HP used to be a trusted name in printers. They still do a few things well (like their network gear) but their home printers are utter crap.

They're garbage, through and through. Their ink is exorbitantly expensive, and they try to prevent you from refilling your own cartridges by using chips on them that count how many times you use them. When the chip thinks you should be out of ink (regardless of how much is actually left inside) it will shut you down and force you to swap it out. It's the same deal with toner and drums in their laser printers.

Their drivers are abysmal, and incredibly wasteful of resources. It comes with so much bundled crap that the downloads are quite regularly 150-250 megabytes. One type of printer we had took 30 minutes to configure itself, and another 30 minutes to install the driver! Ridiculous!

I won't touch their printers anymore, after all the trouble we've had at work with them. I hope that division of their company rots in hell.

Been sad watching them fall over the last 15 years.

they've had shiat profits for a while now. they just stopped hiding them with clever accounting tricks.

I'm totally guessing and DNRTFA, but I suppose that they just wrote off a big hit from the 3 billion spent on WebOS development and that isn't helping.

Weaver95: with profits tanking and revenue down, do you think their CEO will still get his bonus check this year?

If he does, it'll be in the form of a golden parachute. Leo Apotheker got fired a few months ago.

That said, their revenues were only down 3%. Most of the drop in profit was due to some huge aquisitions the company made.

Weaver95: with profits tanking and revenue down, do you think their CEO will still get his bonus check this year?

He won't.

CSB:

I used to do tech support for HP printers - everything from your on-desk lasers to your 9500s (10s of thousands of dollars).

Not bad, but we were severely under trained. If you did find something out, something genuinely flawed, and a fix for it, HP would ignore you. We have VPN access to HP systems, looked like HP employees, but we were not.

On such printer, the 2800 series, was just atrocious. The software could take 3 hours to install, and the just fail. The HP-approved approach was uninstall and try again. And again, and again. It would eventually work sadly. I did some snooping and found ways to cut down the uninstall to about 15 mins instead of an hour, but it was heavily opposed.

Most of the people working there had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Fresh meat weekly off the streets hired on for $12 an hour.

And then they outsourced a bulk of the work above us to Costa Rica. We would get customers, fairly important ones, with a printer that was dead. We'd swap out the power supply, main board, etc. - it still wouldn't turn on. To approve replacing these $15,000 machines, we'd need a sign-of from the "engineers". We'd send off a report, something fairly concise: machine doesn't turn on. 5 other models all work fine in the same outlet. Swap in new [parts listed]. No sign of power." The responses would be "you did not print engine test page. cannot replace without engine test print". Try to explain to them that it doesn't do that until it turns on? Good luck.

Yet when I plug them into a linux computer they "just work"

BOggling

ugh

HP is total and utter crap.

Somebody mentioned the printers, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Have you used their laptops? They make the most disposable laptops in the world. I'd rather buy a laptop from a Chinese manufacturer named "pin pin happy time go lucky yes" than an HP laptop.

Have had 5 HP laptops just completely DIE in a span of 3 years, different models and I have to fight HP over their customer service crap to get them replaced.

Avoid like the plague.

/Anecdotal evidence!!!!
//csb

After seeing the TouchPad sell like hotcakes at a lower pricepoint they should have kept it at that pricepoint as a loss leader and pulled an Apple by pulling a percentage of the revenue off the WebOS store. Saturate the market with your product and support the developers and the money(and karma) will come back to you

Weaver95: with profits tanking and revenue down, do you think their CEO will still get his bonus check this year?

They fired Leo and brought in Meg Whitman. I don't think Leo left with anything sizable.

and I know you know who Leo is ;)

Is the garage in Palo Alto still available?

I hope the ghost of webOS haunts them for years. Bastards.

wow, so 3% of revenue = 91% profits? that is SOME small margins right there. i knew they were slim, but wow.

my only experience with HP has been consumer products (printers, computers, etc.) They have all been offensively bad for about 10 years for me. i quit buying from them 5 years ago and will never go back.

/maybe their other services are fine
//might never know

I love my HP Touchpad.

WebOS is pretty cool.

The Flexecutioner: wow, so 3% of revenue = 91% profits? that is SOME small margins right there. i knew they were slim, but wow

Not the whole story, you have to look at the other side of the ledger:

Revenue - expenditures = profit.

Their expenditures were way, way higher, as they spent a couple billion on acquisitions of other companies.

The Flexecutioner: my only experience with HP has been consumer products (printers, computers, etc.) They have all been offensively bad for about 10 years for me. i quit buying from them 5 years ago and will never go back.

I used to agree with you. Then last year I bought an HP Envy laptop. It's flat-out the best PC laptop out there.

MrSteve007: The Flexecutioner: wow, so 3% of revenue = 91% profits? that is SOME small margins right there. i knew they were slim, but wow

Not the whole story, you have to look at the other side of the ledger:

Revenue - expenditures = profit.

Their expenditures were way, way higher, as they spent a couple billion on acquisitions of other companies.

The Flexecutioner: my only experience with HP has been consumer products (printers, computers, etc.) They have all been offensively bad for about 10 years for me. i quit buying from them 5 years ago and will never go back.

I used to agree with you. Then last year I bought an HP Envy laptop. It's flat-out the best PC laptop out there.
[cdn.ubergizmo.com image 468x354]

i was just being snarky with the revenue/costs/profits thing. and HPs bloatware ruined it mostly for me with their peripherals. im sure the laptop is good, but also paying premiums on name-association for things like Beats by Dre annoy me too. I've always rejected certain name brand premiums mostly on principle and less on actual quality. Beats, while good and all, are just too expensive for me.

/built my last comp from scratch
//bought my previous 3 custom built from ibuypower

I have a burning hate for HP Printers and the drivers that come with them. But, my company still insists on buying them year after year. And year after year I get to fix/replace them.

/4000+ employees
//All have HP All In Ones
///Yeah I Mad

Charlie Freak: So much this. After we burned through our last two HP printers, I switched to Brother and I'm never looking back.

Also bought a Brother - its now 9 months old and working great. With is 3 months longer than my last HP printer lasted.

/when I hit print - it prints!
//unlike the HP - which you would have to take bets on whether the damn thing would jam or not

MrSteve007: Their expenditures were way, way higher, as they spent a couple billion on acquisitions of other companies.

Some of which they just shut down after buying. Great leadership there.

bravian: Also bought a Brother - its now 9 months old and working great. With is 3 months longer than my last HP printer lasted.

/when I hit print - it prints!
//unlike the HP - which you would have to take bets on whether the damn thing would jam or not

And it costs a grand total of $10 for a multipack of cartridges.

The official ones can also be forced to print from by using a sharpie on the glass in front of the sensor.

Manufacturing garbage and expecting people to keep buying it is biting Hewlett-Packard-Bell in the ass.

The Flexecutioner: i was just being snarky with the revenue/costs/profits thing. and HPs bloatware ruined it mostly for me with their peripherals. im sure the laptop is good, but also paying premiums on name-association for things like Beats by Dre annoy me too. I've always rejected certain name brand premiums mostly on principle and less on actual quality. Beats, while good and all, are just too expensive for me.

I bought one as part of their 'black friday' deals from last year. Considering it was $500 off, with free shipping - I didn't pay much of a premium.

/wonder if they'll have the same deal this year
//wife got it as part of the divorce

The Flexecutioner:
paying premiums on name-association for things like Beats by Dre annoy me too. I've always rejected certain name brand premiums mostly on principle and less on actual quality. Beats, while good and all, are just too expensive for me.

/built my last comp from scratch
//bought my previous 3 custom built from ibuypower

I assure you, Dr. Dre worked long and hard in his Science Lab to bring you tbose beats. He is a doctor, of course.

/a doctor of beats.

MrSteve007: I used to agree with you. Then last year I bought an HP Envy laptop. It's flat-out the best PC laptop out there.
[cdn.ubergizmo.com image 468x354]

If they can turn it around, HP still has a chance of being a very successful company. The brand that has been built over the last 30 years still stand for something, even if people have negative views of their current product line.

The best way to turn their business around is to stop racing Dell to the bottom of the cheapest bargain bin computers, and set their sights competing with Apple. Apple has consistently shown that a quality product will attract buyers if the sales department can STFU and let the marketing department simply connect customers with quality products.

A easy way to separate their old products from the new would be to:

1. Not have junkware in their consumer or business products. This means having products that will AT LEAST reasonably last for 4 years without the capacitors burning out because they wanted to save $3 a unit in production costs. That means designing printer drivers keeping in mind that people don't want to sit for an hour waiting for their printer to 'configure' itself.

(Yes I realize the engineering difficulties of programming a driver that will work with every hardware configuration out there. But does the customer really need to download/use a driver that has config files for a configuration that they're not using?)

2. Redesign the look and feel of their products to more accurately reflect the design and ergonomic taste of the public. Make it simple and make it cool. (That laptop pic in the quoted post actually looks attractive).

3. SIMPLIFY the product line. For each market segment HP wants to target, they should have 2, maybe 3 base models (cheap/expensive/uber) with customization options from there. Currently there seems to be a plethora of options that customers get lost choosing from (3 different levels of consumer products with 4-7 options for each "level" of computing that a customer wants to choose from).

4. Push their software partners (ie Microsoft) to produce products that show the hardware's useability. Take an active role in suggesting improvements.

Those choices would make the company healthier and more competitive.


/I think I'd make a good CEO