With Respect to Matters Concerning The Board of Directors of HP | Hacker News Reader

With Respect to Matters Concerning The Board of Directors of HP

raganwald.posterous.com

35 pointsraganwald11 comments

That is a good scene from Traffic.

It seems like HP had a good thing going. Then Wall Street decided HP should be making more money. This insatiable need for increasing profits then forced a group of people to make a series of increasingly bad decisions.

That is how it looks to me at least.

I haven’t seen “Traffic,” but I first heard this story told about Billy Martin, who somehow managed to get fired and rehired by the Yankees five times. It was also allegedly told about Yogi Berra. I would not be surprised if there is a version in latin told about Ceasar.

Et tu, envelopes?

I love 'two envelopes'.

I have tried to track down the original joke. The first time I heard it was 20 years ago. I was 10 years old at the time and the old Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were falling apart. My dad was a political refugee from Eastern Europe who emigrated to Australia.

I asked him what was going on while we watched the news on TV, and he explained that communism was a different system to ours and it was one where the government controls the people.

He told me 'two envelopes', but with the characters being leaders of the Soviet Union. It was an old joke he first heard in Russian, and had heard repeated across the Eastern Bloc as a commentary on the situation they were in.

I couldn't find an earlier reference than when I heard it - so I will assume the joke originated in old communist East Europe. When you search for the joke, a lot of websites reference it as a 'Russian joke' [1], which backs up how I first heard it.

[1] http://toperjokes.blogspot.com/2007/05/two-envelopes.html

Why doesn't HP just make a printer that I, the consumer, want to own?

If I think about it, I really don't want to own a printer. What I really need to do is to put my signature on letters and forms that are then faxed or sent via email.

I dig the story, but why is the last message written in cipher?

Comedic timing. Hold back the punchline for just a little bit longer than you think you should, and you'll kill 'em every time.

Unless your joke sucks, then you'll just suffer an awkward silence.

In the original joke, there's three envelopes. The second says "reorganize".

He's not suggesting that the stock price fluctuated as wildly as it did, and employees "revolted" against Leo solely because of webOS, is he? Did he forget that Leo did announce one other thing that day: that the hardware division of HP (which wasn't bleeding cash) would be spun off into a new company, and HP would be taking a gamble with software services? Dump something that you bought one year ago, who cares but the fanboys. Dump something that HP has been doing for decades, and heads will roll.

If you ask me, they should've given their hardware division more time to come up with a winning tablet, if not running webOS then running either Android or Windows 8 (seeing how HP and Microsoft are "intimate" partners"). Give the hardware division a chance to reverse course while it is still not a cash drain on HP. Then, if HP can't break into the high-margin tablet market, dump the hardware division.

> Give the hardware division a chance to reverse course while it is still not a cash drain on HP.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. How many notebooks did Apple make before having a hit? You build two phones and one tablet that are not hits and you can the whole division?

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