Fundamentally, however, we know that the markets HP was in were not growth markets: PCs, printers, enterprise consulting, etc. The growth markets at the time were phones (Apple), software (Microsoft), and cloud services (Amazon, Google, etc.) Could HP have succeeded in any of those businesses?
Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low.
I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.
The most common complaint about HP is its lock-in policy and its associated gutter business practices, not with the inks per se. If you reckon HP inks are the best for high quality art then I'm not going to argue, it's your decision and your money.
On the other hand, I've now an Epson WF-4830 which I only run in draft mode because of the outrageous cost of the inks. When I've finished with this current batch of inks I will do with this printer as I've done with its predecessors which is to chuck it out the window onto concrete two stories below and buy another (that's the cheapest and most effective option for upgrading printers nowadays—I'm onto my fourth printer in about 20 months).
Incidentally, my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet IV which I bought in the 1990s is still working perfectly (these days its Centronics interface goes through a converter to the PC).
BTW, I've heard there was a problem with fusers in LaserJets but never experienced it myself in any I've used.
I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through.
I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.
We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.
The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it.
Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here.
The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc.
HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive.
Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call?
[1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs?
[2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing
[3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared
I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels.
For example,
- We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices.
- Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.
That reminded me that BBN started in acoustics. Any other significant tech companies get started in audio engineering?
My problem with Ayn Rand is that she starts the description of her world view with agreeable statements like "A is A and therefore one can see truth (or draw objective conclusions) just by looking" (which disregards the problem of missing information). But then goes on to draw a moral from that idea which basically negates the whole point of objectivity by making the subject the center of the world. But that's not yet what makes her work propaganda.
What makes her work propaganda is that she, from there "induced" that, since there's only the individual that matters, it is only moral that one tries to maximize one's own happiness and that a fully capitalist society without any regulations whatsoever were we worship the then-to-be-godlike individual entrepreneur would be the only way to achieve said happiness. This also implies that while is is only moral to strive for one's own happiness, there is only a certain kind of individual who actually deserves it. The rest is there to worship or just be screwed over and over again, because there can be only a few winners.
So we've come a long way from making seemingly agreeable statements to justifying a system that dehumanizes most of its subjects (pun not intended) and makes them nothing more but a fleshy mass to the disposal of a select few winners. And that's just what propaganda does: drawing conclusions from a seemingly agreeable standpoint in a way that seems to be logical, but in its essence ignores the fuzziness and incompleteness of the world for the sake of some sense of purity. Don't be fooled by that. There's always complexity hiding somewhere. And while A might seem to be A, you just don't know, how large the hidden b is, yet.
In practice, I'd recommend to look for mental tools that help you analyze but always leave room to deal with the inconsistency of reality. Outside of formal science, consistency is a trap. Building a world view from a set of basic axioms works for mathematics, but not for the extremely complex network that is human relations. I had to learn that the hard way. I'd recommend thinking in networks, path dependencies, path probabilities and network centrality (power) instead. It leads you down a path that allows you to form a much clearer critique than you ever could by adopting Ayn Rand's way of thinking.
The shrug in the book was people turning their back, walking away— people who thought their talents were either wasted or unequally compensated in some way, or footing an unfair portion of things, and the “shrug” was them walking away. A fundamental individual, not collective and corporate act. The central character felt exploited by the company he worked for.
The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.
So you’re saying Rand wouldn’t have been happy with Citizens United. You may want to inform her acolytes like Clarence Thomas.
- Originally she would have got 8 mil if the transaction closed
- She had to give that up due to bad press
- 10% would have been 2.5B so no way was that ever happening
- Her big score was the golden parachute tied to leaving the company. You could say the merger accelerated her exit indirectly, but there was no commission on the deal.
https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...
I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:
Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help
them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”
OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".
Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.
Look at this quote from the letter:
I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ... why
are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company
exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of
a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real
reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish
something collectively which they could not accomplish separately.
They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution
to society .... You can look around and still see people who are
interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives
come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to
give a service—generally to do something which is of value.
And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.
To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:
In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
true objective.
If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC
I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).
Both Elon and Bezos have significantly decreased cost to orbit and are very close to full reusability. This is alongside their other feats like a global logistic network that gets pretty much any product in the world to your doorstep in 1-2 days, self-driving cars, neural implants that enable mind-controlled computing. If that were in the novel, no one would believe it.
As you said, Atlas Shrugged touched a real conflicts that are rarely addressed. Is it kind of obtuse/allegorical? Yes. Would I like it to be a bit shorter? Yes. But it’s ideas seem generally right, the subject matter important, and under discussed.
Industrialists and inventors are the great heroes of our time.
Those don't exist. Effectively nobody actually believes that, or is trying to convince anyone else of it.
And if you think that "we should make sure no one person or small group has too much power (with wealth being a form of power), because we've seen the bad outcomes that produces" equates to "human ingenuity and invention is bad", you have been swallowing propaganda whole.
It's humorous how debased from reality John roger's quote is. It doesn't challenge Rand's ideas it just insults it's readers. There's this stigma among her work as if it's dangerous, just like any other right wing idea. But reality is she only asks that one better themselves. She doesn't tell her readers to make a tort against another to right some perceived systematic wrong. Unlike many modernly accepted ideas her works have never been used to justify throwing people in the gulag, ethnic genocide,or insurrection. She tells one that you are not entitled to money, sleezy money grabs do not pay in the long run, and that being hardworking + innovative will payoff in the end.
Also Tokens works are now considered xenophobic and racist by many people as well because the orcs are portrayed as this dark evil race that invades this quent European landscape. so nothing really passes the purity test.
It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd.
Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3
There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
Or perhaps she was still a dense prick to the end of her days. Who knows?
You are probably just butthurt at this ridiculous ideology being exposed for what it is.
Either outcome is meaningless. I'll worry about it when the bank accepts internet points as mortgage repayments.
I agree down-voting just makes people emotional, and doesn't add anything.
Personally, I saw Rands writing as lazy thinly veiled fictional despotism, and targeted peoples need for simple answers in a chaotic world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control#By_proxy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randian_hero
This doesn't mean both perspectives can't seem true =3
The Internet is a big place, and some people are always having a bad day. =3
Sure, she could have used the money she had put into social security to invest, and maybe would have come out better off. But for those of us who see how public services can enrich an entire society, there is irony to how this all played out.
Then where exactly is the irony or hypocrisy here?
Have a wonderful day =3