> This place is what Hewlett-Packard was probably like in 2000 (with the printer monopoly), the collapse is coming, but without starting over there is no way to fix it.

Interestingly, that printer monopoly seems to be doing fine today, given how I have to go to hp.com to get drivers for my Samsung printer.

Hewlett-Packard was an electronic engineering, semiconductor, and computing company from the beginning (the first product they sold was an audio distortion analyzer, it used a creative circuit to achieve high performance at minimum cost), they used to do serious and innovative R&D. There were the glorious days when Hewlett-Packard makes state-of-art test equipment and semiconductor devices, developed in-house enterprise computer systems like HP-UX system and PA-RISC CPUs, first-generation of scientific and programmable handheld calculators, etc., not just today's customer printers and laptops.

e.g. I recently found a datasheet of an IC in an amateur radio gear, it were really the glorious days. Those chips with an HP logo (or a Motorola logo) are really cool.

> The INA series of MMICs is fabricated using HP’s 25 GHz f_max, ISOSAT™-I silicon bipolar process which uses nitride self-alignment, submicrometer lithography, trench isolation, ion implantation, gold metallization and polyimide intermetal dielectric and scratch protection to achieve excellent performance, uniformity and reliability.

Around 2000s, the EE & semiconductor department became an independent company, Agillent, and later Keysight.

I think the last major innovation at HP was probably memristor that was supposed to be the next evolution of digital logic and storage, and HP claimed that it was developing a memristor computer system. Unfortunately, it failed to materialize.

HP was the Google of its day when H & P were in charge. People either retire or die eventually. What happens to Google when time claims Larry and/or Sergei?

Not trying to besmirch or minimize early HP by comparing to Google -- probably better to use Musk/SpaceX or something -- but IMO this is the key takeaway that doesn't seem widely discussed. Innovative companies have innovative leaders with expert-level knowledge in their technical specialties. At some point, the MBAs take over, attempt to put it on autopilot, and it's all downhill from there.

This is one reason why the current high stock market valuations for large, profitable tech companies are crazy. Eventually the corporate culture rots from the inside and they're overtaken by a disruptive competitor. Unfortunately there's no practical way for retail investors to take a short position on those stocks for 30 years in the future; regular options only go out about 3 years.

True, but if you can identify both the winner and the loser, say AMD and/or TSMC vs INTC, you could sell puts/spreads on the loser and sell calls/spreads on the winner in similar at-risk dollar amounts. If the market itself booms or busts through your strikes, gains on one side will cancel the losses on the other. While you're right, you make double money by winning on both sides. But you lose double if you're betting the wrong way.

My friend, whether you're trading naked or spreads doesn't matter on timescales of corporate rot are ~30 years; the contracts available to retail traders are like ~2 years out.

> Unfortunately there's no practical way for retail investors to take a short position on those stocks for 30 years in the future; regular options only go out about 3 years.

You don't, not if you're a small investor. You go index and hedge your bets that they're not all going to rot at the same time.

I would say H & P had a serious edge over the Google guys in the ethics department.

What about companies like IBM? The company was originally foundered in 1911, but you could say their heyday wasn't until half a century later (or even more), after the original founder had left.

It was the unusual case of a competent son of the founder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Watson_Jr.

>Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it."

Not saying this happened at IBM, but sometimes correct people can be promoted into correct positions, in which case the company keeps going just fine.

However, at some point any company is probably bound to promote wrong people, who will end up promoting/hiring the wrong people under them, eventually completely changing the course of the business.

It seems like the death of a company is inevitable.

It also happens that the circumstances that allowed a company to dominate come to an end. It would require heroic measures to move to a new form of dominance. Why should lightning strike again in the same place?

Lightning will strike a place many times if the capital is expended to erect a lightning rod.

I nominate your comment for the Hacker News comment of the day.

> It feels like the death of a company is inevitable.

Which, from a higher perspective, is good. As it breaks down monopolies and give way to more innovative new companies.

It's good when we allow them to fail gracefully. I would hate to see what unscrupulous stuff a failing Google could do with all our info being held hostage.

No need to wait or wonder. Google Equifax.

One of the last innovations at HP was the work on Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing and Very Long Instruction Word architectures that led to the Itanium IA-64 processors produced by Intel.

By putting the burden of scheduling parallelism on the compiler, does the EPIC design avoid speculative execution vulnerabilities, or did Intel implement Itanium with the same flaws?

I'm well aware of the impressive achievements of the old HP. But I'm also aware that that era was already clearly over in the year 2000, and they were already a very different company from what their older reputation suggested. In 2000, there was no "collapse coming" for HP from anything like mismanagement or complacency; they weathered industry-wide troubles as well as any other company and didn't experience any personal catastrophes. If the next 20 years for Intel end up like the last 20 years for HP, then long-term investors will be quite satisfied.

HP? You mean Agilent-Keysight-HP? :p

They’ve split up into companies that are widely successful in each of their individual fields.

The multiple splits and name changes didn't help brand recognition, at least on my end. I remember HP lab equipment being highly impressive and warranting its price. But I consistently fail to make the connection that Agilent amd Keysight products are the successors to that.

I agree. The rebrand to Keysight is the worst. Agilent was a good name by the time they split. Agilent still exists in medical but I know much less about that. I think everyone who works in test & measurement knows the big brands and knows keysight. All of the reps, culture, and products stayed the same.

The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.

> The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.

I have to look it up... This is stupid. If I see a Fujitsu chip on a board, I know the brand and may find it interesting. But if I see a Socionext chip, I'll think it's some random U.S. startup from California.

I think there's a reason - Wikipedia says it's a joint venture of Fujitsu and Panasonic, so it makes sense for them to give it a new name, and it's common for these Japanese companies to choose a English name for global business (in the same way that NEC becomes Renesas due to the two reasons).

But what a terrible name!

HP used to be much more. It was a real innovative company.

But the interesting parts have been spun out like: Agillent and Keysight.

HP Enterprise was also spun out.

Other than splitting off HPE, the HP of 2000 was pretty much the HP of today. As far as I'm aware, they're still major players today in all the markets that they were major players in back then, and none of those HP or HPE business units had to go through a collapse and start over.