Gossip

HP staff unhappy about Jornada vanishing, but not optimistic, either

Insiders at the "old HP" have responded strongly to the suggestion that the "new HP" might have missed a trick in going with the iPaq brand ...

Intercepted packets from one employee expressed some bitterness with the situation. "I've just read the article on NewsWireless Net - very interesting ... " remarked one anonymous employee, who was part of the ACO, the calculator devision of HP. They called this "Another example of $$$-driven management decision taking!"

"They closed us recently because we were not making enough money," reports this source, adding that although they were one of the most profitable divisions in HP, "and could sustain ourselves with no external help, The idea was to let calculators die. They just discovered recently how profitable calculators are, and are trying to revive them, but with no real division working on them, the future seems bleak ... "

This source offered a bit of history to help their next point: "When the ACO started in 1997, we had to get information from the old calc division, and this was awfully difficult, and we lost many things, including the source code for some calculators ... So, now that APCD (the Jornada division) is closed, if HP wants to continue/restart developping the Jornada line, I predict it will be awfully difficult to achieve!"

Also, another division (EMSO) which was working on embedded Linux, and which would have been the best to take over the Jornada line, was been closed last week, the source added.

And just for fun: "The previous calc division was absorbed by APCD, but since APCD was focussed on Jornadas, they let the calcs die ... So when the ACO started, APCD got a little jealous, that's probably one of the reasons why it was so difficult to get information about the old calcs!"

Corporate life, eh ... Dilbert isn't humour, it's documentary.