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Comment by zrobotics | Hacker News Reader

The thinking isn't that long-term, it's focused on the next 2-6 quarters. Plenty of people got rich off of plundering Hewlett-Packard; to the point there's no meat left on that carcass aside from garbage printers.

Ironically enough, the test equipment division (what I would call the actual successors of the company) have been through 2 restructurings (HP->Agilent->Keysight). Almost as though having cutting-edge engineering & R&D will have the side-effect of making good products. Shame that costs money though.

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I'm not sure I'd describe Keysight as a success story of cutting edge R&D, I can't speak for the current Agilent as I'm not a chemist. They and other namesake test equipment brands seem to only focus on the ultra high end and the lower to even midrange models are frequently white labeled products from overseas competitors with a more polished UI. And they're not even always pushing their top end stuff further, their top end multimeter is virtually unchanged since 1990.

Oh, Keysight gear doesn't hold a candle to vintage Hewlett-Packard. However, I just wanted to argue that Keysight is closer to Bill & Dave's garage than the current HP incarnation. They have some OK gear, but too much of it seems overpriced; they are definitely letting the cheaper Chinese manufacturers catch up to them and seem to only want to rely on institutional contracts.

I personally don't know anyone in the hobbyist electronics space that owns any Keysight gear, my only exposure has been in university labs. Bit of a shame, really.

Yeah it's kind of crazy what HP was able to accomplish, the reason keysight hasn't updated a lot is because they didn't really have to. The DAQs are incremental improvements from what I've seen, the aforementioned 3458A still competes with new instruments, and I honestly enjoyed the 54601A scopes I used in school more than the new Tek ones I have at work.

They are not as affordable as chinese counterparts (Rigol or Siglent) but their 1000x line of scopes is a step in a good direction. I own one although I paid more for less features as compared to Rigol, difference in quality and polish of the UI is staggering.

The 3458A is still one of the highest accuracy, most stable and linear multimeters around, even though new 8.5 digit DMMs have been introduced since then. Anything significantly better is going to look more like a physics experiment than a neatly packaged bench instrument.

I'd appreciate something other than a GPIB connection in 2020, but you're right it's really a marvel of a design. Since getting it in the lab I've started reading more about how it works and there's a lot to learn. The widely lauded ADC in particular is really impressive.

https://doc.xdevs.com/doc/HP_Agilent_Keysight/HP%203458A%20C...

>Plenty of people got rich off of plundering Hewlett-Packard;

certainly not the employees!

C-suite's job is, unfortunately, only to get the shareholders rich, not the employees.

maybe thats part of the problem, I recall a trend where employees bought out the company and ran it. Not sure what happened to it.

We can't let the great unwashed own the company and run it for God's sake. /s

That's what happened.

There have been a only few instances of employee ownership of large corporations, never any sustained trend. United Airlines employees took over majority ownership in 1994 but that never really worked and they ended up bankrupt.

I suppose HP were challenged externally and couldn't adapt, the money savers start moving in, which pumps it up temporarily and it becomes a vicious cycle.

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