On 2/6/22 13:18, Bob Albert via groups.io wrote:
In the old days, HP did a commendable job.? As the years went by they became more profit oriented.
Correction: "Short-term profit oriented". These suits can't see past the end of the quarter. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were looking a lot farther down the line than that.
The decision to go public is often a big mistake when it comes to product value.
It's common knowledge that being publicly-traded is generally bad for a company's customers and encourages self-destructive corporate behavior, when viewed in the long term. If you think about it, it makes sense, as the company's true customers are no longer those who purchase its products, but its stockholders. Everything boils down to "shareholder value".
Disgusting.
No longer do managers attempt to create products; they now attempt to make money.? Not that money wasn't always the ultimate goal, but some outfits carry the banner a bit too much.? A lot too much.
Yes. And since suits typically have outsized egos, each successive generation of suits thinks they can "push things a little bit farther" than their predecessors, because of course they're better businessmen. So things deteriorate over time.
I recently looked at Keysight's offerrings regarding the present successor to the original HP200.? They no longer seem to offer a reasonably priced audio oscillator.
Very few analog scopes are available from anyone these days.? A digital scope is basically a computer with a screen readout, not an oscilloscope.
Analog oscilloscopes take real talent to design, digital oscilloscopes much less so. The former cannot easily be farmed out to India or China, while the latter can. Again, there's that short-term profit.
Further, the current crop of tech guys, while I think they're generally doing great things, seem to lack any real knowledge of oscilloscopes. They think that an oscilloscope can be made by slapping a display on a microcontroller and connecting a wire to an A/D input. Sure, you can generally display a waveform that way, but it's going to be garbage. And the market is FLOODED with finished products labeled "oscilloscope" that are little more than that.
These kids don't understand the difference, and they formulate assumptions based on incomplete knowledge, and then they vehemently defend those positions without being willing to learn about what they've missed.
-Dave
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Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Dave McGuire