Hewlett Packard Could Have Been Apple, But It Made 5 Poor Decisions

Business Insider ^ | 02/01/2013 | Julie Bort

[SeekAndFind]

Back in the 1970's Steve Wozniak worked for Hewlett Packard designing its hit product, engineering calculators. At night and on the weekends, often in his HP cubicle, he tinkered on a little project that would one day become the Apple I computer.

Woz designed the hardware, circuit boards and operating system for the Apple I.

Woz took his pet project to HP and "begged" them to manufacture the PC, he told Georgia State University students on Wednesday.

"Five times they turned me down," the Atlanta Business Chronicle quotes Wozniak from his lecture.

When Steve Jobs saw the Apple I, he recognized its potential.

Jobs didn't say, "Oh my gosh, let's start a computer company," Wozniak recalls. "He said, "Let's start a company to build one little part — a printed circuit board, so people can assemble a computer. Let's build it for $20 and sell it for $40."

[Mr. K]

I’m with you

I bvought one HP computer- The secondary drive bay was welded shut so you could not install a second drive. For the entire time I owned it my 2nd hard drive was hangin by the wires

To remove a broke flobby drive I had to break apart the front plastic. there was a weird port in the fron that NOBODY made anything for...

When I needed drivers the tech support people acted like they were from a foreign country and didnt understand what I wanted - I knew more then them- it was like they contracted with the first company from Inda in the phone book

Total POS and not even their printers are any good anymore. I bought an inkjet all-in-one and it would shake so bad I thought it was going to bring my desk down

[William Tell]

Gaffer said: "Sold instrumentation to Agilent;"

A much more accurate description is: "Spun off the instrument making divisions of the company, which then adopted the name Agilent." Every Agilent employee, on the day of the spin-off, had been a Hewlett-Packard employee the day before.

It was a difficult adjustment for those in Agilent to give up using the "Hewlett-Packard" name. Hewlett and Packard had founded and grown the company making very well-respected Hewlett-Packard instrumentation for decades.

The decision was evidently based on the fact that the computer side of the house needed the recognition of the Hewlett-Packard brand name for the computers and printers more than the instrumentation side of the house needed the name.

[CodeToad]

#6. Hired a dumb broad that knew nothing about HP to be the CEO. She ran it into the ground. So much for her thinking HP was “just a printer company”.