As a former employee of Agilent, I have to say that the saddest thing about the HP story is that another company <i>got away with the name</i>. To the extent that the real Hewlett-Packard still exists, Agilent is the real Hewlett-Packard. (The company spun itself into two parts in the 1990s.)<p>And so it's painful to read all these stories about how the HP Way is dead dead dead, about how the company founded by Bill and Dave has been trashed, et cetera. In fact, the company founded by Bill and Dave isn't quite dead. It just donated the HP name -- and entirely too many unfortunate employees -- to this now-completely-different company that has since been run into the ground.<p>Agilent, as far as I know, is still chugging along. Unlike this thing-now-known-as-HP, it still makes test equipment, descended from the test equipment that Bill and Dave built in their garage. I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches.
The following stroke me as a very strange: "Hurd borrowed heavily from the founders’ playbook". Really? How? Where? Why? WTF?<p>Does any of HP-alumnis here thinks that Hurd was a "HP way" CEO?
I get the general vibe that pre-Carly HP was an engineering firm, and after that, it's been an enterprise IT firm.<p>Would that be a reasonable vibe, or is that wholly skew from reality?