The Mandelbear's Musings

HP: No Surprise

September 11, 2006 (Computerworld) -- Why was I surprised to hear that Hewlett- Packard spied on its own board members to find the source of a news story? I shouldn't have been. Last year, just after Carly Fiorina walked away with $21 million in severance pay, I ran a letter in my column from a demoralized HP employee. "After all these cost cuts, stealth layoffs, expense and travel reductions, no raises for years, no bonuses, here Carly walks away with all this money after basically running HP into the ground," the anonymous reader wrote. "Oh well, tap me on the shoulder for that workforce reduction -- I'll take the severance, the unemployment, and have a nice rest."

A week later, an HP manager asked me, "Who was your source?"

(from groklaw, which has very good coverage of the HP debacle.)

I must say I'm feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude over the whole sorry mess -- considering what HP did to Compaq and the remains of DEC (after Compaq trashed them), and considering that every piece of HP hardware I've ever owned has died suddenly and mysteriously, with no help from what HP jokingly calls their tech support (sample, to try to fix my dead scanner: try power cycling the computer five times -- no, it didn't work; maybe they forgot to tell me about the dead chicken)... Where was I? Oh, yeah: HP. The real HP is called Agilent, these days. Don't know where these imposters came from.