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Alternative a is just a non-starter. All we would have if they did that is the memory of HP calculators with no hope at all for any future ones. I prefer hope and encouragement to HP to improve rather than using language such as you have done. The type of language you use is guaranteed to have HP not take you seriously.
I think people tend to give corporations too much credit and too little. On the one hand, corporations, particularly multinationals like HP, are seen by some as either the salvation or the damnation of the world in general. Corporations have power, but so do people, if they will but use it. On the other hand, we expect corporations to act as if they have interests other than making the quarterly numbers, and we excoriate them when it becomes clear that they don't. Even people who work in corporations aren't very comfortable with that one, but it's generally true.
And corporations are made up of human beings. But that doesn't mean that a corporation acts like an ordinary human person, the legal fiction of its personhood notwithstanding. Toeing the bottom line doesn't mean you will always make short-sighted, selfish decisions. Often a corporation's interest coincides with something that is recognizable as "moral" or "community minded" or even "philanthropic" or "noble." More often though, corporate actions are described as "crass" or even "stupid" and "heavy handed." Either way, the labels are misleading, because they tend to make you think of the corporation as a person, rather than a highly organized hive intelligence.
It seems to me that HP, like IBM before it, purged itself of an older culture that valued people inside the corporation over customers outside. The organizations "had" to do this because the competition had made the transition, or else was born with the customer centered focus. In human terms, the transition at HP was famously painful and difficult. A lot of "crass," "stupid" and "heavy handed" decisions got made along the way. One of these, a very small one of these, consigned HP's in-house calculator division to near oblivion.
So that left many of us who loved the old machines, and who admired the old culture that produced them, scratching our heads, wondering where the hell the "customer focus" was in all of that. Well, it's another painful and difficult thing to swallow, but people like us, in our role as calculator enthusiasts, aren't HP's customers, at least in terms of the market research and sales figures.
I'm not saying there aren't good and committed people inside HP working to deliver the best machines they can given realities. I work for a giant corporation too, so I'm not unsympathetic to people who struggle to deliver quality with a human touch in what simply can't avoid being a dehumanizing context. But I do have two criticisms.
The first is aimed at critics of giant corporations. Don't act like the huge hive mind is an individual who has wronged you. It's silly, and more importantly, it's factually wrong.
And the second is directed at individuals within HP's calculator division. If you can't hear criticism like some of the more dramatically stated stuff in this thread, then you really are falling down on your "customer focus." Even if this crowd doesn't represent the target demographic du jour, our sensibilities matter. Our sons and daughters are going to school now, and some of them will be influenced by our opinions about whether or not HP is worth buying.
Regards,
Howard