Steve Wozniak was also an HP employee, and an ardent fan of HP’s programmable calculators. Since he’d used HP lab facilities and parts to develop early Apple prototypes, Woz insisted on pitching his HP managers on the product. They declined, and the rest is history.
https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/blog/atlantech/2013/01/woz-i-begged-h-p-to-make-the-apple-1.html
Yep. And the biggest mistake HP could have made. Woz, based on what I’ve read about his personality, would’ve been perfectly happy to do lots of cool design engineering work for HP. He was all about the tech and didn’t care about changing the world or getting rich.
But when HP chose to let him go found Apple (not that they could’ve stopped him, but they probably could’ve made him a counter-offer sufficient for him to choose otherwise), they lost some very rare and unique talent that could’ve (with proper management) driven HP’s designs for decades, including their computers.
But their loss became our benefit. Although an HP-Woz computer might’ve been a great machine, I’m sure it would never have seen the level of success of the Apple ][ series.
They still do. My guess is that because of what became ferocious competition in the desktop home and small business markets, HP turned its focus on the much more profitable enterprise printing markets:
Continuing to veer off-topic, If you are technically inclined, grab the sources for GNU APL and build it yourself.
I recommend cloning from the git repository to get the latest and greatest. It builds natively on Apple Silicon. and works quite nicely. You will need the APL fonts and keyboard input map from Dyalog
Not to prolong the off-topic discussion, but my days of building apps from source are long over, even if it means getting an ARM-native version of APL. Native APL could greatly benefit from the acceleration wonderfully treated in Howard Oakley’s recent articles since it is an intrinsically parallel language, but I doubt that gnu APL goes that far. I am happy with Dyalog.
These things may be related:
and
HP misses first-quarter revenue estimates on sluggish demand in PC market
“Sales at HP’s … Printing segment posted a 5% fall.”
But in that same article:
Last week, its peer Lenovo Group reported stronger-than-expected earnings in the third quarter, with revenue returning to growth after five quarters of decline.
If you’re declining and your competition is improving, then it’s not the market, it’s you.
And it should come as a surprise to nobody (outside of marketing departments) that if you abuse your customers for long enough, they are going to take their business to your competition.
Are printer sales from Dell, Lexmark, Brother, Canon and Xerox also declining?
Though the numbers aren’t great, HP’s first 2024 quarter results don’t look quite as terrible to me:
Keep in mind that they have not yet released breakouts of their individual products. In addition to their branded computer segment, they have a good market share in large format printing, clothing, etc.
It seems that the consumer side of the print business is having a rougher time revenue-wise than the commercial print business, though there are other issues on the commercial side:
Consumer Printing net revenue was down 22% and Commercial Printing net revenue was down 12%. Supplies net revenue was flat (up 1% in constant currency). Total hardware units were down 17%, with Consumer Printing units down 15% and Commercial Printing units down 18%.
In any case, my main interest was the introduction of HP’s new “contract” model for even light-duty consumer printing. Contracts like these make a lot of sense for many mid- to high-volume business users, but I expect the model will not endear HP to many home users, especially low-volume users. It will be interesting to know if retail sales staff will be incentivized to upsell consumers into larger/longer contracts.
Exactly. Time will tell if commercial-style contracts for consumers will improve the picture for either HP or the consumer.