Atlas Shrugged (2024)

https://david-jasso.com/2024/04/11/atlas-shrugged/

by mnky9800n • 8 months ago

37 81 8 months ago

mnky9800n• 8 months ago

How Hewlett Packard destroyed its empire by listening to consultants

PaulHoule2• 8 months ago

I feel the story is too heavy on names and personalities but light on specifics that would drive the message home. The Ayn Rand connection also polarizes people, whereas I think the basic message could have a broad appeal.

The central point seems to be where they hired consultants to get some insight into the problem of a high growth company feeling the walls of the aquarium around it.

Many high-growth companies wound up worse such as the Digital Equipment Corporation which carried The Massachusetts Miracle for two decades but went out with a whimper. HP is still here.

The best outcome I imagine is that HP created a business unit that took the place of one of today's industry titans such as Apple [1], AWS [2], Google [3], Facebook, etc.

HP did have to change direction. In the 1970s and 1980s it had designed multiple minicomputer and microcomputer architectures for all sorts of devices but realized it could not compete on its own in the "micromainframe" 1990s so it teamed up with Intel to make the ambitious but doomed Itanium which they would have shared with other server vendors but instead shared the AMD64 platform with the mass-market segment and kept alive.

Jensen Huang will likely face a crisis with NVIDIA where the explosive growth they've had in the last few years can't possibly be sustained and who is he going to call?

[1] Why couldn't HP been big in smartphones and luxury PCs?

[2] HP could have pioneered cloud computing

[3] DEC's Altavista search engine was world beating for two years until Google appeared

gsf_emergency_6• 8 months ago

  Jensen...

It just struck me that Masa Son won't pick up the phone even when Jensen gets desperate enough. Jen has room to die harder along edge compute angle tho-- e.g. Unitree for the "unwashed" masses. Thence has he the option to call the other Son [sibling!] Thanks!

wduquette2• 8 months ago

I watched this happen from the outside. I bought a Laserjet IV when it was first released; by the time it started to fail, many years later, USB had killed the older printer interfaces. It was a workhorse. I wouldn’t even look at an HP printer today.

don-code• 8 months ago

I likewise have a circa 1997 LaserJet that I refuse to give up. Both the printer and scanner still function flawlessly, every time I need them to - something that few printers today seem capable of.

I switched to 64-bit Windows in 2006. The printer supports PCL drivers, but there are no 64-bit drivers for the scanner. Luckily, I was able to keep it going by running 32-bit Windows in a VM, and passing the parallel port through.

I switched to a laptop without a parallel port in 2019 (thank you, Lenovo, for keeping the parallel port on docks as long as you did). At that point, I bought a JetDirect that supports both printing and scanning over the network. CUPS and SANE both support it out of the box.

i80and• 8 months ago

Those 90s LaserJets were genuinely incredible, and aside from (understandably) dog-slow PostScript processing, I think they were a pinnacle of office printer engineering.

We had one keep on trucking for... geez, as far as I'm aware it's still out there.

PaulHoule2• 8 months ago

I can't speak for the lasers but I will stand up for HP inkjets even though I own an Epson today.

Many criticisms are true (impossible to fix when complex plastic parts break, expensive ink, cheap paper feed mechanisms on budget models, undocumented fading performance, ...) but even the cheapest printers make astonishingly good prints if you use quality ink and quality paper and the cost to fill up a room with decorative art is pretty low.

I know they put you through hell about the ink but it's also true that there are no standards for third party ink and on photography forums you see people who try to make borderless prints and get inksplosions instead and the lowest common denominator is third party ink.

hilbert422• 8 months ago

I've had many Hewlett-Packard printers over the years, and I'd never buy another one.

The most common complaint about HP is its lock-in policy and its associated gutter business practices, not with the inks per se. If you reckon HP inks are the best for high quality art then I'm not going to argue, it's your decision and your money.

On the other hand, I've now an Epson WF-4830 which I only run in draft mode because of the outrageous cost of the inks. When I've finished with this current batch of inks I will do with this printer as I've done with its predecessors which is to chuck it out the window onto concrete two stories below and buy another (that's the cheapest and most effective option for upgrading printers nowadays—I'm onto my fourth printer in about 20 months).

Incidentally, my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet IV which I bought in the 1990s is still working perfectly (these days its Centronics interface goes through a converter to the PC).

thunderbong• 8 months ago

There's a typo in the first line - the author's name should be 'Ayn Rand', not 'Ann Rand'

Jordan_Pelt• 8 months ago

And the title of the book is "The Fountainhead," not "The Fountain Head."

jimnotgym4• 8 months ago

And that reduces the length of the title by about 1/10. Something the rest of the book could have benefitted from as well.

cratermoon• 8 months ago

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers

markus_zhang2• 8 months ago

Which one is which?

UncleSlacky• 8 months ago

"A is sometimes F"

ProllyInfamous• 8 months ago

...I love the J.Rogers quote, absolute truth, master of wit. Thanks for the new quote to use as a bookmark in my personal copy of Atlas (not a book I recommend, young reader or old; nor do I agree with its overall cut-throat inspirationals).

If anybody wants the similar story of Xerox's fumble (due to enterprise stagnation), check out the incredibly-humbling Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC

[•] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029PBVCA

aeternum3• 8 months ago

I believed this quote when I first read it.

I now see that both the heroes and villains in Atlas Shrugged turned out to be far more real that I could have imagined (the engine was still unnecessary BS though).

delichon2• 8 months ago

The central mythical figure in the novel is John Galt, a great inventor. What more critical piece of machinery could Rand have him contribute than an engine, the driver of the industrial revolution? It doesn't work to simply remove it from the plot. It would need to be replaced by something else, like Taggart's railroads, Rearden's steel or Roark's buildings.

mchusma• 8 months ago

I think this quote is the kind of thing that sounds smart, but is actually devoid of meaningful criticism.

As you said, Atlas Shrugged touched a real conflicts that are rarely addressed. Is it kind of obtuse/allegorical? Yes. Would I like it to be a bit shorter? Yes. But it’s ideas seem generally right, the subject matter important, and under discussed.

danaris2• 8 months ago

But the "heroes" of Atlas Shrugged are, in fact, the villains of our modern world.

rig666• 8 months ago

Yes because all the teenagers reading Marxist works are well adjusted and based in reality.

It's humorous how debased from reality John roger's quote is. It doesn't challenge Rand's ideas it just insults it's readers. There's this stigma among her work as if it's dangerous, just like any other right wing idea. But reality is she only asks that one better themselves. She doesn't tell her readers to make a tort against another to right some perceived systematic wrong. Unlike many modernly accepted ideas her works have never been used to justify throwing people in the gulag, ethnic genocide,or insurrection. She tells one that you are not entitled to money, sleezy money grabs do not pay in the long run, and that being hardworking + innovative will payoff in the end.

Also Tokens works are now considered xenophobic and racist by many people as well because the orcs are portrayed as this dark evil race that invades this quent European landscape. so nothing really passes the purity test.

readthenotes12• 8 months ago

I was wondering why HP was buying Compaq and then I read that fiorina was getting a 10% sales commission for making the deal.

WhitneyLand• 8 months ago

Where did you read that? It’s not true.

- Originally she would have got 8 mil if the transaction closed

- She had to give that up due to bad press

- 10% would have been 2.5B so no way was that ever happening

- Her big score was the golden parachute tied to leaving the company. You could say the merger accelerated her exit indirectly, but there was no commission on the deal.

BergAndCo2• 8 months ago

"was getting" doesn't necessarily imply that she got away with it; "got" implies that.

readthenotes12• 8 months ago

I must have read it in the bad press! I'm glad you missed her commission, sorry she got her golden parachute. It should have been made of lead

airstrike• 8 months ago

feels like this really needs a subtitle like "An insider's view of HP's fall from grace" or something to that effect

dpkirchner• 8 months ago

And a sub subtitle "I didn't read the book, btw".

GMoromisato• 8 months ago

I'm sympathetic to the thesis, but I wish there were more details. For example, what could HP have done differently? Buying Compaq seems like "trying to win" to me--it was trying to expand its PC market share. Was that the wrong acquisition? What would have been better instead?

Fundamentally, however, we know that the markets HP was in were not growth markets: PCs, printers, enterprise consulting, etc. The growth markets at the time were phones (Apple), software (Microsoft), and cloud services (Amazon, Google, etc.) Could HP have succeeded in any of those businesses?

compsciphd• 8 months ago

they bought palm. people were pretty happy with webos/hp touchpad. so there was at least some desire to within hp to go into that market.

instead they cut bait quickly. sold off WebOS to LG and that was it.

efortis• 8 months ago

Playing to win versus playing not to lose

I’ve been trying to verbalize the motives behind the best practices frontend dev influecers preach these days and now I think it’s something like that. Everytime someone falls from his bike we have to install another set of training wheels.

For example,

- We ditched classes in React because someone didn’t bind a handler. Now we have hooks with a ton of best practices.

- Someone got a cascading bug, now we have utility classes for combining two more manageable problems into one big problem.

Joel_Mckay4• 8 months ago

Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care.

It is one matter to embrace selfish neo-libertarianism rhetoric, but the lack of resolve facing the awful reality these people eventually create for themselves is absurd.

Also, HP was a phenomenal company a long time ago, and lazy stewards burned that good will for short-term profit. Process people ruin every large company eventually, as priorities shift away from providing value to customers. =3

tt249• 8 months ago

Keep in mind "Ayn Rand" ended up in the public safety net for care.

There’s no hypocrisy there. She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?

DangitBobby2• 8 months ago

[flagged]

teucris2• 8 months ago

The hypocrisy lies in the fact that the philosophy of Ayn Rand - that an elite few held up society and the rest were pretty much just parasites - has been used at great length to justify the gutting of social programs.

surgical_fire3• 8 months ago

Perhaps at that point she realized that her ideas were shit, and a system where you contribute to a public safety net is not a bad idea, it's what society is for.

Or perhaps she was still a dense prick to the end of her days. Who knows?

littlestymaar6• 8 months ago

She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?

That's not how “the system” works though. She paid so other people could benefit from it, then when she benefited it, she became part of a scheme that took money from working people to give it to her: she become one of the parasites she hated in good years.

I don't blame her for preferring hypocrisy to suicide, but it's still fair to call her hypocrisy for what it is.

jimnotgym4• 8 months ago

I always thought there was a perfect cure for objectivist nonsense. Just exist for a year without the benefits of society. No legal protections, no police, no fire brigade, no roads, no currency, no markets. Thing is, I'm bigger than a lot of them, and it would make me happy to steal their property.

macintux• 8 months ago

HP’s first product was an audio oscillator...

That reminded me that BBN started in acoustics. Any other significant tech companies get started in audio engineering?

ineedasername• 8 months ago

I’m not sure there could be something less like the “shrug” in the book and this comparison to corporate decline. It’s an inversion of quite a bit that was central to the theme.

The shrug in the book was people turning their back, walking away— people who thought their talents were either wasted or unequally compensated in some way, or footing an unfair portion of things, and the “shrug” was them walking away. A fundamental individual, not collective and corporate act. The central character felt exploited by the company he worked for.

The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.

roxolotl• 8 months ago

You just described a union. One of the things that’s wild to me about the book is that it’s pushed as a proponent of individualism and libertarianism but Gault’s Gulch is just the wealthy unionizing. There’s nothing individualistic about it. If just John Galt had walked away nothing would have happened.

littlestymaar6• 8 months ago

The French translator didn't miss the contradiction and as such in the translated title is «La grève» (“the strike”).

CalChris2• 8 months ago

The book has enough problems without also confusing who the author meant when she said “Atlas”. It wasn’t corporations, it was individuals.

So you’re saying Rand wouldn’t have been happy with Citizens United. You may want to inform her acolytes like Clarence Thomas.

teekert• 8 months ago

If you’re looking for a link to Atlas Shrugged, there isn’t any, except for the title… and the interpretation of the sentence “Atlas Shrugged” in this piece has nothing to do with the novel.

romanhn2• 8 months ago

By an author who hadn't read the book, no less...

geophile• 8 months ago

This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name.

https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...

I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:

    Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged
    a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help 
    them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that
    have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”

OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future."

OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".

Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.

Look at this quote from the letter:

    I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ...  why 
    are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company 
    exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of 
    a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real 
    reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist
    as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish 
    something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. 
    They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution 
    to society .... You can look around and still see people who are 
    interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives 
    come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to 
    give a service—generally to do something which is of value.

I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure.

And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.

To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:

    In the last few years more and more business people have begun to
    recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their
    true objective.

(This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.

Atlas Shrugged (2024)

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