Do yu remember "Halo"?

 Funny some things cycle and recycle, you just never know when to expect them.   A recent post by Phil McKinney, one of HP's genuine innovators along the way, recalled some 'forgotten video conferencing lore' that is perhaps worth revisiting (or maybe, for most of you, visiting for the first time).

Here's Phil's LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/question-nobody-wanted-ask-phil-mckinney-jtd1c/

Finding Ideas

Most innovation fails quietly. The warnings were there. Forty years of what nobody wanted to say

Something I keep seeing in boardrooms, innovation teams, and strategy sessions, including my own, is that the most expensive mistakes rarely come from bad ideas. They come from good ideas built on assumptions nobody thought to question.

Not because the people in the room were careless. Because the assumption felt so obvious it stopped feeling like an assumption. It just felt like the plan.

That's what I keep coming back to this week.

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✦ This Week — Studio Sessions

Inversion Thinking: How to Guarantee Your Project Fails (On Purpose)

In 2005, I was at HP when we built Halo. Best telepresence system in the world. Life-sized. Perfect audio. Nobody had built anything close.

The team was brilliant. The technology was extraordinary. And we were completely wrong about the one thing that mattered.

We believed quality wins. It felt so obvious that nobody in the room thought to question it. Not once. Not out loud.

It wasn't quality the market was buying. It was access. Cisco understood that. Then Zoom made it a verb. We invented the category and handed it to them.

In 2011, under quarterly pressure, HP sold Halo to Polycom for $89 million. In 2022, HP bought the business back for $3.3 billion. Thirty-seven times the price. To reacquire a category we'd invented.

The failure wasn't hidden. It was sitting inside one assumption the entire time. An inversion exercise, asking "how would we guarantee this fails," would have dragged it into the open in the first planning meeting. The answer was already in the plan. We just never read it from the other side.

Phil is right when he wrote that Halo was 'the best telepresence system in the world."  My Collab team at Intel did 'bake-offs' for three years (2003-2006) of all the extant systems.  HP was far and away the technology and user preference leader, for several reasons that I'll cover below.

This should not have been surprising.  HP was among the first to invest heavily in Computer-aided Teleconferencing.   That story has only lightly been told in other venues, and I'll just briefly recount it here.  But the sequence is fascinating, not just for HP's prescience and then failure, not just once but twice, but also for other companies (notably Intel and Cisco) trying and failing almost precisely for the same reasons.   So there must be something endemic about what Phil has described in terms of overlooking the obvious. 

Phil was wrong, though when he says "Cisco understood that it was Access."   NOPE, they blew this one bigger than HP, especially because they thought "Access" meant for a select few, not everyone.  So they chased a small company that did think "access" and Cisco proceeded to completely miss the target.

First of all, although Phil doesn't mention that the 'chief competitor' to Halo at introduction was Cisco's Telepresence, they were the two "big kahunas".   Here are pictures of each, Halo first.  Note that Halo includes a big screen at the top, whereas Cisco's room does not.   That is one part of the story.

The HP "Halo" 'room'

The Cisco "Telepresence" room

Both systems were backed, actually stimulated even and then strongly promoted, by the respective CEOs, Carly Fiorina and John Chambers.  Each system cost roughly $350,000 per 'room' with a hefty ongoing networking and maintenance bill as well.   And each system had to connect to a similar systm elesewhere in order to establish a "meeting".  This meant that there was a premium on getting many systems installed so that meetings could happen between folks you wanted to have meet.  Also turned out hard to call a Cisco room from an HP room, or vice versa.

At that price, not everyone could afford such a proposition, and if you did (Cisco ultimately had 100's of 'in-house' systems for their own employees, and for their extended sales offices; HP's 'in-house' sites never totalled more than 100).   Cisco once boasted nearly 1,000 corporations having a system; HP never posted installation numbers, but  projections beyond 100 other corporations were scarce.  

There were two significant differences between HP's technological solution and Cisco's.   First, HP had the additional screen, so that "data" could be shared as well as people's smiling faces.  Some Cisco installations had small (21") screens at the far right and far left of the room to try to show the same thing (ZERO visibility for anyone interested in numbers).  Turns out Chamber is dyslexic, and he insisted that he wanted to see and feel the 'human' in the communication--data was largely extraneous (which by the way is how he mostly managed).   

The more fundamental issue was that Cisco's system was optimized with cameras that all focused on the center seat.   This had the unfortunate side effect that someone sitting to the left of the center seat could not address the person sitting directly across from them, nor could they address people seated at the far diagonal screen, without each Virtual group turning their gaze away from, rather than toward, the person addressing them from the side screen.  It was the ultimate "command-and-control catbird seat" to be in the center.   HP's system, correctly positioned with more strategically thought-out cameras, allowed anyone in a seemingly face-to-face screen set-up to talk to that person.  

The spec sheets didn't reveal any of that, but users quickly noticed this aberration.  Here are classical specs--unbelievably great and analogous technology for each system, except for these two deviations:

Cisco® TelePresence is an innovative new technology that combines rich audio, high-definition video, and interactive elements to deliver a unique, “in-person” experience—over the network. It is designed to bring users closer to the important people, places, and events in their personal and professional lives. The first application, the Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution, creates a live, face-to-face meeting experience, empowering users to interact and collaborate like never before. The Cisco TelePresence Meeting is purpose-built to be a completely different meeting experience, taking interaction and collaboration to a new level. Because it feels like everyone is in the same room, remote interactions are just as natural and effective as in-person communication, simplifying and accelerating information sharing throughout your organization—thereby impacting your top and bottom lines.

Key Benefits

Cisco TelePresence lets you improve productivity and responsiveness by focusing on more interactions with the right resource at the right time. It speeds time to market and enables faster decision making. At the same time, you can improve quality of life by giving employees back valuable time and, more importantly, control over their time with solutions that are as high-performance as they are. Imagine bringing more resources into an account for sales or support, and extending your reach and relationships without ever leaving your office.

Critical to delivering this experience are breakthrough innovations in delivering very high-quality audio and ultra high-definition video at very low latency with limited bandwidth utilization, in addition to the meeting environment itself. The Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution delivers true life-size images, ultra-high-definition video (both 720p and 1080p), and spatial audio, which creates the dynamics of voices coming directly from the participants. This scenario creates a “room within a room” environment that makes users feel as if they are at the same table with people in remote locations. In addition to direct eye contact, the full-duplex, near-zero latency allows users to communicate in real time, catching every comment and every nuance of the conversation. Every expression, every gesture is now clearly visible, whether you are meeting across town or across time zones.

Another user experience was notable for both HP and Cisco 'room administrators' (which were a necessary side operational cost).  THE WRONG PEOPLE are using the systems.   Both Carly and John believed that these were intentionally built for their key executives, to minimize travel costs and times, and to maximize their exposure time to key account executives.  Instead, between 80% and 90% of the users were 'low-status' folk, from the quality department, or personnel, or manufacturing logistics folk, or even folk who had no official standing but just wanted to talk to a friend or colleague elsewhere.  The common characteric of these users was that they usually could not get approval for company travel wherease the top execs had no trouble getting travel budgets approved.  Moreover, the top execs, despite their avowed stated beliefs, LOVED the travel perq, and were loathe to give it up.   Excuses like "It's just not the same if you're not there to press the flesh" abounded.  HP learned this in 1985; and had to relearn it in 2004, because everyone who learned it the first time had retired, left, or died.

The ultimate ACCESS test was, akin to Phil's observations, when Ciscc bought WebEx, in order to capture a larger user community.   WebEx at the time was a subscription service, with a clunky interface that Cisco managed to mangle even worse.   Eric Yuan was VP R&D for WebEx, and he kept explaining, almost ad nauseam, to Cisco officials what was needed.  Totally ignored, he left and started Zoom, with major funding from Cisco's SVP and legal counsel, Dan Scheinman who coincidentally quit Cisco the same day.  Scheinman's cousin provided VC funding later, and became a long-standing Zoom Board member.  Zoom's first customer was Stanford, where MediaX and Terry Winograd in CS had both been advocates.  

Note: I participated in three 'firsts' here actually.  A. Running MediaX where we did a fair amount of Zoom pre-practice in 2011.  B.  I was actually Webex's first user-customer for Dialogic in 1997--when they still sold the software as a product.  In fact, I wrote three papers about Video conferencing systems and a major C-Suite study (see below).   C.  I helped define HP's first efforts, and thereby authored Cisco's first commercial sale, using their early router to develop our HP Internet in 1985.  The story here (which I did NOT know for another 25 years) was that not only was my signature their first sale, but HP was their ONLY commercial customer for 27 months (when Boeing, thanks we think to Dave Packard telling Ted Wilson and Frank Shrontz how well it worked) became Cisco's 2nd commercial cusstomer.

Here are several studies that I published later via Intel and InnovaScapes Institute

(1) (PDF) Distributed Teams—Challenges and Opportunities. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335640480_Distributed_Teams-Challenges_and_Opportuniti.  Published in Resarch Technology Management, 2019

(2) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287205434_Confronting_Culture_Clash   Published in Research Technology Management, 2015.  The specific HP Internet development in 1984-1985, and the cisco systems role (early, the name was not capitalized) are well covered here.   This paper describes the same "Wrong people using the system" phenomenon already discovered by 1987.

(3) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5230814   "It depends on your point of View"  January 2009, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, and IEEE Xplore.

(4) https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2005.3    January 2005, HICSS 38, "Information worker Tools selection, adoption, and evaluation, Chuck House.  This paper explicitly mentions WebEx by name, and shows extensive graphs re value of various capabilities.

A couple of other historical points could be made.  Intel, with Pat Gelsinger as the lead designer and Exec, along with Andy Grove, bet heavily on Workstation-based Video teleconferencing with Team Station.  See the clear article by John James W. published June 11, 2024

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/intel-teamstation-visionary-leap-collaboration-john-james-worrall-1rane/ 

I bought several of these for Dialogic in 1998/1999, and they were incredibly painful to use compared to the G-job terminals we had buiit for our HP system in 1985.   Not the least issue was the "look 'em in the eyeball, not the eye" problem of the off-axis camera.   But they did work, and though pricey, at $12,000 per terminal, they were lots cheaper than a $350,000 'room'.  This was a partnership with PictureTel, who while the leader, had some primitive tools at the time (and a number of the old HP guys).  The goal was to extend this into cheaper PCs, and ubiquitous 'telephone directories'.  Alas, the networks weren't yet up to it, and in particular, the advantages of IPv6 network protocols weren't yet available.   Nor were multi-core chipsets, so that any slow node could be isolated from others rather than dragging all concurrent users to a depressingly low level.

One more sidenote--we now know that the off-axis camera and lack of 'seeing you eye to eye' has largely ceased to be a problem.   It built mistrust in early systems, but today most people really don't look you in the eye--its body language, or room topology, or voice tonality that win the day

Okay, okay, so much for rambling through a long and tortured history.  But think where we'd have been in the COVID days if Zoom hadn't existed.

More interesting than obituaries

 Several have commented that I seem too focused on HPites dying, rather than what is happening at our old company.   So, just to give you an idea, we're always open to communication with living, breathing, functioning, achieving HPites.  This week, for example, I have heard from a wide swath of folk due to a modest update to my own LinkedIn page.

Dave Dayton, who became General Manager of the Logic Systems Division in C Springs when I moved to Palo Alto, sent a note, among other things mentioning that his watercolor hobby has progressed nicely.  He said, Check it out: ddaytonartist.blogpost.com 

Greg Peters, sent notes about the HUGE run-ip n KEYS stock price recently.  I shoulda, coulda, didn't have enough.   He sends notes periodically, includes Jay Alexander usually, sometime4s adds Mike Davis and others from C Springs.  Greg lives in the Napa Valley, still consulting in the quantum computing space.  Here's the front end of his note" KEYS is doing very well at the moment in large part due to the massive AI investments going on around the world. Data centers use lots of cables and connectors and KEYS is extremely well positioned to address those design and measurement needs – including everybody’s favorite T&M franchise – Keysight VNAs 

I sent a connection invite to Pat Byrne the other day; I didn't realize that he lived just a few miles from us when we were in Portland.

Bill Parzybok, Tom Saponas, Mike Davis, Eric Lessing, John Riggen, and a few others trade notes on occasion--all living in the C Springs area.

From Palo Alto and environs--have you priced the housing here lately?   We should have kept our little Barron and Hilp home down the street from Art Fong by the Palo Alto library.  I looked up the Barrett and Hilp company, just found out that they were instrumental in building the Golden Gate bridge.  They built a few homes in Palo Alto circa 1950, in answer to the cheap and popular Eichlers.  Here's the B&H citation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_and_Hilp.    Jenny and I bought one at 115 Walter Hays Drive for $292,000, a princely sum in our view (and certainly so for my father) in 1986.   It now is listed at nearly $5M.  Sigh.

Anyway, from HP there, how about Steve Joseph, Jerry Brown, Lisa Haeni (who was Tom Steyer's assistant for years after leaving Judee Grenard and me at HP), Will Allen, Neerja Raman, Kumar Karungulam, Bob Frankenberg, Webb McKinney, John Minck, Clark Straw, Al Oliverio, Scott Futryk, and Ron Gonzales.  Howze that for an eclectic group?   All of them are still alive and kickin' -- some more so than others, but hey if we can still get upright and fog a mirror . . .

Views around the loop

 Every "once in a while" something unexpected shows up in my 'in-box' that causes a lump in my throat.  Here is a blogpost by an Irish 'influencer' named Aidan McCullen whom I've mentioned before (mostly since he did some six hours of interviewing me a few months back.   Here's his recent salvo, with a 'sad' HP appended story:  https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7458857628308463616/

“The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese” — The Second Mouse (presumably)

This is a comforting story behind the Fast Follower strategy.

There's a fine line between being a strategic second mouse and being a latecomer eating leftovers.

In the 1960s, Chuck House was working on a large-screen display at HP. Dave Packard himself told him to abandon it. Chuck ignored the order. He could see something in the market that HP's own rules had no way of describing, and he kept going. That display became the monitor used for the Apollo moon landing and a $35M business. Chuck later wrote a book about the experience and called it Permission Denied.

Innovation often asks you to break "the syntax" of the company to honour "the context" of the market.

Big organisations fall in love with syntax.
Syntax is the rules, the SOPs, "the way we do things." Syntax scales beautifully, but also stops most companies from spotting the trap before it snaps. The people closest to the context, the Chuck Houses of the world, usually know first. The question is whether the org will let them act on it.

That's the theme of some recent conversations on the show.
Jonathan Brill and Stephen Wunker talked about their new book, AI and the Octopus Organization.

40 years after Chuck House, Jonathan was HP's Global Futurist and Research Director when, in 2009, he sat down with an HP executive to flag a critical touchscreen component coming through one of his clients. The reception was, in his words, "subdued". The strategy was to wait for Apple to launch the iPad, then fast-follow.

So, HP then waited for Microsoft, bought Palm, tried Android. The devices ended up on fire sale. As Jonathan put it in the book, "HP lost because it did everything right." Apple is now worth sixty times HP and HPE combined.

*************      

I don't think I've ever met Jonathan Brill, although a quick perusal of his career shows many common travels.   Here's his impressive Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Brill

He must have followed Phil McKinney, another HP futurist long after my time there.  Phil also has had some 'unseemly' comments about HP innovation in recent years, but I won't list them here.

What I will cite is a comparison experience of my own.   I spent 20 years at HP in the oscilloscope division (although I kept trying end-runs like XY displays and Logic Analyzers and Program Development Systems to combat a fierce and capable Tektronix), and then nine years back in Palo Alto and etc. in other roles including Corporate Engineering Director.   Along the way, I gained 'fame' or more accurately 'notoriety' with the David Packard Medal of Defiance, and Electronics' magazine Engineer of the Year, and other accolades (some of them even were appropriate, but most of the work was shared and collegial, not 'mine' alone by any means).   

The key point is that four times I wound up in front of the founders to describe some new 'fool-hardy' projects, and three times I either got permission or was able to continue without being thwarted.  The last time was a bit noteworthy, which I've never put in writing before, and it was more-or-less my swan song for HP.   I was leading a new software division (SESD, which stood for Software Engineering Systems Division), and presenting an idea to HP's Executive Council to change HP's accounting system so that software divisions got credit for part of the computer system sales revenue when their SW wa;s bundled.   

Parenthetic note: I'd already (four years prior), gotten HP to adopt the Return Map for project accounting (see Harvard Biz Review https://hbr.org/1991/01/the-return-map-tracking-product-teams) as noted in today's AI summary: The "Return Map," developed at Hewlett-Packard, provides a way for people from different functions to triangulate on the product development process as a whole. It graphically represents the contributions of all team members to the moment when a project breaks even. The tool serves as a graphical representation designed to align diverse, cross-functional teams toward the same goals.

After giving the talk, I walked out of the room with EVP Lew Platt, soon to be CEO.   He said, "Wow!  I've seen you give many original talks that shocked an audience.  But I've never seen you give one that uniformly pissed off everyone in the room."   

Needless to say, I didn't get the order.  Nor did HP get the message.   So HP Image never competed with Oracle, nor did HP Networks compete with Cisco, and on and on.   Giving the software away to move the hardware worked great for profit-oriented hardware divisions, but was the death-knell for every software division for years.

But that was one failure against three successes.

Later, I spent several years at Intel, and as it happened, I had four opportunities to meet with their Exec Council to pitch some new 'fool-hardy' project.   And four times, they approved it.  But inexplicably, four times they failed to fund it.  For the swan-song after the last pitch (for essentially a "Zoom-like" product in 2005), I left to join Stanford to lead MediaX.  And, a chary view might say, "to learn how academia is able to thwart innovation!"

So, kudos to Jonathan Brill and Phil McKinney and the legions of others who bent their pick on the ever-receding HP innovation gene.

Old HP Artifacts and etc .

 From time to time, folk go in and clear out their garage or basement, and find 'treasures' from the past.  Papers, equipment, old advertisements, a journal, whatever.  And strange as it may seem, some of this is incredibly important from a historical standpoint.   Two cases in point at the Computer History Museum are the Pelkey interviews and the Jay Last Fairchild papers.

1. The Pelkey interviews.  These were 81 audio interviews done with leading network designers and other key people during the 1986-1988 period, later compiled into an ACM book, Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968-1988 by James L. Pelkey, Andrew L. Russell, Loring G. Robbins Morgan & Claypool, Apr 19, 2022 - Computers - 632 pages.    There is a back story here, where the Computer History Museum initially eschewed these as 'anecdotal history' but later realized that this trove is uniquely valuable, and the collection was established thirty years after the fact.  Pelkey as of 1988 didn't yet acknowledge Cisco (great back-story), which of course a dozen years later had produced more than half of the Internet routers of the world.   Jim assed away in 2023, months after the ACM book was published.  https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2023/02/10148825/1NVeRg1pnl6

2. Two key efforts enabled capture of the Fairchild semiconductor papers fifty years after the fact.  Jay Last, one of the 'traitorous eight'. was very historically minded, and he journaled heavily, plus purloined and saved  key papers about Fairchild when he left the company before the founders then started Intel.  In addition, he marshaled a collection of Jean Hoerni's papers and journals, that helped serve the later donation by Texas Instruments of old documents that they had accumulated through acquisitions of National Semiconductor (https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/fairchild-release/).   Truly historic material, that had gone unnoticed for five decades, this invaluable material has fueled several books and significant historical research in the meantime.

I wrote a small monograph a decade ago for the Computer History Museum Board of Trustees (a group I was privileged to be a Trustee for nearly three decades), entitled 'Preserving Our Digital Revolution Heritage: If not you, who?  If not now, when?:  (https://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-house/digital-revolution-heritage/paperback/product-12jqr4qz.html?page=1&pageSize=4).  It argues for the notion that many of us can participate or contribute to this cornucopia of arcane computer history, and if we fail to do so, that many salient stories will never  be captured for posterity.  How to do so is the question.  For HP lovers (the old HP?), thee is a great mechanism, which is herein described.

In that vein, this month, Bill Dyck (37 year HP veteran) sent a note out, saying to  Hewlett Packard Employees - past and present (cf. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2450210642/?multi_permalinks=10174461959035643)

Bill Dyck ·rsodopnSte5h45fu 4rlgf2ua811 bfF9ut1m762r7g1ycgm68i90 e:g aMA ·

Cleaning up storage and came across a collection of old HP computers. 100LX, 200LX, Jornada 820, Omnibook 500. Any idea if these are interesting from a historical perspective? All of them are working!

Curt Gowen responded, with something maybe others could use:

Curt Gowan

HP and HPE have jointly hired HeritageWerks, a public relations agency, to store equipment and documents in an archival warehouse -- plus digitize and display the HP photo archives on a website. Many early photos. Includes DEC and Compaq items. https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com

Only a few of many objects and documents in the collection are displayed on the website. Products featured at the top level of the website tend to be unusual ones; dig deeper into the site for coverage of the more successful and long-lived products. The site is designed to emphasize social consciousness, quality of worklife, and technical innovation. https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/about-the-archives

To send a comment or propose the donation of documents or objects: www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/contact As with any archival organization, if your offer is accepted you will be sent an agreement to sign.