1994-b: Joining HP's Inkjet Business

The HP Inkjet Business Unit (IJBU) provided fundamental printhead technology for all HP thermal inkjet (TIJ) products. In 1994, these were primarily Deskjet printers. For a great history of Deskjets, click here: Twenty Years of Innovation.

IJBU was just reorganizing when I joined in 1994. Skip Rung was the manager of the newly forming Advanced Research Lab (ARL). Ron Prevost hired me but moved on to manage another R&D lab, so my manager became Paul Harmon. Paul was forming a section comprising ink research, printhead research and my new program.

I became the R&D Project Manager for "imaging." My initial responsibilities were to create a project team charter, establish working relationships with HP partners, build an engineering team, and manage ARL's portion of the Imaging '95 effort to understand photo printing and deliver digital photo printing technology. Here's the charter I had created by the end of 1994:

Develop models, methodologies and tools for understanding the fundamental nature of print and image quality and for understanding and measuring the parameters of TIJ pen design and manufacturing that influence print and image quality.

Develop new vision tools and/or extensions of current tools to meet the R&D requirements of evaluating pen and system print quality parameters of present and future TIJ pens.

Develop and manage local PQ committees and other human tools with the goals of improved detection of print quality attributes and improved capabilities to respond to the needs of engineering studies and new TIJ applications.

Develop tools to obtain a high degree of correlation between machine evaluation and human perception of print samples and thereby reduce our reliance on human committees for the routine evaluation of engineering test samples.

Develop communication vehicles to broaden IJBU expertise in best practices for print and image quality evaluation.  Establish, improve and document procedures, metrics and database reporting structures to provide design engineers with timely feedback regarding pen and system performance during pen product development.

Thus, the HP Printed Image Quality team was launched, and I was able to build a team of about half a dozen experts. My counterpart team at HP in San Diego was called VISTA. We divided duties with my team more focused on color and imaging and image quality attributes and measurement with the VISTA team working more on measuring attributes of dots on paper.

In 1994, Rick Belluzzo ran HP's Computer Products Organization. Reporting to him were Dana Seccombe (Inkjet Supplies Business Unit), Antonio Perez (Hardcopy Imaging BU), Dick Snyder (DeskJet Printer Group), and Carolyn Tichnor (LaserJet Printer Group). Belluzzo also had responsibility for laptops and related computer products.

The surprising thing for me was how competitive HP's printing businesses were internally and in front of customers. I remember an intimate Advanced Research Lab management meeting where Antonio Perez banged his fist on the table and declared that "we will crush laser." This attitude made it difficult for me to drive a common HP understanding of the elements of color science and imaging technology, but we managed to collaborate at a lower organizational level without telling upper managers. I formed PEST - a worldwide HP Print Evaluation Solutions Team collaboration - to help all of the HP teams working in these areas leverage knowledge and capabilities.

I spent much of the Fall of 1994 traveling to HP sites and international conferences to learn as much as possible about my new role managing color and imaging scientists and psychometric evaluation methods for judging photo quality.  I flew 60,300 miles for HP in 1994.

Next: 1995: Color Science and Image Quality