We may be heading into an age when PCs are antiques. And smart phones and tablets are dirt cheap.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
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Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
They were for it before they were against it before they were for it again.
The instrument business probably makes decent money, but it isn't a growth business. You and me, we respect the instrument end of the biz and yawn at the PCs, but Wall St. doesn't see it that way. BTW, HP does have a commercial (business) line that isn't quite as visible as the PC peddling. They do storage, cloud, blah blah blah.
Seriously, the instrument division had to buy old HP test gear just to destroy it to keep it off the market. Their stuff was that good.
Don't forget HP also dumped their semi group, but Avago is in a lot of phones. Actually spun off from Agilent, but you get the idea.
That seems like bull poopies. Why do they archive many of their service manuals on their web site? If they really wanted the old equipment to go away, you would think they would not provide that service.
The old HP was becoming an ever smaller part of the company. Upper management focused on the big money part of the business; the test and measurement business was ignored. It was if a billionaire's kid was pestering him all the time for $5. Further, so much of old T&M was becoming a commodity business, with an uncompetitive cost structure, that it was exiting a bunch of businesses with really nothing to replace them. Further, it had just decided to sell off the medical instrument business, predicting cost cutting in health care, further shrinking its product portfolio. So the computer/printer side cut it loose, with their best wishes.
The old name went with the computer side, for fear of losing consumers. So the old HP got a new name. Components had been a way to supply "beyond the" state of the art semis to the product side of the house, but the product side exploited that angle less and less. Philips, a power in lighting, was interested in the superbright LEDs, but no one was that much interested in the rest of components.
CEOs are paid by the revenue they generate and the easiest thing is to sell parts of the company. They don't expect to stay for more than 2 years, so the decision is easy.
If I look at the Böblingen HP campus in walking distance from here:
They sold the medical division to Philips. They sold/spawned the multilayer division to Multek They spawned the instruments division:Agilent. The semiconductor division is now Avago. Agilent's wafertester division became Verigy. There is some company for mechanical CAD, too, and more that I don't remember.
Verigy immediately decided that they are a systems company and not in the business of building hardware, so they concentrated on their core competence and outsourced building stuff Boeblingen to china and when they found they could not deliver from China to India.
Then, a new chinese company surfaced with a low end tester that remarkably looked like a close family member. There were discussions to buy them to avoid competition. Verigy itself has been bought by Advantest in the meantime.
I read this week that HP would lay off a lot of people this year.
With Siemens it's the same game: They sold their passive components as EPCOS. The semiconductor division became Infineon.
Infineon sold their optical parts: Osram. Memory devices became Qimonda, now small enough to go bankrupt.
Infineon fiber optics was sold to Finisar and then closed. (brought me some time time in San Jose for tech. transfer..)
They put all the old manuals online for those that still own the gear. It is not like they hate geeks and cheapskates. Business can write off gear, so they don't own boat anchors like the hobbyists.
I can write off my gear too, but I get a lot more bang for the buck with boat anchors!
Cheers
Phil "Hoist the Jolly Roger" Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
The culture inside a lot of companies does not reward saving money on equipment, but does punish risk-taking. Also, a lot of people have undue faith in new equipment and a lot of fear of dealing with problems.
I just bought a nice DC voltage standard that is probably 20+ years old, and it easily meets the specs when new from the factory. Maybe 15 cents on the dollar (a bit expensive by your standards perhaps, but I had it in-hand, (in-rack?) next day). 100% well-aged parts so it should actually be better than a new instrument.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
I bought a certain amount of used stuff when I was at IBM as well, but there was almost no possibility of using eBay, so I had to pay top dollar too. Still, I got several things that I couldn't have afforded at the time, e.g. an 11801C and a bunch of plugins. Also probably 15 or
20 cents on the dollar, from Test Equipment Connection or ElectroRent or Metric Test or one of those outfits.
Plus I've been at this long enough that a lot of my boat anchors are closely similar to equipment I used when it was new. It helps a lot to be familiar with what you're buying.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
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Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Everybody was dumping everything then. Jaques Nasser dumped Ford's
*parts* business. That's crazy. Parts are the classic cash cow.
I doubt the PC will disappear altogether. IMO, they *have* stopped getting cheaper. It's not scientific, but I get the impression tablets are bought in addition to laptops, not instead of them.
It's pretty hard to find a better SA than the old HP 8566B and they are selling for less than 10 cents on the dollar. Plus, no one will walk off with it.
They won't even try hauling it to the next workbench!
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
Yup! That's what many movers and shakers in business either forget or do not know.
True, and I just realized, again, that modern network analyzers often cannot achieve the performance of my 80's era HP-3577A.
But Miso is right that this ain't a growth business. It used to be but no more. A lot of jobs are taken over by PC-driven instruments. I have several. They cost very little, such as the sub-$1k (new!) spectrum analyzer I bought a while ago. It does pre-compliance jobs just fine and can even do stuff the big machines can't. All this is eating into the turf of the Agilents and Tektronixs of the world. And then there is Asia. Instek, Rigol and so on, also invading their turf.
A small business can expense equipment purchases, which can cut their effective cost almost in half. A big business shows the cost of equipment on the books just as if it was still cash. That cuts both ways: taxes are due now on the "profit", and takes years to depreciate. On the other hand, shareholders see (or don't see!) the expense as if it was profit.
Yeah. Agilent and LeCroy are doing harder stuff, like PCIe protocol analyzers for $50K and up, or cell phone and fiberoptic modulation analyzers for lots more.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
It's been over a decade since I ran a part of a company and we had the watchful eyes of accountants and the CFO over us, they made sure that everything was legit. AFAIR normally one has a reasonable influence on write-off times if it can be justified. Not so much with new stuff because there are certain established rules. But what would be the problem writing off a used boat anchor over just a couple of years?
Even if you couldn't, doing a MACRS amortization on a $4k boat anchor is still a heck of a lot better than doing one on a $50k analyzer. Yeah, more taxes, but a lot more profit.
The question is, is that going to be enough? I have the impression that they are seriously neglecting the lower end. That's what the big three auto manufacturers did and they ended up bruised and beaten, with two of them essentially on the brink of bankruptcy if it wasn't for a taxpayer bailout. Until they re-learned how to build smaller lower end cars again.
Just like they wisely didn't try to compete with Heathkit and Tenma (?) 'scopes back when. As Clint might say, a company (like a man) has got to know its limitations.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
For a small one, yes. But AFAIK that reverts when the fiscal cliff hits, doesn't it?
I bet they could, in the same way car US or EU manufacturers can and do compete with Asian ones even when building compact cars. _If_ they want to and are smart. One example is the car you are driving.
But not when short-changing potential customers. I would have spent 30% more on a Tek several years ago. But with a measly 4k of sample memory you can't do serious pulse echo stuff. They should have known that the
30% cheaper Instek had 25k, and that does allow decent pulse-echo work. So I bought that one.
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