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.