Yes it was fun

Yes indeed.  First time I ever was featured on a one hour radio show.  Up in San Francisco, at KQED, with Dave Iverson as the interviewer.  He was magnificent.  See his documentary re Father and Sons (about all three with Parkinson's -- very touching story).  

We covered a lot of ground, and Q&A took us into a lot more places.  Predictably, a number of folk called to say I am reporting nostalgia since the company has done a hopeless bastardization of the HP Way under the last two CEOs.  And while I too go down that path on many occasions, I felt compelled to point out that (a) Carly Fiorina DID save the marquee name/company, doing no more acquisition than Dave Packard did in his second "term" (from going public to leaving for Washington DC), and (b) many current employees reported in interviews and in book signings this past month that THEIR unit, THEIR division, or THEIR arena is doing great, thank you, with the HP Way largely intact.  Not to say it wasn't LOTS better in those great old days, but somehow it is asking a lot to expect a company of $120 BILLION to act as personal and intimate as a company of $120 MILLION, which is a fair amount LARGER than it was when I joined.

We had calls from Portland, and Phoenix, and San Diego, and Wisconsin, and lots of other places -- and I got emails all day long from friends who heard it and liked it, including our god-daughter who heard it twelve hours later in Las Vegas of all places.  VERY NICE

And maybe that accounts for the surge in Amazon ratings, as it "zoomed" back to #6,751 at 8:00 pm tonight, with our book being #4 overall in Mgmt Guide to Computing (and #1, for the first (and probably only) time on the HOT NEW RELEASES list).  It was #5 and #4 HNR on High Tech, and # 26 and #8 HNR on Company Profiles.  Barnes and Noble didn't do as well, having it still at #45,301.  (No, he's not a numbers guy, and he really isn't very competitive... )

SUNY Stonybrook

Wednesday (12-2-09), Karen Sobel-Lojeski arranged a wonderful group at State University of New York, Stony Brook campus, for me to present re the HP book. Deans from the Biz School, the D'school, the Tech in Society group, CS, Eng'g were among the audience. Very privileged.

Plus a full room (>75) and turning away an estimated 30 more (fire marshal rules). Great questions, including (a) what has been HP's response to the book, (b) how do you compare IBM and HP on services creativity these days, and (c) discuss the new leadership at HP Labs, this one from an ex-colleague of Prith Banerjee at UIUC.

I am increasingly using the "relevance" theme -- what can we learn from this history that applies to our world today -- and the notion that "bottoms up" leadership with marketplace deciding on success rather than "tops down" dictates wins the popular vote, no question. Students groove on that one, for sure. For experienced folk, the engineering-led vs. business-led notion garners lots of enthusiasm, particularly from engineers (duh)

I'm on KQED NPR radio this morning (FM 88.5 in San Francisco, 89.3 in Sacramento) with Dave Iverson. Should be fun.

Wallenberg talk yesterday

A large number of old HP friends and colleagues, coupled with a complement of Media X followers, filled Wallenberg's Learning Center. In addition, a first for us, we did a live streaming from the talk. I even had a few books on the front table (demonstration-proof that there is a book) and the Stanford Bookstore sold some as well, I heard...
The talk began with the three points that Media X has been observing -- 1. the World is Flat, leading to both a very heightened need for collaboration and a much higher competitive pressure from 'everywhere'; 2. the Social Networking phenomenon is 'real' rather than a fad, so whether it's YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, the kids want to participate, not spectate; and 3. it isn't clear that anyone can marshal support or energy for long, drawn-out difficult scenarios ala the Global Warming issues or the Health Care debate. Participants are just not inclined to be followers, so there is kind of a double whammy happening here.
Then it moved to a thesis about Company Leadership styles -- including both the Tops Down vs. Bottoms Up duality, and the Engineer Led vs the Business Led duality. The assertion is that "the Old HP" was Bottoms Up / Engineer Led (Intel was and mostly still is Tops Down / Engineer Led), and that such a company is vastly more apt to be innovative, and able to renew than a company managed for productivity, profitability, and efficiency. Not necessarily better, and almost certainly less effective in the short time, but more resilient and more apt to create new jobs, especially new kinds of jobs.
And then some stories from the book -- and Packard's resolute reluctance for almost every new market shift, but nonetheless, willing to let it play out and have the market decide, plus betting on the enthusiasm, drive and perseverance of the 'innovative kids'.
Great good fun, at least from my perspective

The HP 35 market research story

Ray Price was in town, and he was my guest at the Palo Alto Fellowship Forum. The guest speaker was Nils Nilsson, the fabled longtime leader of the SRI Artificial Intelligence Lab. And appropriately, several guests were in attendance, some of them old SRI types.

Just before I intro'd Ray, another member intro'd Roy Clay, who was HP's first software jock. He is featured in our book re the HP 2116, HP's first minicomputer (or instrument controller). I'd not met him; Ray conducted that interview. I stood, held up our new book, and mentioned Roy as well as intro'd Ray.

On my right, a fellow said, "oh, I met Bill Hewlett once". Asked the circumstance, he said, "I was at SRI, and he had a little balsa wood model of a handheld calculator, and he wanted some market research done. So I put together a plan, and some focus groups, and conducted them in San Francisco. Turns out, he wanted more than $200 for this thing, and everyone loved it but not at that price. So I wrote a "won't work" report." His name is Bill Waters, and I showed him our passage in the book that said, "Hewlett ignored the dismal market research report from the prestigious firm, SRI". We laughed together.

The product unalterably changed HP forever.

HP and Silicon Valley

The book has generated some 'new insight' re HP's involvement in 'silicon' -- some of those unwritten stories that James Burke with "Connections" always treasured.

The book notes that HP had more semiconductor processes "in production" by a factor of two than any other chip manufacturer, ever. This was due to unique needs for instrumentation leadership mostly. But it translated into more than half of all Gallium Arsenide chips for satellite communications, and more than half of all Light Emitting Diodes (the flashing red lites on your VCR or digital clock) for years -- HP was the undisputed III-V compound semiconductor manufacturer, whether for truly high frequency signals or for light output.

The book also documents HP leadership in microprocessor architecture, design, and manufacture, leading Intel usually by about three years, up to and including the Itanium design, still the world's most "powerful" microcomputer chipset which was designed by HP and licensed for manufacture by Intel.

But memory chips are what built Silicon Valley, actually, and HP's role here was more interesting and more lightly mentioned. Yes, HP helped craft the specs for the Intel 1103 DRAM, the first 1K memory chip, and yes, they bought 40% of the output from Intel for the first two years (East Coast computer folk were still wed to magnetic core memory). But it had never been documented, and I only pieced it together last week, that the Anderson Bombshell (in the book) which nearly derailed the U.S. push for MCC and Sematech, was heavily stimulated by the YHP (Yokagawa HP joint venture) semiconductor testset, derived from HP's acquired R-L-C meters from Boonton Radio. I reported on this in last week's blog, so this will just add a bit.

This is one of those stories where a resourceful group bucked HP top mgmt, survived long and difficult development cycles, found only ONE customer (Hitachi) which figured out how to build radically more reliable, higher performance chips cheaper as a result. YHP never was able to sell Silicon Valley manufacturers; the net result is that today the $20 Billion (yup) memory chip business is entirely elsewhere -- a shift that happened in a mere five years (between the 8K and 64K memory chip 'space'). I have now interviewed four HP top managers involved with YHP, and I don't believe that HP top mgmt or Intel top mgmt ever had a clue that this is all related; if Intel had known it, Andy Grove's epiphany in 1985 might have been hastened by several years (or he might instead have been able to adopt the 'winning tools').

Great speculation at any rate. Fun to hear the stories come forward...

connecting is such fun

This week, with Ray Price in town, has been wonderful for us. We've met a number of old colleagues around the circumstance of the book being published. Alan Bickell shared a cup of coffee, and we reminisced about Y-HP, and he helped put more "flesh on the bone" about the semiconductor test set done there, as well as the emergent Samsung memory chips a decade later. Dean Morton added his perspective the next day, and Art Fong contributed more that night. The story is impressive -- it has to do with how a small remote division ignored Palo Alto leadership for years, finally prevailing on a very difficult project, only to find they couldn't sell it, and yet eventually would reshape the entire semiconductor world and the companies in it.

When Y-HP sold one unit, eventually, to Hitachi, that company found that it could control doping levels for impurities much more precisely -- a fact that relatively soon led to a massive adoption by other Japanese firms, and gave the world better memory chips much cheaper than U.S. vendors, notably Intel and Texas Instruments which were two of the leading worldwide Dynamic RAM vendors. There were three repercussions in relatively short order:

1. The Japanese "took over" the 16K and then the 64K RAM chip business, going from less than 10% of the business in 8K chips (1977) to more than 80% of worldwide chips in the 64K chips in six years. Midway through, U.S. vendors got very concerned, even going to Washington DC to seek "government relief" --> leading eventually to MCC (1982) and Sematech (1986) national initiatives. Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, left that company to head Sematech.
2. Dick Anderson, HP's Computer Systems VP, delivered the 'Anderson Bombshell' in Washington DC in March 1980, describing the twin facts that Japanese 16K memory chips were not only cheaper (and thought to be "dumping" in America), but 1000% more likely to pass incoming inspection, and lasted 500% longer in operation. Intel and TI both viewed this as "sour grapes" from a competitor even though HP was the largest memory chip purchaser in the world at the time. HP's BPC microprocessor (16-bit micro) had shipped 77,000 units to customers before Intel could source 8086 production units to anyone; TI and HP had been locked in a nonsensical price war initiated by TI over handheld calculators. TI, infringing heavily on HP patents, threatened to withhold memory chips if HP sued. Bad blood flowed.
3. Intel's Andy Grove capitulates to the Japanese in 1986, taking Intel out of memories and into microprocessors. He still describes this as "an epiphany." All other U.S. manufacturers bail out as well. The memory chip market today (2008) is an $18 Billion worldwide market, with no U.S. manufacturers.

No one, to our knowledge, has until now made the connection between the HP semiconductor test sets and the radically better processing technology that Hitachi and others then pioneered. The incredible 'rest of the story' is that Y-HP tried for years to sell its testers to U.S. vendors, with no success; consequently, it was virtually HP's only division with radically higher sales in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Palo Alto management for years associated this with bad marketing skills at Y-HP in contrast to NIH within U.S. semiconductor firms.

Attendees at Keplers event

We each recognized many, and we "knew" more (but like a class reunion, couldn't quite put a name with a face sometimes). Art Fong -- Mr. Microwave -- was there, and we got some pictures with him; Curt Gowan, who runs the HPAA alumni group for Agilent and HP retirees said a few words; and Steve Leibson, who has a brilliant Colorado Computing website, http://www.hp9825.com/, introduced us to the audience.

Our brief outline of the book, and some perspective on the two founders, four successor CEOs, two strategists, and two technologists, was followed by a great interactive Q & A, including the inevitable "how is the HP Way today?" or, for many, "what happened to the HP Way?".

Many actually bought books, and asked us to sign 'em; quite a privilege, and I even was coached on which page you're supposed to sign your name (no, it is not the inside front cover page). But almost last in line, shy and diffident, was a slight man with a wry smile, who asked for our signature. I asked, "who for?" and he said, "I'm a relative". Turns out, he said he was a son of the shy and diffident co-founder and my alltime hero, Bill Hewlett. I tentatively stammered, "are you Jim?". And yes, he was Jim. We had never met, but he was the only scion from either founder to ever work at HP. He programmed for Roy Clay on the HP 2116 for a year and a half -- a fact that we had put into the manuscript at one point, but somehow that part didn't survive the editing process (along with many other wonderful pieces that we wished we could have kept). Again, an incredible privilege for both Ray and me to meet this man, and to realize he came to hear us.

Many others were in attendance; it'd be folly to try to list them all, but two others merit some comment -- Roland Haitz, who shared some terrific stories about the LED and components business with us, and has built a great Components timeline, but alas, we chose not to use most of that for the book (it will be featured in an evening at the Computer History Museum next year); and Srini Nageshwar, who "named" the LaserJet (even tho at the Personal Computer division) when Boise Division had the prosaic name, HP 2686. Sukumar was key to the original HP 250 saga, as well as the HP 150 Touchscreen, and many other programs.

It was a wonderful evening to realize that we barely scratched the surface of this wonderful HP legacy for so many people.