Someone asked recently, "are you still doing that old HP blog?" They could have looked it up, but instead they just asked. The answer, after some 17 years, is 'sort of, on occasion.' What occasion, they asked. And I struggled to mention that now it is more because one of my idols has passed away, than some monumental new breakthrough at our favorite company.
So this is a bit of a review for 'how it's gone' over the years.
The blog started a bit in self-defense, when Ray Price and I were striving to finish our HP history tome, The HP Phenomenon, which finally was published in October 2009. I wrote 20 apologetic posts in 2008, another 40 in 2009 and 43 more in 2010. No, I didn't put the whole book in the posts, but it might seem like it.
Toward the end of 2010, Mark Hurd resigned (I almost wrote "fired", but he was allowed to resign after the investigation of his conduct with Jodie Fisher turned up "only" a few inaccurate expense reports). I don't think anyone admitted to the sexual pictures that the HP pilots surreptitiously took, so that tidbit stayed out of the press. My blog carried an epithet attributed to HP employees at the time (Mark Turd) that got picked up by eastern journalists and boosted my blog-page count considerably for a few days. I did see Mark the next spring at the Menlo School graduation where his son and our grand-daughter were graduating, but he didn't stay for conversation with me.
Anyway, the book did well, with plenty of speeches and hoopla, and even a few polite reviews. Three years later, gigs both at Stanford Business School and via Harvard and HP workshops generated new material, and another 155 posts between 2013 and 2015. Only eleven posts over the next seven years, though, so the story was now old, and HP with its multiple CEOs and subdivisions were, if not the laughing stock of the Valley, close to it.
And then, 2024, and I had time to post a few updates and some reflective notes. Nothing big, but certainly some nostalgia. And a teary eye for some wonderful colleagues who now rest in peace (I trust). The page-count? 283,579 in the first sixteen years. If you back out the Mark Hurd spike, about 15,000 page-views per year. Over the past fifteen months, we're up to 315,928, which is an astonishing 25,000+ per year, higher than ever. What? Why? Never mind, just write a few more.
Here's the blog-post graph for four of my blogs.
