The Hewlett Packard corp. lost AT LEAST $500 today. Why?

Outsourcing.

I manage a store that sells their products. One customer refused to buy a $350 All-in-One machine when she found out that tech support calls might be outsourced to India.

Another customer returned a $150 machine after spending THREE MONTHS trying to get help from Dell and HP on an installation problem. He said it was frequently hard to understand the tech support people and their promises to return calls often were broken.

today,something i`ve never done-why? the woman i spoke to was an american. at least i know she`s getting min.wage plus commission.

from HP last December. After talking to customer support (in India) and having to ask the guy everything 3 times because I couldn't understand him, I took the laptop back for a refund the next day.
I'll buy local from now on, even if it does cost a little more. I have difficulty understanding Indian people trying to speak English.
So there's another $1,400 they lost because of outsourcing.

We need a website advertising the insanity of executive decisions.
Just a few examples: investing billions in "dot coms", Intel deciding to go into web hosting just when it's crashing in supply and price, DSL investment disasters, not standardizing wireless in the US nationwide, big 3's refusal to invest in hybrid engine research...

so many stupid decisions and customer support has to be at the top of the list.

Computers are a terrible product. Instead of correcting this and have
have repair on the agenda of their product and actually train
their support people to have the skills necessary to debug
the system over the phone (they have scripts written they must walk through and the employee has no clue on how to diagnose a system malfunction through technical training), or bother to setup UPS mechanism to fix the machine and send it back and so forth...

instead they screw over the Americans and make customer support even
worse...thus do not grow the market in terms of Americans adopting the
technology.

Customer support idiocy and bad product design to me go into the top
10 stupid corporate decisions list.

if it's worth it. It was a great computer for "newbies." My first was bought in '96 and lasted me until January 12, 2000. That's long in computer life for that time with 16 mgs of ram. I bought top of the line and spend $2,000 with that Presario. Then at the Millenium I bought for $799.00 "Internet Computer in a Box" from them which was Processor, Monitor and the JBL Platinum Speakers (which I loved on my first computer.) The only thing which wasn't better were the speakers which were much lower quality than my original. They were better, however than the other "in store" speakers which came with the whole system that I tested...so I bought it.

I have a romantic attachment to Compaq which I need to get over in this day of "no loyalty" because they don't care about customers mentality. I got suckered too long with AT&T because of my loyalty.

But, I still say, for those of us "clueless" who wanted to get "online" in '96, my Compaq opened the door to the world of the internet for me. And it even helped me to learn "word processing."

I will always be grateful to that "old Compaq group" who saw that there were so many of out there and gave us "help" and a "Restore floppy and later CD-rom, plus much free help (in the early days) from techies who walked me through problems for over an hour about once a month. For someone with no DOS training in those early days of the internet..you have no idea how bad it was trying to figure out what all those error messages were.

Good Ole Compaq. I still have my first one sitting as a "back up" in case something crashes. They were "good guys/gals" once. :shrug:

Well, the ones you are loyal too...those great engineers
who built the technology...were rewarded by getting fired and replaced
with cheaper foreign counterparts.

There is no one left to be loyal too...kind of like buying a GM
car thinking you're "buying American" when odds are you're not...

it's a shell, just a purchased name...the people are gone.

I have a laser printer from HP as well as a calculator, both
early 90's...fantastic products, still functioning...

today's HP computer? blah motherboard performance, tons of ads,
sold stripped of memory...

I just had Microsoft updates blow apart my system. Microsoft's
"help" had some Indian guy claim "there is no problem".

So much for advances in innovation and quality engineering...
but loyalty? The corporate names don't represent the people you used to be loyal too.

DEC was responsible for many great innovations and products. The industry has yet been able to match some of DEC's operating system features.

That was back in the good ole days before Compaq swallowed DEC up. Compaq didn't really know what to do with the DEC legacy. Then along came HP.

It's so weird to see some of the old DEC products with the HP logo.