It really is the same sad story: the founders retire, leave the company eventually and pass away and the next generation of leaders just hasn’t got their hearts in it. Only thing that matters is the profit line and nothing else.
You can see this live at Apple now, but since we are talking about HP (fond memories of logic analysers & oscilloscopes & pocket calculators) let me bring up a contemporary example where HP just didn’t see what marvel they had and promptly destroyed it:
It may not count for much in the total sum of their enterprise business, but the Gen8 Microserver was a well engineered, perfectly balanced small home office server, a tiny 9" cube that could be tucked away and would do its job for years without much fuzz. I know because I’m running four of them in various places and they just work. Four 3 1/2" drive bays behind a perforated door (for air circulation) with crates for each drive that would slide in on rails and lock, a micro-SD card slot on the motherboard, ideal to install FreeNAS etc. etc. etc.
Sadly, this product is now discontinued, replaced by the Gen10 Microserver.
(You can easily google them, the one with the silver door is the Gen8 and the one with the black ‘door’ is the new Gen10).
You would expect the new product to be superior to the old one, improved etc. This is however not the case at all: The Gen10 got the ‘accountant’ treatment.
It was made ‘cheap’.
I hope that the person who made that decision will read this, because he hasn’t done his company any favours. He might have shaved a few pennies off here and there, but by doing so he made it unattractive to the existing market.
I would have happily purchased a few more, recommended it to friends who have similar requirements but the Gen10 just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Why? Gone is the door, instead you have to remove the complete front panel (which still has a fake door look) to access the drive bays. Gone are the crates for the drives and the rails, you install the drives directly, with the connector taking up the weight at the rear, both mechanical and electrically an unreliable construct. The whole box feels flimsy now. Gone is the micro-SD card slot that held the operating system. Absolute show stopper. To install an OS I would need to add another SSD drive and sort of wedge it in the area where the DVD/BluRay drive would normally go.
I didn’t bother with the fan assembly or power supply after that but I’m sure the accountant’s touch left its traces there too. To add insult to injury, this stripped down version is now $150 more expensive than the previous one.
Well done, HP.
