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An interesting comment by HP about a company they bought last year: "there were "serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations".

Geez, things don't seem to change. I could swear similar comments have been alleged about a company which was in the auto business & which we are all familiar with. Only difference -- the auto company was purchased (or merged) some 60 years ago.

Yeah. That's what happens when bean counters, salesmen, preachers and Harvard MBA's try to operate a business any more complex than selling diamond tipped shoe strings out a street corner somewhere.

OR Prov. 22:7

Not surprised HH56......... due diligence or caveat emptor is always in play. The boys and gals counting those 'beans' prior to acquisition are probably outside l@@king for new jobs given their performance?

And from a post I made last year, Hell, in chapter 8 & 9 of the Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company ( by James A. Ward), Nance was even mis-leading his own board of directors , page 136, "In this obviously deteriorating situation, Nance resorted to cooking the books."

Who can you trust?

Old Man Ford mite be a controversial character. But his strategies and savvy places him in nearly a realm of divinity of business not to mention the auto industry.

A position that still stands stable to this day while even GM and C has fallen away in some significant ways.

Any girl scout can run a bank, government, army, computer or chicken farm. It takes a REAL man to run an auto company.

That's comming from an old line GM'er. Not a Ford fancier.

Quote:

The two held primarily responsible are no longer with the company but the board "feels terribly" because they approved it.

Ironically, unlike the auto deal this one was vetted by two national accounting firms who found no issues. It was only after an employee of the purchased company pointed the accountants in the right direction that the shenanigans were discovered. Guess there was no incentive for anyone pointing people in the right direction long ago.

Oh well. In the big scheme of things, what's a few billion dollars written off here or there. Plenty more where that came from. At least it will keep a few hundred lawyers employed and flush for the "multi-year journey" while it all sorts out. That has got to be a boost for the economy.

Different climate 60 years ago so doubt there would have been much recourse -- even if someone had wanted to pursue it.

http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/20/technology/enterprise/hp-earnings/index.html?source=cnn_bin

Funny thing.
Even I living in Norway, when reading about HP! in the papers today, got the idea that this story seemed to have been told some 60 years ago.

Tom

Glad I sold my HP a long time ago.

Sold it???? My HP (Compaq) burned out a mother board or something after 6 years and would cost too much to fix (even just for the parts) it so i had to throw it away. It was a bullet proof machine tho. That was over 8 years ago.

"Old Man Ford mite be a controversial character. But his strategies and savvy places him in nearly a realm of divinity of business not to mention the auto industry."

Am enrolled in a Detroit area "entrepreneur boot camp" as I try to get a new business started. Instructor said Henry Ford and Steve Jobs were "lucky" in acting on their own ideas without use of customer feedback, surveys et all and that the "right" way to introduce product is to first get lots of feedback from potential customers.

Something smacked of nonsense when I heard this. Not that getting early feedback isn't important but people like Ford and Jobs seemed to have a knack for knowing without lots of surveys. I should have reminded the instructor that the odds of being lucky not just once but with the Model T, Model A AND V8 or with the Macintosh, Pixar, iPod, iTunes, iPhone AND iPad was about one in 5 quintrillion quadbillion.

I can agree that both men "seemed to have a knack for knowing without lots of surveys". Too bad more so-called captain of industry can't lay claim to that; it's too easy to skew surveys to support EITHER side of an argument.

However, Steve Jobs couldn't hold a candle to Henry Ford. IMHO, Ford was innately in tune with the common man, many of whom would go on to become the middle class after WWII.

Jobs just happened to have a gift for exploiting the masses at the time.

For example, the same peripheral used for IMB-class machines would cost you about 30% more when it was wired (and licensed) for use with Mac. To me, Mac OS looks a lot like the X Windows platform developed at MIT at about the same time. I haven't seen a thing you could do on a Mac that couldn't be done on an IBM-class computer; the solutions just came later.

Then, all this iCrap is nothing but a racket (a gross extension of the personal computing business model). After laying out so many bucks for one of those products, they really can't be used without spending even more on iTunes and apps. OK, some apps are free, but what percentage of free ones go on to extort a charge EACH TIME they're used.

I never have and never will own an Apple product - period.

As for Pixar, that began as an operating group within Lucasfilm that was eventually spun-off and acquired by Jobs (about the time Lucas was settling his divorce). Not to ignore the many significant accomplishments of the team that was employed there, I believe that Pixar was something of a white elephant under Jobs' ownership. Things didn't really take off for that company until they hooked up with Disney, which eventually acquired them (and more recently, Lucasfilm).

Yet, don't get the idea that I'm singling out Jobs. I'm no fan of that pirate, Gates, either - though my computers came with 'Windoze' and I have purchased a couple pieces of 'Microsquash' software (purely out of necessity).