Bill Terry RIP

 Two weeks ago, I posted that Bill Terry had passed away.   The San Jose Mercury-News just published his obituary this morning, at https://www.mercurynews.com/obituaries/william-terry-palo-alto-ca/

Obituaries are often sources of surprise for readers who thought they knew the person.  A note about Bill in that obit was a big surprise to friends of mine, but Bill and I had talked about this more than once.  "Bill found joy in simple pleasures as well. He was an avid stamp collector who appreciated history through philately."

What?   Why would Bill and I talk about that?   Well, long story short--I'd been sickly as a youngster, missing nearly 100 days of school in 3rd and 4th grades.  And if you miss a lot of school, how do you learn important things like history?  Well, stamp collecting is indeed a historian's delight.  Not only does the US honor all sorts of historic figures and events with stamps, most other countries do as well.  So for the avid collector, stamp collectding is a terrific hobby by which to learn facts that honor that country's heritage.   Moreover, it is an easy hobby, easy enough to do when bed-ridden or wheelchair-bound, Franklin Roosevelt, wheelchair-bound for his entire presidecny, was an avid philatelist, so was I, and so was Bill.  Bill's knowledge was so thorough through such means that he would routinely surprise if not stun engineers at HP with his broad collection of factoids, gathered from who knows where (at least as they viewed it).

The other thing noteworthy about Bill that the obit covered nicely was his dedication to Santa Clara University, somewhat unique within HP executive circles which was preponderantly Stanford oriented.  I taught both places, and have had extended family graduate from each (not to mention Berkeley or Caltech).   Most HP engineers were dismissive of the Santa Clara and San Jose State programs, but we surely got some great engineers from those places, and over the years, they've proven their worth.  The key thing for Santa Clara U for me, and for Bill, was their dedication to the ethical and moral worth of the pursuits.   In particular, two men--Jim Koch and Geoffrey Bowker-were key for years.  

Jim served as the Dean of the Leavey School of Business in 1990 to 1996.  He also was on the Informix Board of Directors, which is where I first got to know him.  He was the founding director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society (now the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship), which examines the intersection of technology and organizational change.

Geoffrey and his accomplished wife, Susan Leigh Star, were the founding STS leaders for SCU for Koch's department, a department that Bill Terry supported with great enthusiasm.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_C._Bowker.     

One never knows in advance how one person's life--their actions, their values, and their support--will play out in your own life.  What's the phrase--"never burn a bridge"?   I wasn't happy (duh, really?) when Bill Terry tried to scotch my XYZ display back in 1966, but later I had to agree that he did allow it to continue even though he could have stopped it.   But when he was in Cupertino, he graciously invited our Logic team to work with his engineers (in particular, Bert Forbes, who took us to IBM Santa Theresa and the rest became history).   And then he was very supportive of the HP Corporate Engineering role.  But more than that, long after we'd both left HP, he was supportive of both the UC Santa Barbara Center for Information impact on Technology and Science (CITS), and later of MediaX at Stanford.

I could go on and on, but I shall not do so here.   Just raise a cup tonight to this great man, Bill Terry.

Madder than a wet hen

 Where did all of these idiomatic phrases come from?   How many do you remember?  And apologies for the phallic ones, which were especially popular with my step-father

Happiness:

    1. Happy as a clam in a mudbank

    2. Happy as a pig in shit

Unhappy:

    1. Madder than a wet hen

    2. Mad enough to spit nails

    3. Mad as a March hare

Capability:

    1. Can't carry a tune in a basket

    2. Couldn't pour piss out of a boot

    3. Dumb as a box of rocks

    4. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer

    5. Not playing with a full deck

Busy:

    1. Busier than a one-armed paperhanger

    2. Busier than a cat covering up shit

Memory:

    1. She can remember things that never even happened

    2. Slip one's trolley

Candor:

    1. Lying through one's teeth

    2. We're using alternative facts

    3. (Vulgar) Couldn't say "Shit" if they had a mouthful

If these are your 'thing" chances are you grew up in.a rural environment, maybe even in the South--boy, is that pejorative or what?

Why do I bring this up?

Well, Jenny is MADDER THAN A WET HEN about our HP printers.   This is (gasp) blasphemous.  She and I both bleed blue, we met at HP, we each worshipped HP, and we have always venerated their goals, not to metntion their products.   Until now.  She swears, with enthusiasm, I'LL NEVEER BUY ANOTHER HP PRINTER after the series of insults with our current pair.

Start with the fact that if you once signed up for the Automatic Ink Delivery, nothing ever works again.  Yes, you get the ink, and a healthy charge.  No, you cannot buy ink at Costco or Best Buy or Staples and installit yourself.  The machine denies the cartridge even though it is an HP cartridge.  and the work-around to get it to accept the cartridge takes thirty minutes, and HP wants $35 to talk to an 'helpful' person.  And the machines forget how to do dual-sided printing at their discretion, and forget how to let you scan on occasion (usually only when you urgently need it), and . . . we could go on forever, but . . . .

This stuff all used to work beautifully, reliably, faithfully, and was the best thing since sliced bread.  And, it isn't like we aren't good ink customers.  Each of us print about 5,000 pages per years--that's known as a 'Ream box", meaning ten reams of paper.  That's a lot.   I know, I know, not a very wise thing to do for the environment, but . . . .    And that's a lot of ink.   And we've done something like this for more than 30 years each. 

MAD AS A WET HEN

Bill Terry, HP and MBAs

 I got waylaid a few weeks ago, promising to add more commentary re Dean Morton.   I drafted a short note, and just found it in the 'draft' file, so I just sent it on.   The reason, though, that I was in this Blog was that I just learned, from Bill Parzybok, that Bill Terry passed away last Sunday, not long after I noted that he and Paul Ely were the only two of the C-staff left that took over from Dave and Bill in the '70s.  Gawd, IN THE LATE '70s?   That was nearly fifty years ago, whew.

And believe me, it Dave and Bill could see their company now, they'd be fully whirling in their graves, enough to power all the Nvidia AI centers in California.

Bill Terry was one of the cavalry that joined HP in 1958.  He had an MBA from Santa Clara University, while Morton and Hal Edmondson were from Harvard.  John Young's MBA was from Stanford, and Packard put Stanford's Biz School Dean, Ernie Arbuckle, on HP's Board.  

Hewlett eschewed MBA's, maybe not as vociferously as did Al Bagley, but Packard thought maybe HP would profit to have a couple of them.   As one story goes, in 1964 (might have the year wrong by a year or two), the Counter division (Bagley's, later known as the Santa Clara Division) had the highest revenue and profit percentage for HP, ahead of the perennial winner, Microwave headed by John Young.  Bagley was able to commandeer the corporate-wide PA system and announce the year-end results (since Dave and Bill were out of town), and he cackled while noting that 'his division "won" honors, WITHOUT THE HELP of one goddamn MBA.'    Talk about endearing himself to Young!

As it turned out, though, the company found all of these fledgling MBAs the same year, and the hiring group was unable to select amongst them.  Packard said, "If they're that good, hire all of them."  Which HP did, and they indeed came through.   They all went to work for Noel Eldred, HP's first Marketing VP, and he gave each of them key roles as the company developed a sales force and immense skills.

Terry's obituary has yet to appear in print, and I'll post it along with more story as it is publsihed.

For now, I'll just note that Bill's first division assignment was to become the HP Colorado Springs marketing manager in 1965, as we were competing (and losing badly) against Tektronix.  He was the voice who told Packard that my XYZ display (the world's first commerical computer graphics display had 'no market, only 31 possible sales.'    We of course sparred, and in his later autobiography, he claimed that the number was 50, and that he personally DID support it!   And we became great friends.

His leadership did cause Tektronix troubles, and that earned him a shot to run all of HP computing, at which he struggled, but he did introduce the HP35A, along with some wonderful jokes.  While there, he encouraged my logic analyzer work, which helped immensely for our projects.

Later, he became titular head of all of HP instrumentation, electronic, medical and analytic.  And just incidentally, my direct boss in Corporation Engineering when Doyle was moved to Cupertino with computers.

Bill, in my life, was as big and as important as anyone in my life.  God speed, Bill

It is remarkable to me that all of these giants are disappearing 'together'.      Doyle preceded them by a year, but 2025 includes not only Terry but Young and Morton, plus Carlson and Cottrell who both ran the early computer group beforeTerry did.    Ely left HP in 1984 or so, and Young, Morton, and Terry were the kingpins from then until 1992.  Gone within month of each other.  Kinda like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, dying 50 years to the day of July 4, 1776.

Dean Morton

 Dean Morton, one of the kindest, smartest HP managers ever.   Never mind the quarrelsome editorial that Wired posted in the nineties, pronouncing Morton and Young as the downfall of HP (no one yet knew the names of Carly Fiorina, Mark Thug (or Hurd or Turd, depending on who did the pronunciation), and Leo Apothekar {who?} or the semi-nameless individuals since).   

Dean was, for my taste, the perfect blend of Hewlett's personable-ness and Packard's strategic insights.  He didn't have Dave's 'go for the jugular' or Bill's inventive acumen, but he could listen, and reason.  And, he had a deceptively quiet manner of getting things done.

https://obituaries.paloaltoonline.com/obituaries/memorials/dean-o-morton?o=8889

Au Revoir, early days at HP

 I missed the obituary for Dean Morton, clearly a 'passing of the guard last spring.   Sue Chance, Doug's beautiful wife, passed away a few weeks ago, victim of a sudden stroke.   She was a great friend of Portola Valley children, including mine when I lived there some years ago.   Our paths had not crossed in recent years, but the last time I saw her, that radiant smile was still captivating.  Doug has been a blessed man for their long marriage.

Small factoids that pop up when you see something that jogs the mind.    Back in 'the day' an English lad named John Doyle came to America, and after being nurtured by Nancy Young's father in Omaha.  Doyle moved to the Bay Area, first getting a job cleaning outside windows on the Mark Hopkins hotel in San Francisco.   Gawd, can you imagine?   Having been a Royal Air Force pilot during WWII, he said it didn't give him much fear.   Soon, though, he got a job at HP Palo Alto (that was the only locale for HP at the time),  and he moved into a small Sunnyvale apartment where he met Doug and Sue.  Sue said, "there's this girl in our apartment, you might want to meet."   Turned out to be Judy, and soon enough, she became Judy Doyle, for the rest of her life.  (truth in advertising, Nancy Young and I were married during our Portola Valley time, where we first met Sue and Doug).

Okay, long preamble.  The point of this post is to lead up to the obituary of Dean Morton, which I had not heard of prior to searching the Palo Alto "Lasting Memories" pages while looking up Sue's obituary.  

First, a disclaimer.  I don't as a rule read all of the obit pages, but in doing so today, I found Jerry Carlson, one of the first hapless folk to try running initial parts of what became the HP Computer Group.  Packard had taken Bob Grimm out of running the Automated Measurements division (AMD) just before he left for Washignton D.C in February 1969.   He brought in Jerry Carlson, and then when Hewlett became President of HP (Dave never agan ran HP, and at the time, HP computing was $10M, a whopping 4% of the company).   Tom Perkins pissed Hewlett off big-time, and Bill brought Carl Cottrell out from Eastern Sales to be the Computer Czar over Perkins at Dymec and Carlson at AMD.  Disaster all the way around.

Another year, and Perkins, Cottrell, and Carlson were all gone from HP.  Bill Terry, who was the Division Manager for HP Colorado Springs (my boss) was pulled in to run the Computer Group, which gave me a great entree to pilot some early Logic Analyzer ideas in Cupertino.  Terry lasted a little longer, but then Packard and John Young helped Hewlett decide to have Paul Ely report to Bill Terry, which Paul found unworkable and soon enough took over.  Soon after that, Hewlett retired, and John Young became CEO.  John soon brought an old colleague back to Palo Alto from Boston--Dean Morton.   I'll say more about Dean in the next post.

I find it ironic in a way that Cottrell, Carlson,  Morton, and Young all have died this year.  And other 'giants' -- Al Bagley, Don Hammond, and John Doyle all were recent also.  Bill Terry and Paul Ely are still with us--the group is dwindling, and those of us left are a bit long in the tooth.  Ah, well.  Au revoir!

HP Innovation--Free for All?

 Phil McKinney is one of my favorite "new" colleagues from HP.   Phil came to HP a decade after I left, and long after Dave and Bill, and Bagley and Ely and even John Young.   But he made a mark, and an indelible impression on me.   Here's a bit of his vitae from his LinkedIn page.

VP and CTOVP and CTO

HPHPSep 2002 - Dec 2011 · 9 yrs 4 mosSep 2002 to Dec 2011 · 9 yrs 4 mosCupertino, CACupertino, CA

• • Mr. McKinney recently retired as the Vice President and CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for HP’s $40B Personal Systems Group (PSG), where he was responsible for the R&D and technology strategy for all PC's, laptop's, handhelds, mobile phones, personal storage, displays, workstation's and calculators. He also founded and oversaw HP's Innovation Program Office (IPO). IPO is a separately staffed and funded team challenged to identify and incubate adjacencies and fundamentally new businesses for HP. In addition, Phil had pan-HP responsibility for:
    
    - Industry Standards
    - Ergonomics
    - Accessibility
    - Open Source

  
  
• The key thing about Phil is that he is all about innovation, and of course, our book focused on the way that HP uniquey dealt with innovation -- recall the title--INNOVATION and Business Transformation (thereby). Phil brought an newly invigorated innovation instinct to the HP PC business after they had long conceded to the Wintel designs, and aftewards, he founded a brilliant Innovator's Network with a regular blog and podcast to bring the story to others.   Here's the lead-in to that group:
• 
  
• The Innovators Network (TI.N) is the innovation newsroom that tells the full story of innovation and the people behind them.
  
  We founded The Innovators Network on the belief that innovation is essential to addressing the world’s most pressing problems and opportunities.
  
  We aim to publish high-quality, solution-based journalism that tells the true stories of innovation. We believe that understanding the stories behind the innovations it can empower readers to make informed decisions.
  
  Our digital media platform will shine a light on innovation in all its forms — through articles, podcasts, videos, and events. The forms of innovation cover a wide spectrum, from social to health to technological innovation.
• 
  
• The reason I am including it today in our HP Blog is to amplify the message he broadcast recently:
• 
  
• 

  
   

Does this make sense to you?  Is he right?  Are these laws of singularity?   They work, here and now, but not for you?   What good is it if that is true?   Everyone needs to learn in situ, every time?   We all yearn for a magic elixir, a potion that you imbibe once, and Voilà!    but Phil is saying, "nyet" and I tend to agree with him.

Let me put a simple story around this.    When John Young took over HP from Bill Hewlett (Packard had already ceded the CEO role to Bill), John wanted to stimulate more innovation, and one possible option was to increase the stock option pool for inventors.   In particular, greatly increase the options for 'winning products,'   Since I was working for John as the newly defined Corporate Engineering Director (big title, but mostly a co-ordination role), I thought "Wow, that could be a neat contribution, that might really stimulate competitve juices."

For reasons now obscure (meaning I cannot any longer remember why), I sought out Bill Hewlett,  who after all had a major hand in HP Labs for decades.  I described the idea, and he listened attetively for a moment before exploding with considerable vehemence.

"Dumb, dumb, dumb," he exclaimed, and then said "Let me tell you why."    

He said "Today the prize is to become a select member of HP's vaunted research labs, where essentially everyong makes roughly the same salary with the same perks, including options."

And the goal of every project is to extend the capability by a factor of ten.whether measured by speed, accurary, price, or whatever.  On average, AND AT BEST, only one out of two projects will be successful.  And of those successful ones, only one out of two will be adapted into a commercial division and launched to the public.  And of those, only one out of two will be commercially successful.    So if we reward the originators of the successful Lab project, based on division adoption, and marketplace acceptance, only one out of eight Lab researchers will qualify for these differential options.  Seven out of eight will not.  Or maybe more like twelve out of 13 or 19 out of 20 will not.  Not very stimulating, when phrased that way.

"But" he continued, "if the Labs are given differential options based on ANY LAB PROJECT that makes a totally commercially successful record, then we can reward a panoply of Lab researchers.   And maintain the value and worth and goal of seeking that 10x innnovation instead of going for low-hanging fruit that doesn't require great innovation, just classic engineering productivity."

Young and Platt and especially Carly voted for the new model, Carly including enormous sums for vapid bombastic leaders.   Today HP is very much 'in tune' with normal industry practices.  How has this worked out?

If you go back and examine the record, HP Labs was voted by many to be the most effective innovation central labs of any corporation in America from 1960 through about 1985, after which modest improvements rather than fundamental break-throughs became the norm. And companies like Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and later Google and Facebook and a host of small-fry spun up with new innovations while HP contributions defining new fields and technology virtually evaporated.  Cause and effect?    

• 
  
  
• 
  

HPE and Juniper

 Several readers have asked: "What do you think of the HPE / Juniper merger completed last month?

And yes, our nephew's wife has worked at HP and now HPE, in networking, for two decades.  Plus I've known Tom Black from his early HP days to his Cisco days to his Aruba days and HPE days, before his shift to HPE Storage (https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/07/28/hpe-storage-takes-the-black/) in 2020.  Tom is currently on sabbatical, and out of the networking game for awhile now.   HPE's Aruba division is currently at a $5 billion annual run-rate.

The Big Kahuna, of course, is Cisco.   I did have the privilege of doing 150+ interviews of early Cisco folk for the Cisco Foundation a few years ago, which was a tremendous opportunity.  AND, I did get the 'award' from Cisco for being 'the guy who made Cisco successful' from none other than the EVP of Engineering, Joel Bion, when I was hosted to talk about Ray Price's and my book, The HP Phenomenon, in 2010.  Boy, did that surprise me!  I briefly thought, "Well, why didn't I get any founder's stock?"   

That story turned out to be interesting.  Cisco couldn't get any traction in the Local Area Networking milieu in the early to mid-1980's.  Their gig was Wide Area Networking, connecting Networks of Networks.  But the VCs, some 70+ of them, turned Cisco down for years.   If there aren't yet many LANs, what is the point of building a  WAN to connect some non-existent LANs?

Thanks to a serendipitous connection to Cisco from Bert Raphael in Corporate Engineering, and a project that he and Tony Fanning led to tie all of HP's far-flung engineering operations 'together' via computer teleconferencing (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637069.637109), HP became the leading commercial purchaser of Cisco routers in 1985, with Mark Laubach and his college mentor, David Farber, serving as lead designers, along with Hank Taylor in HP's IT shop.   Laubach is now at Ciena, another modestly successful networking company.

No, let me put it more strongly about the HP and Cisco synergy--HP was the ONLY corporate purchaser of Cisco routers for 28 months, from May 1985 until September 1987, when Boeing bought one, partially due to Dave Packard's recommendation, while he was on Boeing's Board of Directors.   And I was the person who signed the original Cisco Purchase Order for HP, with co-founders Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner sitting in my conference room at the HP Deer Creek facility. 

And you might have read the Sandy Lerner article that I wrote in 2016 for the Computer History Museum (https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/core-2016.pdf).  Her story is an intriguing one, notable for a number of reasons which we'll skip here. 

 It is also perhaps worth noting that a remarkable man, unfortuantely a paraplegic, Jim Pelkey, conducted an amazing set of 81 interviews of the key networking founders and leaders in 20+ companies and 12 other organizations and institutions during the 1986-1988 period.   He omitted Cisco, because they didn't yet amount to anything (his view). These were audio interviews that the Computer History Museum eschewed in 2012, until I weighed in to say "THIS IS THE HISTORY".  Amazing how myopic and prejudicial, groups can be on occasion.   I flew to Hawaii to interview Pelkey, and to review his voluminous materials.  Then we got some contributed money, and a true historian (Andy Russell), and they've now all been transcribed and put on line at CHM, and there is even an ACM book (Circuits, Packets, and Protocols https://www.amazon.com/Circuits-Packets-Protocols-Entrepreneurs-Communications/dp/1450397271) that details much of this.

All this prelude is to say that I've had occasional small glimpses of the networking world, including ACM interviews with Bob Metcalfe (3Com), and a partnership with Bill Krause (3Com) along the way, plus Andy Bechtolsheim about Arista, and . . . . So, the point of all of that dialogue is to say that I've had some fascinating opportunities around the networking world.

Okay, so what's the scoop on HPE with Juniper, and how does that stack up with Cisco and Arista?

Well, first of all, Juniper was a sterling challenger to Cisco at the turn of the century, growing spectacularly from $4M in 1998 to $675M in 2001, with a market share of 33% in routers, dinging Cisco's early dominance dramatically.   Billed as a David and Goliath face-off, the two fought hard battles over the next decade, with acquisitions and new product claims and all sorts of hoopla.  Juniper revenues, though, plateaued after 2010, roughly at $5 Billion per year (Figure 1), while Cisco has not done much better (Figure 2).  Cisco, of course, is ten times bigger, clearing $56.6 Billion in the past 12 months (to August 2025).   

By contrast, newcomers, especially Arista (founded by Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004 after he sold another company to Cisco), is managed by seasoned network executives (mostly from Cisco), has grown nicely, particularly after introducing the software-defined networking products.  These have been around for two decades, but until Arista solved the access speed problem, they were not much in favor.   Now, the clear technology winner is software-defined network solutions, and their run-rate at $8 billion (past 12 months) is 50% larger than either Juniper, or HPE Aruba.  Surprise!   And the only significant annual growth-rate for all of these companies is Arista, at a stunning 31% per year compound rate for the past 12 years.

Here is a synopsis of the various definitional differences for Cisco, HPE/Juniper, and Arista.   Ciena had a nice early contribution, but in truth Ciena lacks momentum at this point.

Another way to illustrate these comparative growth rates is to plot the quarterly gains or losses vs. the same period a year prior.  Figure 5 shows this for the four networking companies described, with the key difference that the HPE diagram is for all of HPE rather than just the Juniper networking acquisition.

Okay, so HPE will roughly double its current networking run-rate revenue with the merging of the Juniper product lines.  That will put it slightly ahead of Arista's recent results, but the momentum for the HPE combination is zero, while Arista's is 30%+ per year.   In addition, there will be inevitable thrash at HPE, as the Aruba and Juniper offerings are merged and sorted out.

Which stock would you bet on?