What a fantastic company HP used to be, back in the day. They led the way in scientific equipment and calculators, and even desktop computers for a brief moment.

They even made PostScript laser printers that were built like tanks and were a by-word for reliability.

Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates, and this is just scraping the bottom out of an already empty barrel.

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ryukoposting 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It is staggering how much HP has fallen from grace. I don't think a lot of people my age even know.

If you're a late millennial/early zoomer, you probably know IBM had a sort of "golden age" from the 1960s through the 1980s. You also know AT&T was a juggernaut (even if you can't imagine the scale of "Ma Bell").

HP though? Nobody my age knows how great HP was in the '90s unless they're either a retro computing nerd, or an EE who knows the Agilent/Keysight lore.

The timeline makes it all the more surprising. HP's glory days were the 1990s! A decade after AT&T and IBM were clearly declining! Somehow the recency doesn't play in HP's favor.

They torched their reputation so quickly and so thoroughly that I can't think of any comparisons. As far as I know, the only companies who did it faster were fraudsters, the Enrons and FTXes of the world.

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cogman10 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That was basically entirely on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and the board of directors. It's pretty similar to what happened to Boeing.

HP had engineers at the helm right up until Fiorina. She came in and destroyed a lot of what made it great to work at HP while not really doing a great job of managing the company.

Then Hurd came in and he just gutted the company to the delight of the shareholders. I came in right as Hurd went out as an intern. The place was in shambles when I got there. He'd fired and outsourced everything he could. The IT there was a complete joke. It was actually insane that HP decided to outsource IT operations.

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ryukoposting 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Ooooooh, there must be a story there. I think I get the same high from corporate horror stories that my wife gets from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

I yearn for the day that I'm in a stable enough career position to write about some of the shitshows I've seen.

	▲	cogman10 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not much of a story. Like I said, I was an intern so I mostly heard this stuff from my coworkers (it's been a while too). My boss was a manager in IT and they were fortunate enough to get a heads up before the shitshow hit. They moved departments right before everyone in IT got laid off. I had requests to IT that I had put in at the beginning of my internship which were just getting handled by the end of my internship. Real basic stuff like getting my badge was a nightmare. I had to make a 3 hour drive to another building just to get my badge. The appointment to do that took 3 months, which meant my coworkers had to let me into the office and past security every day. General office supply and admin was really bad. I was seated in a broken chair for my entire internship. Employees were buying their own office furniture like chairs because there basically was nobody at the helm doing basic recs like that. The IT firm we contracted out to was obviously one that mostly serviced the likes of banks or chain restaurants. The stuff they technically "owned" they were completely detached from. The only stuff they knew how to do was active directory management stuff. But like I said, they were extremely slow and backed up. Understandable because HP is huge company to contract out to. Leadership was a total mess. I had like 3 different bosses I technically reported to and it was never super clear to me in the org chart exactly how I was supposed to be positioned in the company.

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segmondy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, it's not the same HP. If there was ever a case that Ship of Theseus is not the same it's with companies. It just takes but a few replacement to get an entirely different company, mostly same people, same name, same business, completely different. Yet alone when the company has turned over everyone over decades, including customers. This is not the HP we knew.

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agumonkey an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this an unavoidable company pattern? Early on you go all in to prove your mastery. Then your reverse course to ramp benefits or something like that.

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tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They were dragged screaming and kicking into offering PostScript. Their page description language was PCL, an inferior (although sometimes faster) offering.

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BobaFloutist 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Now they are just famous for being the printer brand everyone hates

They're not bad for $300-500 upgradeable Costco/Best Buy laptops, especially since Dell has deteriorated and Chromebooks exited their honeymoon period at escape velocity.

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drewg123 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'll always despise them (and their Itanium) for killing the DEC Alpha CPU off after they acquired it along with Compaq.

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dreamcompiler 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Friend worked at HP in the old days before (as he put it) the company got "Carly'd."