My career at HP spanned 20 years: 20 April 1992 through 31 August 2012.
Really? How did I end up spending that long in that place?
It
certainly wasn't my goal when I joined HP in 1992. I had just been
founding President of Acumen, Inc., and had been in three other start-up
organizations before that. But the thought of having a stable job in a
big company for a few years sounded really good. We had a young family
to raise.
Now, 20 years later, the thought of
"retiring" from HP and starting another career teaching at Oregon State
University sounds really good. That's where my next career begins in September -
teaching BA 590 (New Product Development/Marketing Management) in the
OSU College of Business MBA program.
My final month at HP has provided a good opportunity to look back over the past 20 years and post some thoughts about how I spent my time and why.
To get started, click this: HP Timeline 1992-2012. The blog archive on the right side of the page can be expanded to view all of the posts.
Wow! 20 years at HP!
Monday, August 27, 2012
Sunday, August 26, 2012
2012: EER and Goodbye
The rumors were flying in early 2012 about a possible Enhanced Early
Retirement (EER) program. We were already seeing increased workforce
reductions (WFR), and we were hearing rumors of many more WFR's to come
in 2012. HP's revenue and profit were dropping, and the future did not
look good. Meg was telling Wall Street that HP would turn around but
that it would take a few years.
Shane Robison had retired from HP near the end of 2011, and Meg decided not to replace him. That was a significant shock to those of us in the CTO community. It effectively brought an end to the CTO era at HP. There would no longer be a strong central leader, and the various CTOs were assigned to the EVPs of HP's main business units.
In March, VJ suddenly retired from HP. Meg merged IPG into Todd Bradley's PSG PC business. Todd promptly moved the IPG and PSG CTOs (and the rest of us) down a level in the HP hierarchy. The merging was a huge shock to everyone in IPG and signaled the end of innovation in IPG.
When Patrick Scaglia retired from HP in April of 2012 after having tried to help create a strong new business as the HP Cloud Services CTO, it sent another strong signal about the future of HP's technology leadership. Prith Banerjee also left HP in April. HP Labs had no leader.
By this point, all of my HP mentors were gone. I learned the details of the official EER program while I was working on the R&D portfolio in Porto Alegre on 22 May. By taking HP's early retirement offer, I would get a year of salary added to my HP pension (tax free!) and would be able to stay on the HP medical insurance plan at employee rates for two years. After that, I could move at any time to the HP retiree medical plan.
Needless to say, I took the early retirement package without thinking twice about it.
Within a very short time, I was hired to join the faculty in the College of Business at Oregon State University. I begin teaching in the MBA program in September.
During my 20 years at HP, I took 437 trips and 1535 flights for HP, flew about 1,929,103 miles, and spent about 178.6 days in the air. That's 1.3% of my adult life in the air for HP and 2.5% of my lifetime while working at HP. The good side of all this travel is that I was able to visit all of these countries: USA, Canada, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Hungary, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Portugal, Finland, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, and Brasil. I will miss the international travel.
It isn't very hard to say "Goodbye" to what remains of HP. After 20 years working with great colleagues on innovation challenges, it is time for change again. I receive my gold badge this week. My last day on the HP payroll is this Friday, 31 August. I will forever belong to a great HP Retiree club.
This feels very good!
Shane Robison had retired from HP near the end of 2011, and Meg decided not to replace him. That was a significant shock to those of us in the CTO community. It effectively brought an end to the CTO era at HP. There would no longer be a strong central leader, and the various CTOs were assigned to the EVPs of HP's main business units.
In March, VJ suddenly retired from HP. Meg merged IPG into Todd Bradley's PSG PC business. Todd promptly moved the IPG and PSG CTOs (and the rest of us) down a level in the HP hierarchy. The merging was a huge shock to everyone in IPG and signaled the end of innovation in IPG.
When Patrick Scaglia retired from HP in April of 2012 after having tried to help create a strong new business as the HP Cloud Services CTO, it sent another strong signal about the future of HP's technology leadership. Prith Banerjee also left HP in April. HP Labs had no leader.
By this point, all of my HP mentors were gone. I learned the details of the official EER program while I was working on the R&D portfolio in Porto Alegre on 22 May. By taking HP's early retirement offer, I would get a year of salary added to my HP pension (tax free!) and would be able to stay on the HP medical insurance plan at employee rates for two years. After that, I could move at any time to the HP retiree medical plan.
Needless to say, I took the early retirement package without thinking twice about it.
Within a very short time, I was hired to join the faculty in the College of Business at Oregon State University. I begin teaching in the MBA program in September.
During my 20 years at HP, I took 437 trips and 1535 flights for HP, flew about 1,929,103 miles, and spent about 178.6 days in the air. That's 1.3% of my adult life in the air for HP and 2.5% of my lifetime while working at HP. The good side of all this travel is that I was able to visit all of these countries: USA, Canada, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Hungary, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Portugal, Finland, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, and Brasil. I will miss the international travel.
It isn't very hard to say "Goodbye" to what remains of HP. After 20 years working with great colleagues on innovation challenges, it is time for change again. I receive my gold badge this week. My last day on the HP payroll is this Friday, 31 August. I will forever belong to a great HP Retiree club.
This feels very good!
2011: One More Year
By the beginning of 2011, many of the ideas that I and others had
been promoting for several years began to converge and become both
possible and then widely believable. The technology world was promoting
the idea of "cloud" as the coming solution for almost everything.
Although the term "cloud" wasn't precise or well defined, it became a
convenient term to use to talk about moving things (content, business
processes, ...) out of inefficient personal storage/computing and data
centers and onto platforms that provide scalable and efficient services
and take the bother of managing IT and applications and data away from
individuals and companies. It is consistent with the Internet Imaging
Model that I had promoted for ten years and with Carly's vision and
message for e-services and with many related ideas centered on mobility
and "always-on" infrastructure and broadly available high speed
networks.
VJ had a vision for cloud computing and his enterprise, personal, and commercial printing businesses. He wanted to converge all of them onto a single cloud platform, and he gave our CTO team $6.5M in 2011 to make it happen. It is nearly impossible to go from $0 to $6M that quickly, but we had an architecture figured out and started hiring. We quickly threw a plan together to spend the money. It hinged on using MagCloud as a spending and technology platform, and it depended on being able to scale collaboration with the Hi-Flex team that IPG had acquired recently.
Unfortunately, 2011 was also a year of extreme HP turbulence. Mark Hurd had been kicked out in mid-2010 and replaced by Leo. Leo was busy confusing everyone with plans to sell or spin out the PC business (or not) and with attempts to integrate bad acquisitions like Palm and Autonomy. The good news was that Leo let VJ increase R&D (or at least stop causing innovation to shrivel away). The bad news was that Leo was horrible for HP business and HPQ stock. Meg replaced Leo in 2011. The really bad news was that HP ended up freezing all hiring and spending and the use of external contractors. All of those were necessary parts of any plan for accelerated creation of a cloud computing platform. So our CTO cloud program was essentially derailed midway through our hiring and development ramp-up. It left a partial team of highly skilled and experienced technologists in a bit of limbo about how to tread water until things would stabilize. They never did.
Although the environment inside HP was becoming increasingly difficult to endure, I did manage to stay fairly productive by keeping as much focus as possible on the continued development of a cloud services team in Brasil. I did this despite having a boss who wanted me to abandon Brasil and to put my energy into being his Chief of Staff. That was never going to happen, and I continued to help IPG R&D get the most out of the money HP was required to invest via the Brasil Informatics Law.
Next: 2012: EER and Goodbye
VJ had a vision for cloud computing and his enterprise, personal, and commercial printing businesses. He wanted to converge all of them onto a single cloud platform, and he gave our CTO team $6.5M in 2011 to make it happen. It is nearly impossible to go from $0 to $6M that quickly, but we had an architecture figured out and started hiring. We quickly threw a plan together to spend the money. It hinged on using MagCloud as a spending and technology platform, and it depended on being able to scale collaboration with the Hi-Flex team that IPG had acquired recently.
Unfortunately, 2011 was also a year of extreme HP turbulence. Mark Hurd had been kicked out in mid-2010 and replaced by Leo. Leo was busy confusing everyone with plans to sell or spin out the PC business (or not) and with attempts to integrate bad acquisitions like Palm and Autonomy. The good news was that Leo let VJ increase R&D (or at least stop causing innovation to shrivel away). The bad news was that Leo was horrible for HP business and HPQ stock. Meg replaced Leo in 2011. The really bad news was that HP ended up freezing all hiring and spending and the use of external contractors. All of those were necessary parts of any plan for accelerated creation of a cloud computing platform. So our CTO cloud program was essentially derailed midway through our hiring and development ramp-up. It left a partial team of highly skilled and experienced technologists in a bit of limbo about how to tread water until things would stabilize. They never did.
Although the environment inside HP was becoming increasingly difficult to endure, I did manage to stay fairly productive by keeping as much focus as possible on the continued development of a cloud services team in Brasil. I did this despite having a boss who wanted me to abandon Brasil and to put my energy into being his Chief of Staff. That was never going to happen, and I continued to help IPG R&D get the most out of the money HP was required to invest via the Brasil Informatics Law.
Next: 2012: EER and Goodbye
Saturday, August 25, 2012
2010: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
During the first 18 years of my HP career, I had the great pleasure
of working with remarkable people and having incredible direct managers.
Although there was some craziness at the HP CEO level during those
years, I was close enough to the top to learn about major global company
strategy but far enough away that my wings didn't get burned. My
mentors were among the best and brightest in the history of HP and were
renowned for technology innovation and business results.
Nothing lasts forever, and my HP situation would change in 2010. I faced the question, "Should I stay or should I go?" Of course, I ended up choosing to stay at HP for awhile, but my passion for the company and for my job were gone by the end of the year.
Patrick Scaglia took a different job at HP in May, and we were without a CTO for a few months. Things weren't all bad. Although I no longer had a strong manager, I was able to keep things moving forward in patents, banknote counterfeit deterrence, HP Tech Con, and our HP Labs relationship/technology transfer. Brasil R&D continued to grow stronger, and more and more teams wanted to partner with Brasil. I made four trips to Brasil in 2010 including one that involved stops in Recife, Fortaleza, Campinas, Sao Paulo, and Porto Alegre. I was in Frankfurt and Israel in the summer, and I made a speech at a European Central Bank meeting in Germany in December.
When VJ/Shane suddenly hired Mike Salfity to be our CTO and my new manager in the fall, I began to question my role at HP. Mike was hired without much diligence. In fact, his only interviews were with VJ and Shane for a total of less than 90 minutes. That told me a lot about the commitment that VJ and Shane had remaining - not much. Mike came to HP with a lot of enthusiasm. On paper, he looked good with a 25 year career at Xerox and then a year at a smaller company. But, as with people picked up through acquisitions, we really didn't get any fresh ideas - just recycled experience from a failing company (Xerox). I was unimpressed and was never inspired by Mike. This isn't to say that Mike was bad for HP - he just didn't fill the huge gap for me that had been left in the wake of Lee, Frank, and Patrick.
Next: 2011: One More Year
Nothing lasts forever, and my HP situation would change in 2010. I faced the question, "Should I stay or should I go?" Of course, I ended up choosing to stay at HP for awhile, but my passion for the company and for my job were gone by the end of the year.
Patrick Scaglia took a different job at HP in May, and we were without a CTO for a few months. Things weren't all bad. Although I no longer had a strong manager, I was able to keep things moving forward in patents, banknote counterfeit deterrence, HP Tech Con, and our HP Labs relationship/technology transfer. Brasil R&D continued to grow stronger, and more and more teams wanted to partner with Brasil. I made four trips to Brasil in 2010 including one that involved stops in Recife, Fortaleza, Campinas, Sao Paulo, and Porto Alegre. I was in Frankfurt and Israel in the summer, and I made a speech at a European Central Bank meeting in Germany in December.
When VJ/Shane suddenly hired Mike Salfity to be our CTO and my new manager in the fall, I began to question my role at HP. Mike was hired without much diligence. In fact, his only interviews were with VJ and Shane for a total of less than 90 minutes. That told me a lot about the commitment that VJ and Shane had remaining - not much. Mike came to HP with a lot of enthusiasm. On paper, he looked good with a 25 year career at Xerox and then a year at a smaller company. But, as with people picked up through acquisitions, we really didn't get any fresh ideas - just recycled experience from a failing company (Xerox). I was unimpressed and was never inspired by Mike. This isn't to say that Mike was bad for HP - he just didn't fill the huge gap for me that had been left in the wake of Lee, Frank, and Patrick.
Next: 2011: One More Year
Friday, August 24, 2012
2009: Brasil Innovation and CTO Chores
An interesting thing happened in 2009. My boss suddenly told me that
he had been chosen for a secret assignment for Mark Hurd and that he
would be unavailable for a couple of months. That assignment ended up
lasting much longer, and we never learned the whole story. At a minimum,
a small team was examining the true value of the Imaging & Printing
Group and doing it without involving VJ or VJ's senior leaders.
With Patrick occupied, I turned most of my attention to Brasil. We had about $10M of Informatics Law funds to invest there each year for IPG, and I was on the hook to be sure that we invested it well. We were able to use most of that money for HP's R&D team in Porto Alegre, but the Informatics Law required HP to invest at least 40% of our Brasil R&D funds externally. I ended up making three trips to Brasil in 2009. I was also on the small team that had responsibility to oversee all HP R&D investment in Brasil. In addition to Informatics Law funding, HP business units also used direct funding for projects in Brasil. While we didn't need to approve directly funded spending, it was part of the overall portfolio that we managed. In 2009, the total of all HP R&D funding in Brasil was closer to $50M. The HP team in Porto Alegre was about 400 people, and a significant amount of funding went to universities and external research centers.
When I first took the responsibility to manage our Brasil investment, I found a situation that had much of the internal money aimed at building HP Brasil's R&D infrastructure. The external spending was primarily for HP Labs pet projects. Another big chunk of money went to currency exchange valuation issues. This situation wasn't a big surprise, since no one from IPG had paid any attention up to that point. Now that it had a noticeable impact on IPG's overall R&D budget, it was important to fix the situation. The traditional development strength in HP Brasil had been firmware. They were delivering great results for HP's Laserjet development, for HP's blade servers, for HP storage products, and for a variety of smaller board-level projects.
Looking to the future, I decided to redirect as much energy as possible in Brasil toward the broad area of Web services. That view aligned with IPG's vision, and I found that the HP Brasil R&D team was capable and enthusiastic about making the change. On a tour of our various university and external research center partners, I found similar capability and enthusiasm waiting to be tapped. That particular tour in 2009 was interesting. We went to Recife in the northeast of Brasil and to Rio before ending the week in Porto Alegre. I learned a bit about how big Brasil really is after sitting in cramped airline seats on that itinerary.
By the end of 2009, we had HP Brasil R&D resources aimed at new Web services programs like digital publishing ("Astoria" and MagCloud), Enterprise CloudPrint (which would end up as a branded HP service called ePrint Enterprise), a web service aimed at the architecture/construction market along with our large format printing group in Barcelona, and others. I had worked hard to align HP Labs "Big Bets" to IPG programs and strategies, and I leveraged that to be sure that our external university and research center investments were supporting the right HP Labs programs. Things in Brasil were beginning to show great promise and deliver early results.
I had other CTO "chores" to manage in 2009. Some were fun. One of them was not fun. One of the fun jobs was taking responsibility for IPG's patent portfolio and life cycle. That kept me closely involved with technologists and innovation across all of IPG. As a member of the HP CTO IP Review Board, I was also able to stay connected to innovation across the entire company. The job that was not fun at all was battling with HP IT over spending to support R&D. The full story isn't worth telling. It's enough to say that every minute spent on that chore seemed like a minute of my life wasted.
One of my other fun jobs continued to be working with the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and with Digimarc as we jointly developed advanced capabilities and lower cost implementations. Another enjoyable CTO "chore" was program managing the Obama Time Capsule project. This was kept entirely within Patrick's team, so we were able to move quickly without any need to make slide decks or deal with any bureaucracy or overhead. We worked with Rick Smolan to create Web services for personalized books documenting President Obama's campaign and first 100 days in office. It was great to show how to innovate quickly and at low cost in the Web domain. We gained a lot of great PR for HP and built a technology platform that would and up being used in many HP Web-based program.
At the end of 2009, none of us at HP would have guessed how remarkably dismal some of the events of the next two years would be for HP.
Next: 2010: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
With Patrick occupied, I turned most of my attention to Brasil. We had about $10M of Informatics Law funds to invest there each year for IPG, and I was on the hook to be sure that we invested it well. We were able to use most of that money for HP's R&D team in Porto Alegre, but the Informatics Law required HP to invest at least 40% of our Brasil R&D funds externally. I ended up making three trips to Brasil in 2009. I was also on the small team that had responsibility to oversee all HP R&D investment in Brasil. In addition to Informatics Law funding, HP business units also used direct funding for projects in Brasil. While we didn't need to approve directly funded spending, it was part of the overall portfolio that we managed. In 2009, the total of all HP R&D funding in Brasil was closer to $50M. The HP team in Porto Alegre was about 400 people, and a significant amount of funding went to universities and external research centers.
When I first took the responsibility to manage our Brasil investment, I found a situation that had much of the internal money aimed at building HP Brasil's R&D infrastructure. The external spending was primarily for HP Labs pet projects. Another big chunk of money went to currency exchange valuation issues. This situation wasn't a big surprise, since no one from IPG had paid any attention up to that point. Now that it had a noticeable impact on IPG's overall R&D budget, it was important to fix the situation. The traditional development strength in HP Brasil had been firmware. They were delivering great results for HP's Laserjet development, for HP's blade servers, for HP storage products, and for a variety of smaller board-level projects.
Looking to the future, I decided to redirect as much energy as possible in Brasil toward the broad area of Web services. That view aligned with IPG's vision, and I found that the HP Brasil R&D team was capable and enthusiastic about making the change. On a tour of our various university and external research center partners, I found similar capability and enthusiasm waiting to be tapped. That particular tour in 2009 was interesting. We went to Recife in the northeast of Brasil and to Rio before ending the week in Porto Alegre. I learned a bit about how big Brasil really is after sitting in cramped airline seats on that itinerary.
By the end of 2009, we had HP Brasil R&D resources aimed at new Web services programs like digital publishing ("Astoria" and MagCloud), Enterprise CloudPrint (which would end up as a branded HP service called ePrint Enterprise), a web service aimed at the architecture/construction market along with our large format printing group in Barcelona, and others. I had worked hard to align HP Labs "Big Bets" to IPG programs and strategies, and I leveraged that to be sure that our external university and research center investments were supporting the right HP Labs programs. Things in Brasil were beginning to show great promise and deliver early results.
I had other CTO "chores" to manage in 2009. Some were fun. One of them was not fun. One of the fun jobs was taking responsibility for IPG's patent portfolio and life cycle. That kept me closely involved with technologists and innovation across all of IPG. As a member of the HP CTO IP Review Board, I was also able to stay connected to innovation across the entire company. The job that was not fun at all was battling with HP IT over spending to support R&D. The full story isn't worth telling. It's enough to say that every minute spent on that chore seemed like a minute of my life wasted.
One of my other fun jobs continued to be working with the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and with Digimarc as we jointly developed advanced capabilities and lower cost implementations. Another enjoyable CTO "chore" was program managing the Obama Time Capsule project. This was kept entirely within Patrick's team, so we were able to move quickly without any need to make slide decks or deal with any bureaucracy or overhead. We worked with Rick Smolan to create Web services for personalized books documenting President Obama's campaign and first 100 days in office. It was great to show how to innovate quickly and at low cost in the Web domain. We gained a lot of great PR for HP and built a technology platform that would and up being used in many HP Web-based program.
At the end of 2009, none of us at HP would have guessed how remarkably dismal some of the events of the next two years would be for HP.
Next: 2010: Should I Stay or Should I Go?
2008: Corporate Initiatives
Hurd's draconian dominance over HP forced Shane Robison and his
senior CTOs to execute corporate programs rather than invest time and
talent in innovation. With DPE and DES killed by Hurd's selected leaders
during 2007, Patrick asked me in 2008 to work on some things that
wouldn't make me stand out as a target. It was Patrick's way of
protecting me, and it's the main reason that I was able to extend my HP
career. I made things as interesting as possible.
HP Labs had hired a new Director, Prith Banerjee, in2007. Prith decided to radically overhaul HP Labs and restructured the HPL governance and organization. He created four Advisory Boards and challenged HPL researchers to create research program proposals for "Big Bets." This was in response to criticism that Labs was doing too many small things and needed to organize for bigger impact. My role in all of this was to be the official IPG liaison to HP Labs and to be sure that we had the right Advisory Board representation and Big Bet proposals. Fortunately, IPG and HPL had a long relationship of close collaboration and technology transfer. We were already working to align HPL programs with the evolving IPG strategy and organizational structure. The end result in 2007 was the ratification of the plans we already were making. I have to say that working with Labs helped keep me motivated in 2007. There were still many problems to solve, and our HP Labs colleagues appreciated my help and support.
Patrick also asked me to take over all responsibility for the budget and spending that flowed through our Chief Technology Office. We had two budgets for CTO program and people expenses - one from OS&T and one from IPG. I managed them as a combined pool of funds. For FY08 (ending October 31), our total CTO spending was over $6.5M. Almost $4M of that was spent to fund incubation projects and HP Labs research. We funded things like MagCloud. We also funded some patent license fees. The goal was to have as much impact as possible without attracting detailed attention from Mark Hurd or any of his operatives. My budget and our CTO organization became an effective route for technology transfer from HP Labs in addition to a source of incubation funding and support.
Another element became part of my budget near the end of 2008, as an HP accounting change resulted in IPG R&D being charged OPEX for the Brasil Informatics Law investment. Under the Informatics Law, companies received significant tax breaks on products manufactured and sold in Brasil in exchange for reinvesting in R&D inside Brasil. I suddenly had responsibility to manage another pool of innovation funds (almost $10M). I ended up in Porto Alegre again to give a talk at the 2008 HP Technology Symposium and to meet the HP R&D team there.
In 2008, I continued to participate in HP Tech Con for the 6th straight year. I also continued to work on the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group program and to work on things like the content/data architecture for high speed printing, color fidelity/workflows, and technology evangelism. My 2008 HP travel took me to Palo Alto (many times), Boise, Atlanta, Tokyo, Shanghai, Boston, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, San Diego, Keystone (Colorado), Brasil, and San Francisco.
I didn't enjoy working on corporate initiatives as much as I had loved working on innovation for many years at HP, but I was trying to make the best of a situation driven by a CEO who had no appreciation for HP's longer term future.
Next: 2009: Brasil Innovation and CTO Chores
HP Labs had hired a new Director, Prith Banerjee, in2007. Prith decided to radically overhaul HP Labs and restructured the HPL governance and organization. He created four Advisory Boards and challenged HPL researchers to create research program proposals for "Big Bets." This was in response to criticism that Labs was doing too many small things and needed to organize for bigger impact. My role in all of this was to be the official IPG liaison to HP Labs and to be sure that we had the right Advisory Board representation and Big Bet proposals. Fortunately, IPG and HPL had a long relationship of close collaboration and technology transfer. We were already working to align HPL programs with the evolving IPG strategy and organizational structure. The end result in 2007 was the ratification of the plans we already were making. I have to say that working with Labs helped keep me motivated in 2007. There were still many problems to solve, and our HP Labs colleagues appreciated my help and support.
Patrick also asked me to take over all responsibility for the budget and spending that flowed through our Chief Technology Office. We had two budgets for CTO program and people expenses - one from OS&T and one from IPG. I managed them as a combined pool of funds. For FY08 (ending October 31), our total CTO spending was over $6.5M. Almost $4M of that was spent to fund incubation projects and HP Labs research. We funded things like MagCloud. We also funded some patent license fees. The goal was to have as much impact as possible without attracting detailed attention from Mark Hurd or any of his operatives. My budget and our CTO organization became an effective route for technology transfer from HP Labs in addition to a source of incubation funding and support.
Another element became part of my budget near the end of 2008, as an HP accounting change resulted in IPG R&D being charged OPEX for the Brasil Informatics Law investment. Under the Informatics Law, companies received significant tax breaks on products manufactured and sold in Brasil in exchange for reinvesting in R&D inside Brasil. I suddenly had responsibility to manage another pool of innovation funds (almost $10M). I ended up in Porto Alegre again to give a talk at the 2008 HP Technology Symposium and to meet the HP R&D team there.
In 2008, I continued to participate in HP Tech Con for the 6th straight year. I also continued to work on the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group program and to work on things like the content/data architecture for high speed printing, color fidelity/workflows, and technology evangelism. My 2008 HP travel took me to Palo Alto (many times), Boise, Atlanta, Tokyo, Shanghai, Boston, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, San Diego, Keystone (Colorado), Brasil, and San Francisco.
I didn't enjoy working on corporate initiatives as much as I had loved working on innovation for many years at HP, but I was trying to make the best of a situation driven by a CEO who had no appreciation for HP's longer term future.
Next: 2009: Brasil Innovation and CTO Chores
2007: Digital Photography & Entertainment
In 2007, my role expanded as I was asked to take CTO responsibility for Larry Lesley's Digital Photography and Entertainment (DPE) organization. DES was part of DPE, but DPE was a collection of struggling or newly launching businesses: digital cameras, PhotoSmart printers, DES, Snapfish (online photo storage/sharing site that HP had acquired), and Retail Photo Solutions. The main impact on me was that it required more of my time for staff meetings and business reviews. I also picked up action items that were corporate overhead (like R&D headcount and expense planning). I quickly learned that I enjoyed working one level below this where I could spend my time innovating. So I continued to keep as much focus as possible on growing our DES business.
In May, I had the privilege of giving a keynote address at the HP Brasil Technology Symposium. My talk was called "Beyond IPG 2.0." The theme of Print 2.0 was being promoted across IPG as a way to get people thinking about the impact of the Web as the "2.0" label became attached to many things worldwide. Patrick Scaglia was the architect behind Print 2.0 messaging, and it's main idea supported and expanded our earlier Internet Imaging Model theme: make it easier to print from the Web, drive web-to-print services across all customer segments, and deliver next a generation printing platform to capture trillions of pages. My talk in Brasil expanded on that by including all forms of digital content. Here's a simple view:
Mid-year, George Lynch from my team took an early retirement offer from HP, and I picked up his responsibility to drive HP's participation in the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group (CBCDG) program for banknote counterfeit deterrence. Dozens of currencies around the world have invisible watermarks embedded based on Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS) technology from Digimarc. If someone tries to copy currency on participating printers, the printer refuses to complete the job, and it prints a warning instead. HP was leading the industry consortium of participating US printer manufacturers and software vendors. I took that responsibility. In December, I traveled to Tokyo to meet with the corresponding Japanese consortium to align our technology roadmaps.
By late summer of 2007, our DES strategy had evolved to embrace my Content Consumption Model. We understood that HP could play a strong and profitable role in the digital media supply chain, and we had the resources and investments in place to make it happen. Here are three key views of the model, and how DES was part of a larger HP opportunity:
Using these models, CME CTO Brian Levy and I managed to steer HP's customer-facing messages in the right direction. HP was on track to be a major player in digital entertainment and the coming content economy.
Then things changed. Mark Hurd wasn't interested in the future beyond the next quarter or so. He took a hatchet to innovation across the entire company. He replaced senior leaders who didn't make their short term numbers. He cut R&D investments to the bone and beyond. He believed that IPG was dabbling in too many market experiments, and he put VJ and VJ's staff under enormous pressure for immediate results. He went over VJ's head (and the heads of his entire Executive Council) by demanding that he be involved in all hiring from the VP level up. He brought in people from outside who would follow his edicts.
In the fall of 2007, Hurd hired an outsider to replace Larry Lesley as the SVP over photography and entertainment. That was the beginning of the end of most of HP's initiatives in these areas. Carly had started the trend of preferring outsiders over HP veterans, and Mark Hurd accelerated the trend. It was made worse by the large number of acquisitions that HP made. The senior executives and senior technologists from those companies wanted senior positions in HP. The result was too many executives killing viable growth opportunities (which pleased Hurd) and too few promotion opportunities for loyal and valuable HP technologists as interesting positions became filled by people with no HP history or understanding. The idea that someone from outside a company is somehow bringing fresh ideas is flawed. Too often, those people simply brought their own bad ideas.
Although I would manage to hang on at HP for another four years or so, this point in time marked the beginning of the end of my HP career.
Next: 2008: Corporate Initiatives
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