Today's discussion is about wrong technical/strategic decisions made by big companies. We ignore for a moment clearly wrong business decisions such as HP ignoring Steve Wozniak in 1976. His personal computer design was declined 5 times. The newly formed Apple Computer took it in 1976 and the rest is history. Let's talk about what happened during my time at HP printing division. Here is my list of completely wrong things (as has been proven by time)
1. Inkiet printer (to replace LaserJet) for office printing
2. Highlighter smear problem of inkjet inks in the office -does anybody even remember this?
3. Printing inkjet on coated offset media
4. Inkjet photo kiosk business
5. Image permanence of inkjet photographs
6. 3D printing of final parts (not molds, not prototypes, but actual parts)
Nothing is of the same size as the Wozniak failure, but those were major projects, with many millions of dollars spent on it, and hundreds of very talented engineers were trying to make it work. Why? Why spending the money on this? Each one is a separate case worth writing about, and maybe I will some day.
Overall, the main problems at HP were:
1. Bad marketing team/culture (always optimistic, never no-nonsense, direct Israeli style).
2. High level project managers were not engineers and could not figure out what can or cannot be done from the technical standpoint; they came from the 'market needs' and 'business needs'.
3. No technical leadership and decisions by consensus- the consensus typically leads to a very ugly final outcome.
4. Too slow; many projects were implemented when there was no need for them already
Interestingly, successes of few of HP inkjet businesses came unplanned and unexpected.
(more about it later)
It just occurred to me: What if Steve Wozniak's design would had been accepted by HP? Then HP would have started making Apple-like computers! Perhaps 100 of them would have been made, mostly for geeks. The whole thing would die off in a couple of years, and we would not have the personal computer revolution! So yes, the things turned out well in the end.
