The Decline of HP...What Happened? 

I have been working at HP for about 2 years now. Ever since HP hired Enrique Lores as the new CEO, they have been making a huge push to treat their employees better. HP has been working very hard to repair their image these past few years in my experience.

Worked at HP for nearly 3 decades. The company really went downhill when... they hired the first CEO from outside the company: Carly Fiorina. She made many poor decisions designed to juice stock price, and treated employees like crap. Outsourcing became the primary tactic, and much internal talent was lost. Many other subsequent CEOs followed the same destructive paradigm.

HP used to make pretty okay laptop heater combinations. You could keep an entire room warm by just having a laptop switched on.

My Mom worked for HP and she really attests to the fact that Mr.Hewlett and Packard really stood by their employees. She started as a janitor and worked her way up to a graphic artist. She did alot of designs, photography and general advertising to other commercial prospects, (slideshows and meeting pitches, ect.) She would take the new graphic design software they were tinkering with and make sales pitches of it. She was a training to be a draftsman, (they actually changed the title to drafts person in her branch because she was the only woman. Pretty progressive for the late eighties, early nineties I'd say.) My Dad did plating and assembly with HP, which is actually how they met. Both have told me after Mr. Hewlett and Packard left, the company started to go down hill. My Mom still gets teary eyed discussing that part of her career life.

I worked 25 years with HP. Carly killed it. The board was stupid to hire her and to break up the company. They should have kept the company together and promote Ann Livermore to CEO.

Ah HP. The company that builds printers that lie to you about your ink levels so that they can sell ink at a 10,000% markup, creates laptops deliberately made to not be upgradable, and where everything is designed to fail right after the warranty expires. Super shocked that CM didn't mention them being taken to court, repeatedly, over these shenanigans. *EDIT:* This post has really blown up and it's wonderful to see all of the good points in agreement as well as those in objection to it. The replies have become a rather good list of HP products, laptops in particular, that are more reliable than others. If you want to go with HP for some reason, check below for a recommendation list.

As a person who was tied to HP heavily, the hire of Carly Fiorina in 1999 was the start of the destruction of HP. She pretty much destroy the original HP structure and blew up the whole company. It never recovered from her.

I worked as an engineer for HP from 1976 to 1984. Those were the days when employees would say HP stood for "Happy People". Focusing on technology, innovation, and quality, HP continued to prosper into the 1990s. The beginning of HP's demise came when the Board brought in Carly Fiorina as CEO. Up until that point, all HP CEOs had been HP engineers with technical understanding but more importantly, an understanding of the culture of the company (aka The HP Way). Carly was a marketing person. She touted innovation in ads with pictures of the garage where HP started. However, instead of using the innovative horsepower she had within HP to grow the company, she elected to buy Compaq. After the Carly debacle, the Board brought in another outsider, Mark Hurd, who was strictly operationally focused. With all of the layoffs, Hurd had some improved short term financials but at the cost of employee morale.

I haven't had too many issues with HP computers. They have been relatively reliable. Their printers on the other hand... Dog water of the highest degree. Not only are they expensive, but they break down fairly often and the ink is costly.

I know the quality of HP products are not what they used to be. For the longest time, you wanted a quality printer, you got an HP-that has not been the case in the consumer market in a long time. I purchased an HP-11C calculator for $60 back in 1982; it still runs like a champ forty years later, while those HP calculators bought by friends in the past decade have not lasted much past a few years. Back in the late ‘80s, I worked at a company that used HP 3000 mini computers (talk about a long-dead niche) and those machines are still running, 22 years after HP stopped supporting them. (Third party suppliers are maintaining the OS and supplying parts, when needed.) This type of longevity for products just doesn’t seem to fit into the HP of today…

I'll tell you what happened to HP in 3 words: Compaq, Carly Fiorina. She destroyed HP's corporate culture of humility and personal accountability and tried to replace it by counterfeiting Hewlett and Packard's "garage engineering" like waving a magic wand. She kept a copy of their book, "The HP Way" at hand, but was mentally incapable of grasping the point. Carly was the first HP ceo that was from outside the company and her management style was like some amateur cook who thinks they can become a chef by buying more kitchen gadgets. Her decision to merge with Compaq was done against the wishes and advice of the people who had built and driven HP for 60 years. The Compaq merger was like tying an anchor around the neck of an Olympic swimmer and wondering why he started drowning. In her mind swimming=water=boats=anchor. She destroyed the corporate culture that had been extremely successful by replacing it with a business school derivative that she tried to convince the employees was just a more efficient restyling of the original and then gave them an anchor when they needed a lifeline and inspiration. Her brutal business school management made employees feel mistreated, over worked and unappreciated. That is how you destroy a blue chip company, not re-energize it. Carly Fiorina is a textbook example of someone being educated beyond their intelligence.

I worked for HP in Britain in the 1980s. I visited HP Palo Alto and I saw an email stapled to someone's wall. It was a reply from Dave Packard. Someone had written "Dave, is it true that you once said you would fire a manager if he sacrificed quality to meet a deadline?" Packard had replied "Yes, and I meant it".

You forgot about HP’s commitment to the Itanic which killed their high-end business about the same time they bought Compaq and tanked their (very profitable and amazingly quality) printer business. Not to mention effectively eliminating their calculator business which TI owns the marketshare for to this day. Fiorina did a real number in her time there. It only went downhill after.

It seems so similar a story to Boeing. A well regarded powerhouse of engineering and innovation with a flat structure, that got "modernized for the shareholder" and then immediately lost the thing that made it special.

Former HP employee, joined right after Carly was ousted and left in 2010. First time Hurd met with us, I asked why HP was never included in Best Places to Work. His response to me was “That list is not anything we care about or track”. Spoke volumes.

I grew up in Cupertino back when it was part of San Jose. HP was everywhere and everyone knew a neighbor, friend, or had a family member working for HP. As a kid I actually played with an HP35 before it was released and I knew then I wanted to work for this company. I started for them in the mid-80s when Bill and Dave still ran the show. HP ran on net 10% profit and poured the rest back into employee benefits, salaries, and R&D. It was the best job you could want. I was able to afford a 3-bedroom home with acreage on a technician's salary. The spiral down began in the late 80s when it was decided individual performance would no longer be measured and HP would take 20% net profit. Your pay was frozen essentially with annual raises of

My experience with HP goes back about 50 years: first using their oscillators and oscilloscopes, then their calculators, and a succession of printers starting with a LaserJet III. The common thread to their products was a combination of performance, quality, and reliability. The 200CD oscillator in my basement is about 70 years old and still works flawlessly. My first calculator was an HP-67 that was stolen; the HP-25 that replaced it still works today (as do the dozen or so successors I have gotten over the years and still use today). Unfortunately the quality and reliability have taken a nosedive as the company has evolved from largely focusing on making engineering resources, to becoming a consumer product manufacturer. This, along with the drift from “the HP way” to a shareholder driven corporate mindset, has destroyed their once incredible reputation. In short, they lost sight of who they were and what made them special.

I worked as an HP sales representative for a year. In all of their weekly HP employee update videos and training videos they always talked about innovation and how it was 'the core of their business model', but tbh I did not see any innovation, the 'innovation' they presented was little things that all the competitors already had; built-in fingerprint reader, 360 touchscreen, latest intel processors. I came to realize HP's entire business strategy is just: Throw money at marketing, and if that doesn't work, just throw more money into marketing.

started with Compaq, and when HP took over, work was no longer enjoyable. It was as in the video description, employees were expendable. India became the go to for tech support, Mexico for accounting, .. on and on, thankfully I was laid off with a package.

I was also a 30+ year employee starting in 1980 (good times back then) and I think this article does hit the main points right on. I'd add one more that is a side-effect of the "only stock price matters" attitude - HP started dumping it's engineering brain power with the assumption that everything can be subcontracted. The engineers, trained and HP-in-bred that innovation was everything, were really the driving force behind HP, as Bill and Dave would tell you if they were still around. You can't buy that, especially on the cheap.

My wife exclusively used HP laptops for work because we found them to be the best when it came to price-performance scale. The last one we purchased about a year ago has been terrible. Constant hardware failures, leading to us sending the laptop in for a new one; mind you, I work as an IT engineer so I know what Im doing when it comes to PC troubleshooting. I ended up finally buying her a different laptop from another manufacturer. And dont get me started on the HP printer we have at home, which is a higher end "enterprise" printer not an average home printer; I would have hurled that thing out the window by now if I hadnt spent so much money on it. Absolutely garbage tier products

I worked for Hewlett Packard Enterprise as an intern in college from 2017-2019 and then full time from 2019-2020. During that time there were 4 layoff rounds and restructurings, and then I finally got laid off on 2020. I think the biggest issue was they are constantly changing and reorganizing. They wouldn't stick with anything long enough to see it through. It is sad because I actually really enjoyed working there. Great benefits, good culture, great pople. You could see the "old HP" shining through on occasion, but sadly the constant restructuring kept undoing all of the hard work and progress that was made every 6 months. It made it very difficult to get anything accomplished because your team members were constantly changing.

In the 80s they let go of SO MUCH of their research staff. My professor at ASU who worked at several semiconductor industries was told by his HP manager that the work he wanted to do on semiconductor technology, pioneering new technology, would only be done in the future at universities. They and many other companies seem to have chosen to offload their R&D to universities. A truly depressing choice.

When the real HP split and Agilent Technologies was born was the beginning of the end. I was an HP engineer for 30 years. The drop in quality after that point was visible , shipping kit we knew was faulty just to meet targets. Also outsourcing manufacturing to third parties and badging kit was also to blame. Also they stopped the free donuts on a Friday…! A sign of things to come.

I worked for HP for 3 years. Their strategy at the time was to squeeze every dime out of employees, products, contractors, and whatever else they could without investing anything in the future. The company was run, at the time, like they only planned to be in business for 2 more years.

HP was at its best when it comprised all the different technologies they were mustering: frequency counters, spectrum analyzers, mass spectrometers, printers, laptops, monitors.... it was THE Company, and it was called Hewlett-Packard, and everywhere you saw their logo you knew there was a properly engineered machine. Nowadays go figure what's inside an HP machine... half of the company spun off into many pieces, the other half disbundled... they have three different laptop line ups! All with the same characteristics and very confusing designs. How can I trust a company like this anymore !?

HPs fall can be traced back to one person: Carly Fiorina. I was living in the Silicon Valley at the time, and knew people working at HP, soon to be laid off, and hearing the drama in the news. Christ, Meg Whitman too? Surprised they're still in business at all. I'm still using the HP Financial calculator, 40+ years.

HP illustrates a military adage about too much change: "Order, counter-order, disorder." As one of the founders had noted, one of the strengths of the company had been focus. That was lost with this changing leadership, acquisitions and separations.

The rot started with Carly Fiorina. She was the first hire from outside the company and did not really understand HP's business. Ultimately it was the board of directors' poor judgement in hiring her that was the problem.

The reason why the company was called HP instead of PH was because they literally flipped a coin, and Hewlett won the toss.

I live in a former HP town. Giant campus that employed a lot of people. They were super awesome to staff in 80's and 90's but when Carly Fiorina took over everything there went south. Their facility provided fantastic jobs to people in 4 local towns but it's all gone now. I think they have a few things left on the campus but for the most part it's gone. Weird, it was such a big part of the community, huge, and now it's just a memory compared to what it was.

I've interviewed several HP senior managers at a conference around 2006-8 including Mark Hurd. Don't remember much of it, but for my story I was trying to pin them down on what exactly HP's core business was. Everybody gave a similar dismissive answer, that it was all of the above, whatever brought in revenue and that it didn't matter. They thought I was really annoying. Lack of strategic focus was their downfall imho.

Carly Fiorina also ran Lucent Technologies into the ground because of misleading business deals.

My dad worked for HP back in the 90s. He got moved into their subsidiary Agilent. Electrical engineering. He helped create modern optical mice. I remember using one of the prototypes he got to take home.

I joined HP in 1978 and retired in 2008, 31 years. It was the best company I ever worked at. I enjoyed going to work each day. The company began going downhill after Bill and Dave died. After that the concept of growing from within, both products and people. Top management was hired from outside and didn't understand the principles of "The HP way" and " management by objective". The original part of HP, test and measurement, we spun off as Agilent Technologies in clouding a good portion of HP Labs (you never mentioned thus). Much of the diversity of HP was.lost and al their eggs were put in one basket .

My dad owns a fairly small, but successful and lucrative business. I'm almost 30 and I've known most of his employees since I was a little kid--some were there even before I was born. Even the ones no longer with him had to leave due to outside factors or are still family friends we see regularly. It's because he respects them, gives them benefits, livable wage, raises, opportunities to advance, paid time off, sick leave, maternity AND paternity leave, and he provides a good work environment overall. What he pays them is still livable, but I know many of his employees could get higher paying jobs rom larger companies if they wanted to. They just don't, because they like working for him and know there are opportunities to advance. The importance of having loyal, happy employees cannot be understated. Honestly, I can't imagine how ridiculously successful Amazon would be in a five years if they treated their employees better. It might cost a bit of extra money at first, but once they found the perfect balance, I strongly believe that they'd be even more powerful than they are now. Which might be a good thing, but that's just my opinion. They're doing just fine as it is with their high turnover rate.

I worked at HP for 5 years (2000-2005). I agree with just about everything you said but would also add one "6. Internal Politics". HP was founded with a belief system called "The Rules of the Garage" with like 10 ideas that made the company what it was. One of those was "No Internal Politics". That ended under Carly Fiorina. Different divisions started to fight with each other, hide things from each other, and copy the devices that each was creating, among other things. This was one of the big downfalls for the company. A company is supposed to compete with other companies not with itself. That is just a waste. Maybe #7 could be too much outsourcing, offshoring, and H1-b visas that made employees constantly worried if they would lose their jobs. That is what happened to me. My whole product line went to India (95% of software development and testing, manufacturing was already in Singapore). Company used to be one of the most loved by employees. Now it is the punchline of jokes with my former team members.

We'd been dealing with HP since the early 70s (expensive test equipment, mostly) and had many friends that worked for them. We completely stopped buying anything from them by 1999, basically because all of the good employees (and friends) had already been forced out and dealing with the ones left was impossible. From world-leading expertise and professionalism down to Comcast-level of incompetence and slime in 25 years (to be fair, many companies have done it quicker). Nothing that followed had anything to do with the real HP, it was just a playpen for incompetent CEOs.

Back in the 1970s, I worked on different kinds of HP equipment, and I came to realize that the engineering design of the equipment was simply amazing. There must have been some really, really good engineers at HP. Steve Wozniak - who went on to be co-founder of Apple - was an amazing engineer, and there were probably a lot of other people like Steve at HP. In those days, the leaders of HP - William Hewlett and David Packard - were engineers. The downfall of HP was caused by the fact that the leaders who followed Hewlett and Packard were not great engineers. Today, companies like Google and Tesla are led by top-notch engineers, and it is extremely unlikely that a company can do first-rate engineering without having first-rate engineers running it. When you put salesmen or "managers" at the top of a company, these people just don't understand what it takes to do first-class engineering.

I've been working for hp right around the time the split happened and - oh boy - I totally agree with your list. I've only been working there for about 5 years but all the old employees already complained and were reminiscing about the "good old days" when they still received benefits like team-building trips or small stuff like free sandwiches for breakfast every Friday. At first, I liked working there as the pay was great and I still had a lot more benefits than the average worker in my country. But then they started to spread rumors about possible job cuts and everyone started to get scared. My manager even told us that half of our team had to be fired by the end of the year so some people that had been there for over 10 or 20 years left, using the bonus they offered. Turns out that there weren't any job cuts for our department. It was only the manager that got a bonus for cost reduction by getting people to leave. After this point, I knew I had to leave. All trust was gone and people were only hating on each other. So yeah, the way they treated their people was bad. Even the stupid rating system they had: At the end of every year the managers had to rate their people based on how they performed. The rating went from -- to ++. You only received a bonus if you achieved an average (which would be 0) or higher (+ or ++). The problem was that the manager was forced to rate at least one of his people with -. Didn't matter if everybody worked their asses off. Another weird thing was the "headcount". A manager had a certain number of "headcounts" for his department, which equals the workforce to employ. So far so good. But if an employee went on maternal leave (which can be up to 2 years in my country) that person would still fall into the headcount for this department. That way the manager wasn't allowed to hire a replacement for that person as all headcounts were still fully assigned. So the rest of the people had to do the work of that missing person. But the point that stood out to me very quickly was the lack of innovation. I worked there when tablets became a big thing. Apple was ruling the market with its iPad and Asian companies were slowly joining in with their more affordable options. Also, smartphones were super important already. That's when hp decided to bring out their own "smartphone" which was essentially a bad copy of the blackberry of that time. I got one for free. Trust me it was crap. Shortly after they released their own tablet and oh my that thing was even worse. We had a big release event at our facility and the first time I was able to touch it, I was in shock. It was small, slow, and had a bad screen. This was supposed to be the "next big thing"? I honestly believe that missing that mobile device train was one of their biggest downfalls. Of course, I also heard of some of the scandals. I started when Mark Hurd got fired and stayed until Meg Whitman took over. It was a mess. In the end, hp made me sick. Literally. I suffered from a massive burnout after doing after-hours on weekends just because they weren't willing to hire more people and because my manager put even more work on me although I asked for help for about a year. It was tough but I was able to define my boundaries after this experience. So I guess something good came out of it. But it's still sad to see how much potential this company had and they threw it out the window...

I did phone support for HP's Pavilion line when they were new, and I can tell you exactly what happened to HP. Their shareholders made the rather stupid decision to take decades of hard-earned goodwill (among the best in the world) and trade it for a quick hit of cash profits, to be share, ofc, among the shareholders. I cannot tell you how many engineers and scientists I talked to who told me they bought a Pavilion because there was literally no brand of technical equipment they trusted more. And after owning a Pavilion, they were all pretty convinced they would never buy another product bearing the HP logo. That's what happened to HP -- the shareholders looted it for every penny they could get their grimy hands on.

When I went to college (2005), HP was such a great brand it was the only company I considered buying my first laptop from. Now, I literally didn’t know they still existed.

I worked at EDS when it was acquired by HP. In the transition to HP's payroll system, a buddy's job code was translated incorrectly, inadvertently demoting him a level; this put his pay well over the maximum for the incorrect job code. Rather than just fix it, he was forced to take a 30% pay cut. It took them almost a year to correct a simple clerical error and "promote" him to the HP job code he should have been in anyway... and then despite repeated promises, they refused to reinstate his pay, even just going forward let alone retroactively. He immediately gave notice, and immediately landed a better job, closer to home, with more responsibility, making 20% more than he was making BEFORE the clerical error pay cut.

I worked at HP between 2009 and 2013 and the one leader that was a total mess was Leo Apotheker, what a total shotshow, he announced that HP will sell the laptop division then he retracted it, they wanted to get on the tablet craze and they changed their mind so on and so forth, all in all shares dropped a lot under his 10 month leadership HP lost a lot and he got out with a 20 million bonus. It is incredible that someone would perform so badly and still get such a huge bonus.

HP was like Motorola - in the right fields at the perfect time yet finding a way to underperform and disintegrate into a shell of its former self.

Here's another piece of inside baseball I'll divulge, back in 2013 I worked for a massive Heath Insurance company with the initials KP. We used Dell PC products at the time and had a catastrophic failure rate of 1.8% over three years. HP came to us and wanted us to be exclusive partners for PC's. We agreed on a tentative deal that we would partner with HP if the catastrophic failure rate was 0.1% or less over a three year trial, if they met that goal then all of KP would switch to HP PC's. The failure rate wasn't 0.1%, it was 0.03%! Now this is for Enterprise grade PC's, but no one is better then HP to this day and we tried Lenovo's as a test and they failed bad.

I worked for HP as a fresh graduate back in 2007 to 2008 in the HP Software division (it wasn't called that name yet at the time, but soon would be). As a new employee I was trained in the software they acquired from the then bankrupt (amidst their own scandals) Peregrine Software. But when I was sent into the field as it were, I was given all sorts of odd jobs except what I was trained for. Then the economic crisis hit the world and the project I was on downsized so much that I spent the next few months "on the bench" and my uncaring manager told me to "train myself". It wasn't until HP purchased EDS where I was also let go as part of a "last in, first out" kind of thing. Funnily enough, the best and most valuable time I had was in the last month where I was actually allowed to work with the software I was trained for. This particular division was also split off and became what is called Microfocus today.

I worked in government owned biggest company in Greece, R&D dept in electronics. We already had o lot of HP and Tektronix lab instruments, but we wanted a logic analyzer and a digital scope. So we visited HP hq in Greece to discuss it. Remember those middle 80s huge color page HP CATALOG books with hard covers, listing the edge of technology in lab measurements and instrumentation, including microwave semiconductors and modules? Well, forget them... They sell crap printers now. And they force users to buy unreasonably expensive replacements. I miss the good old HP.

If you look at it, HP has pretty much followed the same direction as other computer companies including IBM with the same results for the most part. They focus on the bottom line and lose sight of what the company was founded on.

My Pikachu’s HP declined too

HP is great! I work on a large contract that uses all HP workstations and I'm getting lots of experience replacing hard drives, fans, motherboards and constantly reimagining (tho that last one is more of an operating system issue).

I worked for HP from the mid 90s to 2008, so I got the tail end of the Bill and Dave era and saw its decline first-hand. Suddenly it wasn't about quality or innovation, as the Company Man says, but about market share and shareholder value. They started using laserjet engines manufactured by Canon, they released firmware and software before it had been thoroughly tested, etc. etc. Then with Carly the purges - ahem, layoffs - began and we employees couldn't be sure one year to the next if we'd still have a job in a year, when the layoffs happened like clockwork. We lost a lot of really great, competent engineers. In other words, HP went from being something truly special to just another average corporate entity selling mediocre products. When I was laid off in 2008 I never looked back. In fact, the company I work for now (where I went right after HP) has reaped the benefit of HP's decline by hiring lots of "HP refugees" like myself.

My biggest beef with HP, aside from their disposable printers that require expensive ink carts, was definitely the Compaq buy out. When I worked as a server administrator from 2000 to 2002, we had Compaq servers and had great service from them. But once the "New HP" took over, the quality of their tech support became so abysmal that our company switched contracts and bought servers from IBM instead. But we still had the old Compaq servers running NT 4.0 that still had to be serviced and I had many infuriating phones calls with HP. So yeah, HP went downhill since Carly Fiona came along and since then had started a trend of CEO's that purposely bankrupt companies to get severance checks...

It seems like Hewlett-Packard Enterprises is the real successor to the parent company and HP is just a reincarnation of compaq.

I love your videos, they're so innovative and full of information in a really entertaining way.

I spent half a career at IBM. It has a similar history. Wall Street CEOs took over in the age of financialization. Innovation tanked and shareholder return was first priority. Now they are just zombies with no clear mission or product yet executive compensation is greater than ever. It's one sorry tale.

Well HP declines when you take damage. You just need to take a health potion or a short rest to recover your HP to normal. (:

Carly Fironia was the downfall of HP she tried to sell the only thing HP was good for and that was printers.

The reasons behind HP, are absolutely spot on. I know how it used to feel with the company. Leadership really killed it.

I worked for DEC and then Compaq then HP. At a board meeting Carli said "customer service costs too much, we need to get rid of it. She was clueless about what makes customers come back. That's when I decided to leave.

HP was once a leader in making analytical laboratory instrumentation. The HP 5890 gas chromatograph was, and still is, a lab standard. Ever seen "My Cousin Vinnie"? HP spun off that part of their business as "Agilent". As a retired chemist, I would find that story fascinating.

Former HP employee. I started in the “old” HP and left during the Meg era. I left when the majority of engineering managers independently confided in me that there was no way they were going to meet any product development promises because 30% of their staff had quit. IMO the worst CEO was Hurd.

My sister worked at Compaq at their Houston campus in the late '90s and early '00s. The merger sent morale plummeting into the ground and everyone was left wondering when the other shoe would drop. The sense was that HP "conquered" Compaq and Carly Fiorina's visit in 2002 was really more of a victory lap - they had scrubbed practically all of the Compaq signage for that visit while the CEOs toured the campus in a golf cart. Ironically that merger did little to help HP's market share, they were beaten by Dell by the end of the decade.

When I arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977, HP was one of the most admired companies here.

we got a great price on an HP laptop back on black friday 2020. stupid thing just randomly killed off last month. never buying an HP product again no matter how good the price is

A good one would be “the decline/what happened to Packard Bell?” They were a big seller of PCs in the late 80s till the late 90s. I remember them being big as a kid and would always confuse them and HP.

What happens with nearly every company. When the original founders leave and they take the company public, the new board decides that profit > everything else so they maximize shareholder profits to the longterm detriment of the company. This leads to the company HAVING to vertically integrate because the CEO and board have to *enforce* changes rather than having a leadership team that decides on what direction to take the company based on what will be best for the long term.

What happened? I bought an HP41CX calculator in the early '80s. Absolutely loved the calculator and the brand. In 1985 I ran an HP 5793A gas chromatograph. Impressed by the quality and the depth of reliability to support scientific research. I bought my first inkjet in 1991, and once I figured out that paper smoothness mattered a lot, I absolutely loved the printer in the brand. All products had outstanding reliability and were worth at least a 20-35% price premium. Then, starting in the 2000s I started buying printers and had mixed results. I thought I'd just gotten a lemon and was unlucky. Then, after several more printers, I realized that I wasn't just unlucky, I was being stupid. The last straw was when my laser printer would tell my to order more cartridges more often than it would print successfully. It would frequently forget and lose its drivers. Horrible product and networking software. I bought a Brother printer. It has been so awesome. I advise friends and family to not take a risk on HP. The once great company has been cash-cowing the brand rather than growing the quality.

I have not only been a customer of HP, but I also worked in sales for them. I didn't work for HP itself, but I worked for a retailer who sold their products, those being laptops, desktops, monitors, but mostly printers. My experiences with that company hasn't given me the best view of them. Their laptops aren't great. They probably have the worst customer service out of the big three computer manufacturers, and not only have I heard horror stories from customers I have spoken to in the past, but I have also dealt with that firsthand. I had an employee discount so I bought an HP Pavilion laptop with it for my sister's graduation. The battery died within a year. After a long back and forth I sent it in for repair, and it came back with some damage to either the board or the ram. i don't know which it was, but they messed something up during repair and the laptop was unusable. After another back and forth I sent it in again, and they sent it back with the same problem. Eventually, after another long exchange, I finally got them to give me a replacement. This was a pretty nice Pavilion laptop by the way. For context I have a cheap Dell Inspiron, and after more than four years I haven't had any problems with it. There's not much I can say about their desktops and monitors. You don't really hear much about monitors unless they burst into flames, and I didn't sell many of their desktops. I sold a lot of printers though, and they're... fine. Printers suck in general, but at least these things weren't as bad as Epsons. However, they were overpriced for what you got, the ink was expensive, they weren't the most reliable things, and HP aggressively blocked use of third party ink. Plus they would engage in the tactic of swapping out their printers every six months or so. Why do they do this? Well I figured out why when a customer came into my store to tell me that her HP printer had died (and she hadn't had it for too long) and that she wanted a printer that used the same ink. I looked around, and we had none that used that ink, as the ones that did use it were swapped out a long time ago. To summarize, if your printer dies and you still have a lot of ink for it, you're out of luck. We sold a lot of HP printers at my store, but the only reason was because they were easy to up-sell people on warranties, and they contributed to our ESP and sales margins. I do have a couple HP products. My main printer is an HP LaserJet P1102w. It's a printer from 2010, and the thing still works great. But I've noticed that after this point the quality of their products gets worse. Now that I don't work in sales I don't have to hold anything back, but I don't think I would advise buying their products.

Speaking from the Enterprise side - I am a systems admin, and for my whole career, I have used Dell Poweredge servers. Lived by them - loved them - and trained my staff on their iLO features……… ………Until I assisted a client last year who already had some new HP ProLiant blades. And my life changed forever. Their HPE (HP Enterprise) brand is nearly flawless in my mind. Physical design is immaculate, iLO features are robust and comprehensive, and support experience was incredible. I’ll be definitely switching to HPE for future purchases.

I was a temp. employee at the Andover Hewlett Packard plant in 2010. The second or third week I was there, they called a bunch of people in my little packaging department into a meeting but told me to keep working. The full time employees with benefits came back half an hour later, saying that they were all getting let go in a few weeks. They were being replaced by the temps who got no benefits and $8.00 an hour. Six months later they did the same to us because 'things are slow.'

I have been working for hp for about 2 years now and I really love it, great company to work for

HP Instant Ink and REQUIRING the HP Smart app to setup printers (terrible for businesses) are the two dumbest things they've done recently that really turned me off of HP.

I lived in Silicon Valley in the 20th century, since moved, and I'm very familiar about HP, as well as an uncle that worked for HP up until the 1980s, where HP could almost be divided into two eras: 1. The era prior to PCs prior to the 1980s; which was on an industrial footing & scientific equipment with few consumer products. 2. The era of the PCs in the 1980s where HP made its name with consumer products. For people living in the Silicon Valley region of California from the 1950s through the '80s, getting a job at HP was highly coveted, as Company Man explained about some of the benefits they had. My uncle was fortunate to gotten hired there; and he informed me of his impressions of the company. But prior to his hire at HP . . . My uncle had a previous attitude of always wanting to run his own business and never wanting to work for someone else; well, after several business failures and in his 50s in age, was hired at HP in the late 1960s as a sheet metal fabricator. To hear him tell it, he no longer had the adversarial attitude of working for an employer; but instead, had nothing but positive raves about HP, it was like employment heaven for him. He strongly encouraged me to apply for work at HP, which I did in the mid-1970s; but alas, at the time I lacked the skill-sets and work experiences to be a hiring candidate at HP. Some of the employment highlights he positively raved about . . . He told me that HP had a _no layoff policy;_ that when a department had to be downsized, the employees would be sent to other divisions within HP that needed positions to be filled. With HP being a Silicon Valley company, it meant the impact of employee relocations were nil. It also gave the employees a reassuring sense of job security. Sick leave could be accrued indefinitely; never forfeited; and cashed-in upon retirement. In my uncle's case, he had over 90 days of sick leave that was paid out to him in full upon his retirement. That's over three months salary paid-out on top of his retirement pension from HP. All other companies I'm familiar with would never allow the accrual of sick leave from one year to the next. When it came to the employee breaks for the mornings and afternoons, food/beverage catering carts were brought into areas of the buildings for employees to enjoy snacks, beverages, fresh fruits, and pastries during those break periods. That I can attest to firsthand as I worked as a temporary contract staffer at HP in 1983 and enjoyed that benefit. All the above was back in an era when HP had few consumer products, with the bulk of their electronics being for industrial, scientific; or governmental sub-contracted work. There was never a critical word from the local media press about HP up to the 1980s. But, it seemed coincidental that when HP got heavily into the PC market and consumer goods, that critical whispers about the running of HP leaked out. And as Company Man explained, HP had many issues to contend with when Bill Hewlett and David Packard were out of the picture. I was acquainted with some people that worked with and were friends with Bill Hewlett and David Packard; where to hear it from those individuals, both Hewlett and Packard were low-keyed unassuming guys that lived in upscale homes that were unassuming; and NOT the ostentatious dwellings seen among the newer generations of high-tech leaders. Packard's house in Los Altos Hills, what was known as the Taaffe House, was a large scale California ranch style home in the middle of an apricot orchard. I was part of a civil engineering (CE) surveying crew that did work in the area in the early 1990s, and was most impressed with the modesty of the home and those well-manicured apricot trees; they were the best looking fruit-bearing trees I've ever seen. But then, when you have a multi-billion dollar wealth as Packard had, he could get the best arborists to care for those trees. The harvested apricots from those trees he shared with others; Packard would bring some to meetings he had with the CE planners for all to snack on in the early 1990s. Those meetings were for the viability to turn the Taaffe House into the HQ for the Packard Foundation after David's passing.

15 year career with hp from 85 until 2000. I kept up with what was happening inside my beloved company for several years after and was saddened to watch it decline. Bill and Dave never would have let all that happen. I never worked for another company after hp as an employee. Nobody came close to the “hp way”. Sometimes I wish a bunch of us 80’s and 90’s middle managers would march into the board room and take over now to get it back to how we know Bill and Dave wanted things run.

I built test stations using HP 2000 series minicomputers tied to HP-IB bus instruments. Fantastic choice of HP instruments and software to do data acquisition, testing and monitoring. I loved going through the giant HP catalog of instruments. Sad to see HP is now only focused on the PC business.

In the 80’s, as a student in electronics, HP was my dream company. I bought an HP 41C calculator that still functions to this day. All their lab equipments were the best that could be found ( together with Tektronix and Fluke). Their PCs were built like tanks, and reliable. When I think about HP, back in those years, the word RELIABILITY is what comes to my mind.

I remember back in '03, I got my first HP Desktop after having upgraded from my Gateway Essential. It had WinXP Home, 256 MB DDR RAM, 64 MB shared video memory, and a 64 GB HDD. The thing I remember most about it was the case. It had the coolest looking power button. It was a giant, semi-transparent button that glowed blue when you powered the machine on. The case itself was silver and black. I loved that thing. So much Diablo 2, so much RuneScape.

My dad got me an HP laptop in 2010 and still works fine.. I just got it a new battery and its doing good. Idk if other laptop brands last that much now

During the Carly Fiorina era, they came up with an "HP Invent" logo, which always made me think of the Shakespeare quote "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

I was working for Compaq at the time of the HP acquisition. It really didn't work, the 2 cultures were so different and they ended up keeping 2 teams doing the same thing, chasing the same clients. It didn't go well.

Bought an HP for school last year, never again. They have automated shipping time estimates that are meaningless, every order gets the same time because its just a standard wait they apply to everyone. Their laptops are ok at best and you will find something much cheaper without having to wait months with no communication.

When I started working as an avionics technician (general aviation - small planes) in 1970 HP was one of the most revered test equipment manufacturers. They went wrong when they went into consumer calculators and computers, which was (and still is) a brutal market. Success does not mean being a market leader in a big market, but being a market leader in specific markets... and stock value is not _the_ measure of success.

There was a time in the 1970s when many people (like me, for example) when considering the purchase of ANY kind of product, if made by HP, would buy that one. No other brands would even be considered. I knew I would be buying the best if I got the HP version of whatever it was. Then there was an abrupt change. They went from making the very best of everything to making crap that I wouldn't want to buy at any price. I have no idea what the current product quality is, as I haven't bought anything with the HP label on it in the past 20 years, and very likely won't ever again.

This easily can be a solid addition into the "Why They're Hated" series.

I'm watching this on an HP. It is a mediocre computer, but I've had it for 2 years and I haven't had durability issues.

Dave Packard posed the thought provoking question, "Does a corporation exist to make money or does it make money to exist?" His answer to that was the latter which was as counter to conventional thought then as it is today. His reason for making a profit was to enable the company to innovate so that the company could contribute to society, the community, their customers, and their employees. Shareholders could come along for the ride if they so chose. If a product idea did not innovate, it was scrapped. Once the company was turned over from the founding engineers to the board appointed accountants, quarter by quarter profits were the goal. We all knew that was not sustainable. I started at HP in 1980 and was on the design team of the first color inkject printer, the first All-in-One printer and the first large format inkject printer. Didn't see much in the way of "firsts" after that. I did live though layoff after layoff until I retired in 2015.

As a child, I found portable computing devices to be absolutely fascinating. At the top of this list where the programmable HP calculators, one of which my father had from his PhD program in the 1970s. At the time, I looked forward to getting one of those calculators one day. When I first entered college in the late 1990s, I made the sacrifice to buy a top-of-the-line HP graphing calculator for my engineering classes. It was twice as expensive as any single textbook. A few years later, I learned that HP had gotten rid of their calculator development division. All subsequent graphing calculators from HP were cheap knockoffs compared to the solid, sleek hardware that came before.

I worked for 3Com Corporation between '98 and '02 until about 50% of the IT department got the sack, including me. They eventually became a 'tiny little division' of HP. I can tell you my favourite HP product was the LaserJet II printer. It was one of several still in operation at the place I worked before and had about 600,000 pages on it when I left. I had a stockpile of spare parts an figured out that all you needed to fix a worn feed roller was a thick rubber band and some Crazy Glue. Parts were not easy to get if you werent an authorized HP dealer.

I was in IT for a while. HP used to make good hardware and lousy drivers. They have upgraded to making lousy hardware too. I side hustle by fixing PC's and laptops and wont work on HP products. In my opinion what is killing HP is the untenable desire of our stock market to punish companies for not growing each and every quarter. Sustainable profits are no longer enough companies have to grow every quarter or the stock market punish them. I'm seeing that with several companies. Corporations no longer care about the long term the only thing that matters is short term greed.

RU-vid served me this video, as I watch a lot of videos in which HP electronic lab equipment is used. Also I happen to have one of my HP calculator periods again at the moment... trying to understand my HP-48G a bit better, the one I could not afford when I was a student. It took this video to make me realize that the company which made all above, is the same which makes the mediocre laptops I encounter at clients sometimes.

My dad was an HP employee for probably about 20 years and he went from loving it to hating his life when they hired carly. I also ended up later becoming friends with someone else was was director-level at HP and he said the same thing. Carly destroyed that company, as well as the merger with compaq.

HP used to be a serious high-tech company. This was only alluded to in the video, but they sold some extremely expensive and specialized equipment for the RF (think satellite or cellphone communication) market. I'm still referencing some of their application notes today! It's the major pivot away from this core business to consumer computers that really lead to the decline of the company IMO.

I've had 9 laptops from them over the years I only ever bought hp because I've never had any problems ever on a single one I never knew they were declining but I did kind of think they were stagnating a bit in recent years the improvements in their laptops have been falling behind others brands.

They had an incompetent CEO who decided to carve up the company. Where was the board? When an IBM CEO wanted to carve up the company, the board fired him. They used to be important in instruments. Even when Tektronix dominated in oscilloscopes, you could find HP ‘scopes used to maintain the mainframe computers where I worked. Instruments were their original business.

I worked at HP Labs from 79 to 00. Bill and Dave would drop in and visit us in the Labs, which was so cool. Beer Busts. Milestone parties at Zott's. Profit sharing. Now it's clear, that was the tail end of the HP golden era. Fiorina made her first visit in the atrium, so we all had to go listen. First time I ever got up and walked out on a speaker. I just couldn't take listening to her. I left soon afterwards.

Bro I've had an HP laptop since 2019 that I genuinely put 5,000+ hours on, 30,000,000+ keystrokes on and the thing was never high speck but it still runs almost like the day I got it for what I need it to do still. These laptops are durable beyond any other brand I've ever had by a long shot.

The issue I have with HP is the quality of their products in every segment. Even some of their high end products have some very bizarre cost cutting measures.

Worked at HP from 1974 until 1999, and then at Agilent ( spin off ) from 1999 until 2001. I felt a “change” in the early 90’s. I blame a few Senior Executives who 1) pushed for high volume low margin consumer products, and 2) introduced a new annual business plan called “SCALE”, which stood for Short Term Commitment and Long Term Estimate. This had the effect of focusing on quarter-to-quarter profits at the expense of looking for new products, markets, and opportunities to make contributions to meeting customer needs. This led to milking the long successful Test and Measurement businesses, and shifting R&D $ to whole strings of product failures.

I worked for HP for 28 years, until 2005. My opinion of why HP declined is that the board of directors and upper management changed the measure of success from long term to short term. ie, rewards were based on the results of the current, or recent, quarter. As a result, long term planning, investment, and results suffered. Many (most?) of the reasons reasons listed in the video, and elsewhere, are consequences of this change.