "Computer" from its former corporate name "Apple Computer, Inc." by 2007), including iPod, iPad, iPhone and most recently Apple TV+, so it really is "Bigger Than You Know".

[@stephenw2992]

Bigger profit margins than you know since they rip you off