I know HP

has printers, is said to be big in the health care sector (where they sell lots of medical devices), and the EDS acquisition massively boosts the size of their services arm, but do they actually compete in any other sectors?

They sure as hell don't compete in the UNIX market (HP-UX is such a steaming pile of crudware), and Itanium based servers have never really amounted to much.

Given the rate at which they are decimating the EDS ranks, it looks like they are going to mismanage themselves right back out of the services market, leaving themselves only the commodity printers and medical devices.

Again, how the mighty have fallen.

From top of the line instrumentation ... to this.

Bill & Dave are spinning ...

Sad.

@AC 20-03-09 5:24 GMT

Once upon a time, long, long, long ago in a faraway land HP was one of the major producers of all sorts of very interesting scientific research equipment, from home boffin gear to expensive university and government gear. Unfortunately, both H and P long ago retired and have since passed on to the great gear factory in the sky. Since then the carcass of HP has been beset by maggots like Fiorinia or whatever the hell her name was. Now they are just another name in the commodity hardware biz.

Family?

Family my arse.

Not much talk of "family" when he's laying people off, is there?

Loyalty

Unless it involves a large sum of money and a signed agreement, I show employers as much loyalty as they show me.

Must be those knives in the backs creating all the leaks!

From chats with some current EDS'ers and hp'ers, it seems there is more than a sense of betrayal being nursed by some EDS staff, just like there was amongst some hp staff laid off in 2001. Some of this seems to be due to the forced paycuts, some to fear of redundancy. How the EDS management failed to realise there would be some bitter bods just itching to ignore any confidentiality warnings is beyond me! It's human nature. Putting out an insecure vid link was beyond incompetent, but then a lot of these "senior management talk to the peons" type vids are just ego trips for the CxOs who like to think they are "communicating" with their employees.