Interestingly, that printer monopoly seems to be doing fine today, given how I have to go to hp.com to get drivers for my Samsung printer.
e.g. I recently found a datasheet of an IC in an amateur radio gear, it were really the glorious days. Those chips with an HP logo (or a Motorola logo) are really cool.
> The INA series of MMICs is fabricated using HP’s 25 GHz f_max, ISOSAT™-I silicon bipolar process which uses nitride self-alignment, submicrometer lithography, trench isolation, ion implantation, gold metallization and polyimide intermetal dielectric and scratch protection to achieve excellent performance, uniformity and reliability.
Around 2000s, the EE & semiconductor department became an independent company, Agillent, and later Keysight.
I think the last major innovation at HP was probably memristor that was supposed to be the next evolution of digital logic and storage, and HP claimed that it was developing a memristor computer system. Unfortunately, it failed to materialize.
Not trying to besmirch or minimize early HP by comparing to Google -- probably better to use Musk/SpaceX or something -- but IMO this is the key takeaway that doesn't seem widely discussed. Innovative companies have innovative leaders with expert-level knowledge in their technical specialties. At some point, the MBAs take over, attempt to put it on autopilot, and it's all downhill from there.
However, at some point any company is probably bound to promote wrong people, who will end up promoting/hiring the wrong people under them, eventually completely changing the course of the business.
It seems like the death of a company is inevitable.
Which, from a higher perspective, is good. As it breaks down monopolies and give way to more innovative new companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Watson_Jr.
>Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it."
You don't, not if you're a small investor. You go index and hedge your bets that they're not all going to rot at the same time.
By putting the burden of scheduling parallelism on the compiler, does the EPIC design avoid speculative execution vulnerabilities, or did Intel implement Itanium with the same flaws?
They’ve split up into companies that are widely successful in each of their individual fields.
The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.
I have to look it up... This is stupid. If I see a Fujitsu chip on a board, I know the brand and may find it interesting. But if I see a Socionext chip, I'll think it's some random U.S. startup from California.
I think there's a reason - Wikipedia says it's a joint venture of Fujitsu and Panasonic, so it makes sense for them to give it a new name, and it's common for these Japanese companies to choose a English name for global business (in the same way that NEC becomes Renesas due to the two reasons).
But what a terrible name!
But the interesting parts have been spun out like: Agillent and Keysight.
HP Enterprise was also spun out.