Ouch, from the giant they were, reduced to some meaningless tech brand to be stuck on all sorts of random crap. I get that HP (pre-split) didn't have much use for Compaq after a while, but a lot of the consumer stuff seems to have a bunch of compaq infrastructure under the hood. Even the SoftPaq name still pops up constantly.
Ironically, the parent HP is the brand licensing I remember...
On this day of looking forward to new Apple products, and looking back (Steve Jobs archive on the HN front page at the moment) let us not forget one more thing:
I was an employee of HP then (still at HPE, a result of the split). I recall when these products came out and Carly was promoting it, Apple's market cap was around $6B and HP's was 10 times that at around $60B. Some of us were thinking it would be cool if Carly did a deal with Steve and buy Apple. I'm not sure if the culture clash would have worked. But within 10 years the stock numbers were reversed and we were not in so great a position being split up.
Later Compaq innovations... iPAQs were used as Linux handheld computers, a couple decades ago. Some people would like to get back to something like that, with modern hardware.
Pocket PC Devices, especially the Compaq iPAQ changed the course of my career. I have nostalgic moments of my life. Recently, I added some phrases so I can read back later in life - https://brajeshwar.com/2022/ipaq/
(Although they offer 24 internationalized keyboard options, I don't know how thoroughly the "Astro Slide" brand was researched for global markets: in the US, it's similar to a major brand of adult intimate products.)
Are there any good books that cover what happened with US companies like HP, Compaq, RCA, ... ? How and why they went from producing top-notch professional equipment to selling off their core engineering departments and reduce themselves to brands for cheap consumer stuff?
To be fair, Compaq was in the middle of trying to become less known as a PC-compatible company and more as the heir to DEC when HP bought them. They took ownership of Alpha just to have HP crash the Itanic into it.
Thanks. This looks more like a "how to manage a company" text book. I was looking more for a historical view of these companies. For example, all history books on HP I found focus on their rise and "the miracle" of building a company out of a garage, not exploring their later years, like selling/spinning off parts of their core business and the reasons for getting where they are now. Maybe 20-30 years ago is still too early to get a good perspective on those events though.
I don't think any books that cover what happened would be considered "good" by business standards. There were too many idiots in the CxO arena and on the boards of directors. Too many directors are on overlapping boards with each other, so the network is somewhat incestuous - the capitalist version of the nomenklatura [0].
I worked for HP in 2003-2004 in the storage network division. HP stocks lost half of their value under her "leadership". Yet the CEO still got bonuses [1].
> In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.
> Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”
> However, before Conservative Political Action Caucus in February, Fiorina proclaimed that under her HP command, “We would double its revenues to $90 billion, triple its rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, and go from a laggard to a leader in every product category and every market segment in which we competed.”
> Sure, she doubled revenues—through a massive, ill-conceived, controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002—but Fiorina did nothing to increase profits over her five-year term, with the S&P 500 showing net income across enterprises concomitantly up 70%. Furthermore, shareholder wealth at HP was sliced 52% under her reign against the S&P, which was down only 15% in that bearish period. She modeled the old joke of “making it up in the volume.”
> Fiorina rammed the Compaq deal through despite intense opposition by analysts, employees, and shareholders. When it appeared that she would lose the proxy vote, the balance was tipped back the other way using hardball tactics that would make Donald Trump wince.
> Despite such carnage, Fiorina pocketed over $100 million in compensation for her short reign—including a $65 million signing bonus and a $21 million severance. I have studied comebacks from adversity, but she’s not shown the required contrition nor earned the needed exoneration, and she’s not served as a CEO since. Upon leaving Taiwan Semiconductor’s board, the firm disclosed she only attended 17% of the board meetings.
She looted the place. And destroyed what was left.
The commercial jets were another pitiful incident. The existing fleet of Gulfstream jets were unable to fly non-stop from America to India. So she had the company purchase new Gulfstreams which ran about $55-60M each. The story going around my division (in Colorado Springs) was that the older planes had older pilots and she wanted younger pilots, so the existing pilots were laid off even though the transition from Gulfstream IV to 450/550/650 (I forget which new model they bought) would be covered by the same type rating.
So many people were being laid off that an entire department existed to try to comply with WARN Act compliance [2]. Every Friday there were lots of going away parties where things like "Joe Bloggs here is the last guy who knows how to do X". Los Alamos laboratories had the largest installed computer base of DEC Alpha chips [3][4]. All those folks who worked with Alphas were laid off by 2003. Los Alamos National Labs had to hurry up and replace those computers ahead of schedule because repair parts and tech support disappeared in the layoff frenzy. This was the first job I had where H-1B visa workers were present. Chatting with some, their paychecks said "Digital Equipment Corp" even though Compaq bought DEC in 1998 and HP bought Compaq in 2002. They explained it to me that it was almost impossible to rename a company in India (this might have been true back then, or they might have been pulling my leg). They were asked to work remotely on Fridays, or to come in on Saturdays instead. This was due to fears of disgruntled ex-employees committing violence. I got to learn PERL because the previous guy wanted to learn it and that jerk wrote all of the build scripts in PERL [5].
Yes, but I was pleased with Gateway laptop I bought as a gift. It was a good price with good specs and construction, even though I knew it was not related to Gateway (Gateway 2000 for those who remember) at all.
I used to drool on Compaq Presario adverts - they looked the coolest and totally out of my reach at the time. I think there is a market for using the brand with some innovative stuff.
Yeah... I had one of the Mac-like-things with a built in monitor. It was very cute and I actually liked it, but it was dog slow. Upgrade the memory from 4 megabytes to 16 and put a 1000 - megabyte hard drive in it eventually.
Compaq did a nice luggable IBM PC compatible, then the first 80386 desktop IBM PC compatible (before IBM had a 386 PC), and many subsequent things.
Compaq, DEC, HP... all great companies that became not what they used to be.
(IBM's eventual 386 PC was the PS/2 Model 80, using an MCA bus for expansion instead of 8/18-bit PC ISA, so it was maybe less PC-compatible than the Compaq.)
The old HP and DEC I mourn but Compaq I don't. Compared to HP and DEC Compaq's period of "greatness" was a flash in the pan. By the time they bought DEC in 1998 they were already a shell of what they had been. Their servers had been a mess for years and their service techs were not great. DEC service techs were fantastic, and it was a real step down in quality when Compaq service techs started coming out for support calls.
I feel like Compaq was evolutionary, and DEC was revolutionary.
Their great coups are more about timing than anything else, I'd say.
By showing up shortly after the very first generation of "PC Compatibles", they managed to miss the tendency to build something "better but not compatible", and had a chance to plan a strategy for when IBM's lawyers came calling.
Getting a 386 to market was inevitable; if they didn't do it, someone else would. Without Compaq, the PS/2 Model 80 might have been the first 386 PC, but it would still have had a hard time fighting off cheaper and more versatile ISA-bus clones.
Maybe I'm still resentful of the mid-late 90s days, when the dream was a standard AT chassis and power supply and its reliable upgrade path, rather than manufacturers like Compaq with their zany form factors.
BTW, Advanced Logic Research (ALR) also had an early '386 PC, in what looked like a mostly generic AT clone case, around the same time as the Compaq Deskpro 386. (News around the time was confusing, with both ALR and Compaq being called first.)
Basically these are meaningless companies riding on their past fame any manufacturer can slap their logo on any product for a fee. What a scam...
More and more people will eventually notice like I did, people aren't stupid. When the exact same generic product is sold 10 times more under a known brand than under some obscure one, one will realize that paying more doesn't yield better quality.
Uh not a native speaker, but the very first sentence of that blurb:
Brand Licensing provides the permission to trademarks, under defined conditions.
Really doesn't read well to me, feels like they omitted a verb, like it should be "the permission to USE trademarks" or something. Being permitted to a trademark feels very chopped-off.
I’ve read my fair share of American legalese, and I haven’t seen either the phrase “permission to trademarks”, or the odd usage of the definite article. Combine that with the phrase “Tablets in USA” lower down (few Americans put the A in USA, and even if they did, it would have “the” before it), and I’m guessing it’s written by someone from another country. Not that it matters.
TV's and PC's made my eyes bleed immediately. I'm a non-native English speaker and I can't help wondering if those are actually signs that it _was_ written by a native English speaker (US, or otherwise).
