January 27, 2012

HP’s Mighty Stumble

How could a company as mighty and diverse as HP have had so many executive management issues?

HP stumbled mightily in 2011, and it had nothing to do with product or people. Even sales remained strong, though the PC business is changing. HP’s mighty stumble was a crisis of confidence due to a chain of shenanigans at the very top. This culminated with the short reign of Léo Apotheker, leaving HP to reassure the market of its strategy.

Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, February 11, 2011

I’ve spent this week in San Jose, CA at Tech Field Day 5, and that’s the bulk of my news. We heard from great companies: Symantec, Drobo, Druva, Xangati, NetEx, InfoBlox, and HP. Whew!

Stephen’s HP Product Line Decoder Ring

Do you want X-series or P-series storage? Is A-series networking gear any good? And where did all these HP products come from?

HP has always been an alphabet soup company, assigning just about every item in their bewildering array of products a unique product number. Like Mercedes-Benz cars, even the product names are a mix of letters and numbers that can be off-putting to browsers. Now that they have grown to supersize proportions through internal expansion and acquisition, just about everyone outside the company seems to have trouble decoding the product line, so I decided to take a stab at decoding the enterprise lineup in plain english.

Two Stupidly Cool Terminal Fonts

Two stupidly-cool fonts in action: My normal DEC VT220-like terminal and a super-tiny Tom Thumb session showing Hamlet. All of Hamlet.

Two stupidly-cool fonts in action: My normal DEC VT220-like terminal and a super-large terminal with super-tiny Tom Thumb displaying Hamlet. All of Hamlet. No kidding.

Top Ten Innovative Enterprise Storage Hardware Products

st506

Looking around at the enterprise storage landscape, it is plain that certain archetypes rule: Monolithic enterprise arrays, dual-controller modular arrays, standard-sized hard disk units, NAS servers, tape libraries. Are these really the optimal designs for storage in our modern open systems world? On the contrary, I suggest that the enterprise storage world we know was [...]