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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 7/28/2005 |
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Commentary on the decline of
Hewlett Packard Hewlett
Packard is one of those legendary American companies, started in a garage by
2 engineers who wanted to go into business for themselves. I first
saw a Hewlett Packard personal computer back in 1979, when I was marketing
director of one of Spokane’s first personal computer companies. This
was a very small desktop computer designed for engineers and it had a tiny
3” screen.. It had none of the flashy graphics
of the Apple II . The one cool trick it could do was
to play the William Tell overture in squeaky computer tones. Somehow
HP eventually got into the printer marketplace and did extremely well. Their
later pc products sold fairly well, but nothing like their printers. HP
printers became truly the flagships of the industry. I can remember buying
the first color printer – the HP paintjet,
which used continuous plain paper, for $ 1500 back in 1991. It could print the early ega and vga
graphics of the time. I later bought a HP laserjet
2 printer for $ 2300, and use it to this day. Then I bought the first flatbed
scanner, which was the HP Scanjet IICX for $ 1500,
and I still use that. I since
bought several HP color inkjet printers, and each one was better and cheaper
than the previous. I think the last one I bought, an HP 840C, was around $
200 and could print photo quality. As major
pc vendors have bitten the dust, HP has survived, despite major
competition from Gateway, and now Dell Computers, which now leads the
industry in direct market sales. As part of its survival strategy, HP ended
up buying Compaq computers, a debatable decision, which has not paid off for stockholders.
In recent
years HP has faced fierce competition in the printer marketplace,
particularly from Dell, who is now giving free printers away with many
computer purchases, and an influx of cheap scanners from overseas vendors. So it was
not at all unexpected when I saw an industry journal headline recently stating
that HP was going to cut 28000 jobs. The company later changed that figure to
only 14500, if you can use the term only with such a huge figure of lost jobs,
and now with a new CEO is talking bravely about the future and how it is
going to return to profitability in the new global market. And
there, as Shakespeare said, lies the rub ... the term global market, in which the US has
been doing very poorly in. The US
lags behind many foreign counties in the implementation of high speed
internet, because we don’t have a government policy which supports it.
Our government has refused to interfere in this marketplace. The
recent sale to China of IBM’s pc division has been termed the biggest
technological giveaway in US history, and we watch China’s balance of
trade figures skyrocket while ours declines. So now
when we still another major US PC corporation cutting jobs and struggling, I
worry about whether HP is going to survive, in the global economy. And it
makes me feel that Perot was right on years ago when he said that giant
sucking sound you hear is your jobs going overseas. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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