HP Digital Commericals

dylanzeppelin · Jan 6, 2005

I just find them to be so awesome, with the likes of music groups of the Kinks and the Cure supplying the background.. I just love the way they do that deal with the pictures.. so fascinating, anybody know what I am talking about?!?

WildRain · Jan 17, 2005

Phenomenal ad campaign! My favorite is the one with the guy lip-syncing "Picture Book" as he holds up the hollow squares, which in turn capture what's seen through them and become photos. For anyone who's not seen it, it's the "François" commercial on this page.

Cheers,
Jeremy

kidswillbeskeletons · Feb 21, 2005

if anything is most incentive not to buy their products.
i hate it when companies try to use music that is popular to sell their fucking products

thrawn · Feb 24, 2005

kidswillbeskeletons said:

if anything is most incentive not to buy their products.
i hate it when companies try to use music that is popular to sell their fucking products
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I think its more the inguenity of the ad's than the products themselves.

SpliffVortex · Feb 26, 2005

i have a HP pavilion 754n . they dont sell a replacement on and off switch .my 400 watt power suplly wont fit "it sits on top until i get a new case" to keep this short im buiding one next.and ill i never buy a factory built PC again.

Co0kiezGurl · Feb 27, 2005

Yeah HPs suck, but I love that commercial

SpliffVortex · Feb 28, 2005

Co0kiezGurl said:

Yeah HPs suck, but I love that commercial
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nothing sucks more than my first PC in 2001 a compaq presario 800mhz with a little 40 MB HD slow and noisy and ready for this the nortorius Window Me . and 128MB of memorie. i did not buy it it was a gift. thank god it came with a recovery disc.

Maggie Sugar · Feb 28, 2005

I love the picture book commercial. I always end up singing the song. LOL. I LIKE my HP printer. My dh works in Technology, and they use a LOT of HP products in their R&D and he loves them, too.

EllisDTripp · Feb 28, 2005

Maggie Sugar said:

My dh works in Technology, and they use a LOT of HP products in their R&D and he loves them, too.
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Unfortunately, those products are no longer made by HP. All of their former test and measurement, diagnostic, and laboratory products were "spun off" into a totally separate company called Agilent Technologies.

http://www.agilent.com

The current CEO of HP was just recently forced to resign by her board of directors because of the company's financial nosedive during her watch. She decided (against the advice of just about everyone, including founder Bill Hewlett) to abandon the company's "core competencies" in industrial test equipment (the business that Hewlett and Dave Packard started in a garage in Palo Alto!), where HP had been a driving force since the 1930s, and decided to merge with Compaq and focus solely on the consumer PC market. HP is now just one more seller of commodity products in a market with minimal profit margins, ruthless offshore competition, and limited room for innovation. A good article on the rise and fall of HP is here:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2005/02/10/carly/

The company that more or less FOUNDED "Silicon Valley" is now just a name being plastered on somebody else's products. Sad.... At least the company now has the "honor" of paying for their former CEO's $42,000,000 "golden parachute". Not a bad payday for essentially destroying a company, no?

Maggie Sugar · Feb 28, 2005

Wow. I was probably going on old info. I kinda tune Bear out when he gets tech-talkie, LOL. I just used to hear HP come up a lot. I wasn't aware that their products were made by someone else.

Our HP Printer/scanner/copier/fax died, one day, due to a carraige problem, and they sent me a new one Fed Ex, barely any questions asked. I was pretty happy.

I'll read those links. Thank you, Ellis.

EllisDTripp · Feb 28, 2005

Printers are about the only decent product line HP has left anymore, and Carly was trying to get rid of those just before the board dumped her! I have an OLD HP LaserJet II that just keeps going day after day, for more than 10 years. Thing is built like a tank! Unfortunately, the build quality of their newer printers is a pale imitation of their early stuff.

As an electronic designer, I work with HP/Agilent test gear all the time, and have a few friends who worked for the company before and during the "Reign of Terror" who were forced out by the Agilent spinoff. What happened to this once proud company will go down in business history as one of the great disasters of American industry. HP always had a corporate culture (The "HP Way") that treated employees with respect and emphasized community involvement and progressive business practices. All that came crashing down with the appearance of Ms. Fiorina.

The text of the Salon article, in case you don't want to sit through their ads to read it:

End of a hatchet woman
Hewlett-Packard's ousted CEO Carly Fiorina destroyed a great company's creative soul and trashed its business.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Lawrence M. Fisher

Feb. 10, 2005 | Carleton S. Fiorina's fall from grace was dramatic, as was most of her career. But don't cry for Carly; her way of doing business remains ascendant, and has already triumphed over that quaint set of humanistic values known as "The HP Way."

I well remember my first meeting with Carly, who from an early date seemed destined to be one of those first-name-only stars like Cher or Madonna. Months before Hewlett-Packard named her its chief executive, the company had invited me and John Markoff, my friend and colleague at the New York Times, to spend a day with the engineers at its legendary research labs. But midway through our morning in nerd nirvana, Carly paid us a "surprise" visit.

She was, of course, charming, well-coiffed and coutured, as nearly every article at the time would mention. And as I watched her perform, amid an awkward group of guys who really were wearing short-sleeved sta-press shirts with pocket protectors, I realized I was seeing the new and old faces of Silicon Valley, up close and personal.

On one side of the hall were these unassuming but enormously bright individuals who came to work each day on Page Mill Road, in Palo Alto, Calif., not to make a killing in high tech, but for the sheer joy of inventing cool things. On the other was the perfect pitch person, singing Wall Street's tune absolutely in key.

From early in her six-year reign, Carly's mendacity was breathtaking, as she methodically eviscerated HP of everything the company once stood for. Is that too harsh? Recall the "invent" campaign, launched soon after she joined, where she plastered billboards and ads with the image of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's sainted Palo Alto garage, even as she was slashing the company's research budget and laying off scores of real-life inventors. After all, tinkering with the outer reaches of particle physics may be cool, but it's hardly a bottom-line contributor, not this quarter anyway.

At the same time, the truly inventive side of Hewlett-Packard, as well as its historical heritage, was being spun off as a separate company, now known as Agilent. To be fair, HP's board initiated this thrilling bit of stupidity before hiring Carly, but she had plenty of time to stop it and did not.

HP's test and measurement instruments, direct descendants of the audio oscillators that launched the company in 1939, were and are considered the best that money can buy. Despite increasing global competition, these products command a premium price and maintain high profit margins because they are simply higher performing, better built and more innovative than the offerings of other companies. They are, in a word, "differentiated."

Yet Carly and the HP board chose to dump this profitable business to concentrate on commodity products like printers and PCs. Why? The answer at the time was that securities analysts accustomed to following straightforward companies such as Dell Computer really couldn't understand a complex business like test and measurement. And, to be sure, Wall Street's shills fell into lockstep, praising the divestiture as a brilliant strategic move that would, in that tired phrase, increase shareholder value.

As HP's best and brightest headed for the doors, whether they jumped or were pushed, some of them were not shy about calling a reporter who had covered the company for many years. As I talked to these talented people from every level of the company, one interpretation of events emerged with remarkable consistency. Carly had no intention of sticking around Hewlett-Packard for very long, these folks said. Her real intent was to do a quick, Lee Iacocca-style turnaround, accompanied by the best autobiography money could buy, and in 2004 run for the U.S. Senate, against Barbara Boxer.

It seemed a little far-fetched, but soon the photo-op shots of Carly in the company of high-ranking Republicans began proliferating. Even as Carly's script for HP ran into harsher realities, even as Boxer retained her seat, the story never really died. And in retrospect, it offers the only explanation that makes any sense at all of Carly's biggest strategic move. I'm referring here to the acquisition of the Compaq Computer Corp.

Prior to launching that deal, Carly had said her intention was to pattern HP after Lou Gerstner's version of IBM, which had successfully leveraged its low-margin hardware business to sell high-margin consulting services. To that end, she initially negotiated to acquire the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting firm. She punted at the last minute, and IBM ultimately acquired PwC's jilted consultants at a substantial discount.

Undaunted, in 2002 Carly moved to acquire Compaq, which was bleeding market share to Dell and losing money at an even faster rate than HP's PC business. Never mind that no big merger in the history of high tech had ever really worked; never mind that Compaq itself had already made two big acquisitions -- Digital Equipment Corp. and Tandem Computer -- that had failed to add any value; never mind that Dell rapidly seized on the inevitable uncertainty to take even more customers away from both HP and Compaq. Even the pointed opposition of founder's son Walter Hewlett didn't dissuade Carly and the HP board from this historic blunder.

At the time, I was on staff at a consulting firm that was retained by one of the family foundations to analyze the merger. In the process, we spoke with a number of people close to both companies and their remarks were stunning. "The collision of two garbage trucks," was how one put it. "Doubling down on a dog," was another take. Without naming the firm, or their specific recommendations, it was obvious to anyone who cared to look that Carly's projections could only materialize if IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems took a collective nap for the next five years, and every single one of her rosiest scenarios came true at once. Any resemblance to the Bush budget is entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

So why did she do it? For one reason: Wall Street loves big mergers. The investment banks collect immense fees for their roles as advisors, regardless of the ultimate soundness of the deal. And their securities analysts all write positive reports, which prompt a lot of rubes to buy shares, which generates a flood of trading commissions. Big mergers and acquisitions are almost always a net negative for the companies and communities involved, but a win-win for the bankers, lawyers and other deal makers.

A second reason is that it should have worked well enough for Carly to declare victory and move on to the political stage. Despite their dismal long-term success record, big mergers usually can "achieve synergies," Wall Street-speak for massive layoffs, which reduce costs enough to show a big if fleeting bump in earnings per share.

There was a brief period where the credulous might have believed that this merger was working, thanks entirely to such redundancies eliminated and other corporate bloodletting. But it didn't last, as Carol Loomis' masterful article in last week's Fortune magazine made all too clear. Loomis did the tough analytical work that the board should have done, published it for all to see, and in the end, HP's recalcitrant directors had to act.

To those who will inevitably say that Carly has been singled out for harsh treatment because she is a woman, nonsense. Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, Meg Whitman of eBay and Carol Bartz of Autodesk, among others, have all shown that a Y chromosome is no prerequisite to performing the CEO's role with quiet competetence. What these leaders share besides their gender is they don't make promises they can't possibly keep.

As the Fortune article makes clear, Carly's numbers didn't work because they couldn't work, which is of course what folks like Walter Hewlett were saying three years ago. And so a once great company is a shadow of its former self, and Fiorina is out of a job. But don't cry for Carly. Given her way with numbers, there's surely a spot for her in the Bush administration. Secretary of the treasury, perhaps.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Lawrence M. Fisher covered business and technology for the New York Times for 15 years, and has written for dozens of other publications.
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Maggie Sugar · Mar 1, 2005

That's really sad. HP used to be a good company. Corporate greed spoils everything.

Faerie · Mar 1, 2005

They are cool commercials

EllisDTripp · Mar 5, 2005

Another good piece on Carly's "Reign of Terror", from an engineer that worked in their corporate research center:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/wo/wo_delio030405.asp

Carly's Way
As Told to Michelle Delio March 4, 2005

An electronic engineer who worked as a Research Scientist at the Hewlett-Packard Imaging Systems Laboratory starting in 1975 until he resigned in 2003, G.S. thought HP represented the very best of American character -- "a spirit of adventure and a belief in unlimited possibilities."

He charges, though, that starting in 2000 the can-do attitude was killed by management choices intended to placate nervous investors and board members rather than benefit the company and its workers over the long-term. He warns that sustained cut-backs to R&D budgets over the past half-decade may have irreversibly damaged H-P and the entire U.S. technology industry.

I snuck out of Hungary in 1973, one week after I was told that if I ever wanted to advance as an engineer, I would have to join the Communist Party.

Being a good party member was far more important than your skill level, and so my boss was a man who had been a pig farmer. After decades spent raising hogs, he suddenly was supervising dozens of machinists, most of whom had engineering degrees and had built bridges and buildings until we were reassigned to "practical and useful" work -- making parts for factory machines.

Working for Carly Fiorina reminded me of my days working for that farmer. I remember the first time she walked into the Hewlett-Packard labs. She said that our new company slogan was "Invent." Then she told us that the technology industry would never again be as exciting and profitable as it was in the '90s. That we'd all need to grow up now and face that fact.

I knew from that moment that HP's best days were behind us.

Carly was a marketing person put in change of engineers, a person who cared nothing about the art and beauty of technology. She just wanted saleable stock to bring to market.

My uncle gave me a present when I first arrived in America -- an HP-35 Scientific Calculator, the first handheld scientific calculator.

"People here don't use slide rules anymore," he says.

Well, that turned out to be not quite true, but my HP-35 was beautiful. It had integrated circuits and LEDs, brand new things that had been developed in HP Labs. When I got a job at HP's Palo Alto lab two years later, I was proud. You were encouraged to work on whatever excited you.

Bill Hewlett used to remind us that "The marketing guys said the HP-35 would be a failure because it was too small, and then we couldn't make them fast enough to meet the demand. The marketing folks don't know everything."

It was Bill's idea to start HP Labs in 1966. He figured there should be a place where people could focus on building the future. I worked on projects such as thermal inkjet printing because I thought dot matrix printouts were ugly. And I worked on miniaturizing huge industrial inkjet printers because I thought it would be great if people could print wonderful color images from their desktop PCs.

We had no idea when we started what these projects would lead. We just wondered "what would happen if?".

Our biggest mistake at HP Labs came from being too cautious. We passed on developing Steve Wozniak's cheap little personal computer. Woz was working in HP's lab, on calculator projects, at the time. We knew the computer idea was great, but we couldn't work out how to market it, so we passed.

The lab was never packed with genius marketers. Carly told us we had no business sense, and that every project needed to make a profit within three years or less.

She usually said that right before the research budget got slashed again and more lab employees were laid off.

In mid-2002, HP's labs became solely focused on finding ways for other businesses to save money. This led to some good projects -- grid computing, self-maintaining servers, self-healing systems. But the emphasis was not on creating new or better technology, just technology that would boost the bottom-line.

I left in late 2003.

Profit is every CEO's major focus. Research almost always benefits an entire industry more than any particular company. And research doesn't have immediate results.

Sometimes it doesn't have the results that CEOs want. You invent a product that has a longer life-cycle, that doesn't need constant refills or upgrades. Research is expensive and unpredictable. Things that today's business world frowns on.

New technology typically has a five-year development cycle. The U.S. technology business stopped being serious about research in 2000 and the results are showing now.

People have a little more money but there's nothing they want to buy. There's nothing that makes you say, 'Wow." Ten years ago I was seeing something interesting every month, but now we're touting bloated software and cute case designs as innovation.

The damage to HP and the U.S. technology industry at large may already be irreversible. If we start investing today and let our engineers play we might have something exciting to show people in 2010. That's a long time to wait for the next big wow.

To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.
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And get this, Fiorina might be next in line to head the World Bank, after edging out NeoCon hack Paul Wolfowitz!

http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/01/news/international/worldbank_wolfowitz/?cnn=yes

SpliffVortex · Mar 5, 2005

http://www.m90.org/view_image.php?image_id=3483

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HP Digital Commericals

dylanzeppelin daydream believer

WildRain Member

kidswillbeskeletons Member

thrawn Member

SpliffVortex Senior Member

Co0kiezGurl Banned

SpliffVortex Senior Member

Maggie Sugar Senior Member

EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

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EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

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Faerie Peachy

EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

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HP Digital Commericals

dylanzeppelin daydream believer

WildRain Member

kidswillbeskeletons Member

thrawn Member

SpliffVortex Senior Member

Co0kiezGurl Banned

SpliffVortex Senior Member

Maggie Sugar Senior Member

EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

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EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

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Faerie Peachy

EllisDTripp Green Secessionist

SpliffVortex Senior Member

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