Duane quotes:
> "Hewlett-Packard Co. said yesterday that it has suffered a significant,
> widespread decline in the growth of new orders during the current quarter,
> and that it will abandon its money-losing disk-drive business."
 
Truly the end of an era.  HP's disk drives were almost always industry
leading in some area such as capacity, quality, size, etc.  Who can
forget the 7933/7935 disk drives which were the pinacle of HP's large
disk drive design in their day, and were so satisfying from an
engineering
point of view.  These were products that practically oozed excellence
at you.  HP's reputation was built on products like these.  Now I guess
HP can only inherit the reputations of those who they choose to OEM
disks
from.
 
I understand we now get off-the-shelf disk drives from Segate and
others.
Gone are the HP specific features like "sector atomicity" that enabled
features like the HP3000's power failure recovery capability and allow
the Transaction Manager to do it's job.  Now a UPS will be required to
prevent the corruption of data that could occur should a "new" disk
drive ever unexpectedly lose power.  Hardly a step forward in any
direction other than a short sighted economic one.
 
> "Their products were good, but their turnaround cylces were slower
> compared to others because of careful design and thorough
> engineering work."
 
It's too bad that evolution selects the most successful approach, and
not
the most elegant one.
 
And the definition of "success" seems to take a rather short term view
most of the time.
 
I question HP's decision to apparently disolve away one of their areas
of core knowledge and excellence.  This is the sort of thing that you
can't get back once you let it go.  It strikes me as another example of
questionable cost-cutting logic that focuses on the short term bottom
line.  This is the same sort of dilbert-esque logic that would suggest
firing all the employees so as to reduce costs to zero, thus making
the organization 100% profitable.
 
I recently read that at one time in the past before AT&T was broken up
and they owned the entire United States telephone system, that the
value of the copper metal in all their wires got close to the value of
all the corporation's stock.  A clever but rather short sighted investor
could have bought AT&T, ripped out all the telephone wire in the US and
sold it as copper scrap metal.  Of course the long term effect of this
would probably not make it look like a very good deal.
 
Sometimes a thing has more value than is obvious when only the short
term
is viewed.
 
G.