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Comment by 0x12 | Hacker News Reader

HP is as good as dead. It will take a long time to die but they're now officially the Yahoo! of hardware. Brand damage this severe is going to be very very hard to fix.

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Probably, but not necessarily. They're dead in the water on the consumer side, but enterprise can be turned around. I'd heard tell they were working on some uber-high-end scientific and government hardware, too, and maybe that becomes their cash cow eventually. Government contracting has certainly been kind to other hardware companies in the past.

They might be able to pull out of the race to the bottom / razor-thin-margins that is the non-Apple PC market, build up a high-end image doing cutting-edge industrial hardware, then (possibly) reconsider a consumer relaunch as a high-end, high-margin brand.

They're going to chart a path like SGI. From industry leader to historical footnote.

It hurts just to think about that.

In a weird way I'm happy that Hewlett and Packard are not around to witness this, to see the work of a lifetime butchered like this is just too painful.

Do you think if they were around they would havr helped avoid this mess?

From what I've read about them their retirement was permanent, they both had more than deserved it. So I don't think they could have avoided the mess unless they stepped in and that would be highly unlikely. Maybe a 'watchful eye' would have had some positive effect or a consulting role of sorts.

HP was a unique company and it definitely isn't the first time that such a unique company flows from the hands and brains of unique people and does not survive the transition to new management without significant damage.

The HP story does not bode well for Apple, which was even more the brainchild of some pretty unique individuals.

Steve Jobs is still around, and I really hope that Tim Cook will not embarrass Steve in the way that the HP board has fouled the HP legacy. Those guys deserved a lot better than this. Once upon a time there was the HP way. Today that's the stuff of legend.

Well if Tim Cook dare to screw up Jobs' legacy, some rabid fanboy will take him out with a suicide bomb attack.

And I'm only half joking.

Actually for the company that Hewlett and Packard founded see Agilent. After the HP/Agilent division around 2000, Agilent took most of the early HP records. Why? Because Agilent's business lines were the original HP business lines.

http://www.home.agilent.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

Yes, and I think that Agilents future is a lot more secure than HPs at this point in time.

Agilent is basically the instrument division of the 'old' HP.

If you mean the death of the old HP, the 2008 acquisition of EDS was the formal declaration of HP's death.

The company named HP will not die anytime soon but that's irrelevant - it's just another large IT services vendor.

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