I had (somehow) forgotten her California campaign.

The old HP was a great company. Great internal research, great innovative products, for a premium (but non-usury) price. I've told my story about using an HP Integral PC in grad school. It was an amazing lunchbox PC for the time. http://books.google....onepage&q&f=false The one we had was donated by HP. The list price was ~ $5000 with a 10 MB HP-IB hard drive.

But they were in a cut-throat business and had to change dramatically in the many markets they were in beginning in the late 1980s. They were at MS's mercy in the PC business. They had the talent to innovate there (witness NewWave - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_NewWave ), but MS killed that in Win95. They were undercut by outfits in the Far East in the instrumentation markets. They were at the US stock market's mercy, along with many other great US companies. Etc.

South Korea was willing to (directly and indirectly) invest billions over decades building up Samsung and other behemoths. Now they have the infrastructure, knowledge, and market share to control their destiny for years to come. Intel is likely to have trouble competing with them (and TSMC) in the not-too-distant future. HP, being in so many markets but without the size and support necessary to compete with state-of-the-art semiconductors, would have had a very tough time no matter who was in charge.

Yes, based on her governor campaign, one wouldn't expect her to be a good fit for the old HP. Yes, Sculley wasn't a good fit for Apple's culture and for getting the best out of it - especially in retrospect. But Jobs was unique. It may well be that she's spinning madly, under the mistaken belief that she can blame the auditors and Autonomy's former management. I dunno. But I do know that the press too often gets things wrong. When non-public information is thrown around in the press with strong language, with billions at stake for those involved, and which can easily be slanted to feed preconceptions, well, one can't take the stories at face value.

For example: http://www.wired.com...m/2012/12/launch/

Last week, North Korea finally managed to put an object into orbit around the Earth after 14 years of trying. The event was greeted with hysterical headlines, about how the whole thing was a likely a missile test and most certainly a failure of Western intelligence. Most of those headlines were dead wrong.

There are many questions yet to be answered about this launch and what it means. Some of them will take weeks or months to determine, others may never be answered satisfactorily. But there’s enough information already in the public domain to answer basic questions about the launch. News flash: Most of the initial reports about it were total misfires.

[...]


Maybe my sexism detector's sensitivity was turned up too much, too.

FWIW.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.