Green Rectangle
I'm guessing there's a significance to the green which goes back a long time as it's also the colour they've used for all those plastic lock and mount bits inside their computers for decades.
Meg Whitman, who will take the reins as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise later this year, has unveiled the branding system for the soon-to-be-created company, and it's just as bland and lifeless as anyone could have anticipated. Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo is short on razzle- …
The Green Rectangle is not only highly symbolic, but completely on-message and correct:
We will all be boxed in to the same shit that we are feeling sick about right now.
Flexibility will be limited to the infamous slide-ways slide to the point of collapse. Yes kids, you can test this at home with your very own open ended rectangular cardboard box - just place it on the floor with the open ends pointing sideways and place your hand on the top. Allow your hand to move in any direction left or right of the open sides and the box will collapse into a heap on the floor under its own weight. Just like this rebadged monster is likely to do..
If your enterprise is boxed up inside that collapsing metaphor, you will probably be feeling just as green as the colour that Meg has chosen especially for you...
To me it sounds like whoever came up with this held some kind of power over the CEO (poor relative with no job skills perhaps?) and so Meg didn't disagree and every other exec on the board was just as spineless as she was so they just nodded yes and proclaimed the artist a genius.
Or maybe they were conned and are too proud to admit it.
Those are the only two explanations I can think of for this pile of bull-shit that looks like somebody made in MS Paint in 5 minutes...
Crazy Operations Guy,
We'll know all about how they got foisted with the logo in a couple of years time, when they go the FBI and Serious Fraud Office, plus sue the people who sold it to them, and their auditors for allowing them to sign up for it...
Either that or it is a cousin with 17 fingers and no teeth or job prospects that's done it. And that person has now taken the paycheck home, and given a single downvote to every comment on this thread that's rude about the design or HP...
P.S. Dear El Reg,
Booooooo! Where's the Strategy Boutique or the mention of whalesong and joss sticks on this article?
This post has been deleted by its author
Presumably the empty minus sign is supposed to signify that there's nothing left when you remove the company's core business. It'll be interesting to see how they trademark it. I know the Bass logo of a red triangle is one of the oldest trademarks around, but these days they have to be a bit more distinctive.
The "joined t's means partnership" back-splanation seems more than a bit forced, but I've heard worse drivel and seen worse results come from many more dollars' and hours' work (I will assume few of either were invested here). Is she still considering a run for U.S. President? Maybe this can be part of her branding ("I'm not a square; I've got wide-view thinking so I must be a rectangle").
After staring at it for five or six hours yea, it's agile and transformative as a green rectangle with a name under can be. But I wouldn't suggest this technique be used by HP marketing or their advertising professionals less they be accused of witchcraft or something.
Good thing they didn't use a pentangle instead of a rectangle.
Look carefully at the name "Hewlett" in the first line. See how the crossbars on the two lowercase T's are stuck together? According to Whitman, this is the first time in HP history that this has been the case.
Um... Ok.. So?
"That connection is symbolic of the partnership we will forge with our customers, partners, and our employees – what we will do together to help drive your business forward,"
O...M...G... Check your Bingo cards!
"However could they not have provided a nice template for the Bingo card? seems like a lot of work to play"
If you can't knock up a template in less than 30 seconds in a spreadsheet with cell borders or a table in a word processor than I'm afraid we'll have to ask for your El Reg membership to be rescinded.
Or you could write a perl script to create a LaTeX document and export it as a .ps file to a printer and we might let you stay.
I can come up with a template for that. How about making the border of the bingo card green and the card white? This results in you holding a hollow green rectangle, which as everyone implicitly understands is symbolic of you holding a communal synergized cross-platform paradigm enabling entrepreneurial client focused solutions providing win-win value creation for cross-value chain stakeholders in your hands.
(Now if you'll excuse me, after that I somehow feel dirty and in need of a shower .)
Thanks for the upvotes and replies, guys and guyesses!
I like to think that I write well thought out comments, touching on issues ranging from the social to the political, to the technological, and the philosophical.
I involve myself in serious debate threads - fully listening to my opponent, and strategically planning my response.
Yet, in all these years, the most upvotes I've received are on a post about bollocks, linking to more bollocks! That's what I love about El Reg! :-)
As for the link, the site I linked to was just an old archive of an ascii-only mailing list, hence the sparseness.
Here are 2 link to similar CGI generated random card creator. Fun for all the office!
http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/
http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/buzzword/
Googling 'buzzword bingo' brings up more!
communal synergized cross-platform paradigm enabling entrepreneurial client focused solutions providing win-win value creation for cross-value chain stakeholders
Still laughing. Many times in my career I have been told that to make more money I have to move into business analysis - but since it comes down to being able to talk like this with a straight face that option is not open to me!
"That connection is symbolic of the partnership we will forge with our customers, partners, and our employees – what we will do together to help drive your business forward,"
So is she saying that in the past, they *didn't* do that as well as that should have? Even under her recent stint as CEO?
Or have they always been doing that as well as they should have, in which case the new symbolism is mere jingoism?
"If they do, and then a fully-formed DEC can be spat out of that ... I'll be one of the happiest men alive..."
That may seem like an almost infinitely improbable idea, but then two years ago so would the idea that HP would repeal the death sentence on VMS and instead hand over its future development to a new company who would (a) promptly recruit many former members of the VMS community at DEC (b) commit to a port of VMS to x86-64... and then it happened:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/
They've now built+released their first new Field Test of VMS (for those IA64 things, in the short term).
The current commercial arrangements of the PDP11 stuff are less clear, but a Colorado company called xx2247 appears to have some involvement. LinkedIn has contact info.
Yes there was other stuff too, but I know even less about the pre-PDP era.