For this year-end column, I thought I’d do what everyone expects us media types to do and focus on the negative – specifically, two of the industry’s biggest negative events of 2006.
There has been a lot of talk about battery recalls the last few months. Pundits have been listing Dell’s battery recall along with its flaccid stock price, as one of the hits against the company. Dell wasn’t the only company to issue a recall; Apple, Toshiba and Lenovo also did so.
But to be fair, the battery recalls really do not reflect so badly on those computer manufacturers. They did the right thing. They saw there was a problem, and they dealt with it. Dell at least could have speeded the logistics up a bit – I had been aware of the recall for several weeks before I got a notice from Dell telling me how to determine whether the batteries in my Inspiron laptop were affected (they weren’t) – but they told their customers there was a problem and fixed it, so let’s not beat them up too much.
It doesn’t look quite so good on Sony, which actually made the batteries. Consumer safety is very important, and machines that catch fire are not good news. Sony’s reputation has deservedly suffered.
If you want a real scandal, though, look no farther than Hewlett-Packard’s boardroom. Trying to determine who had leaked some sensitive information to the media, HP spied on reporters and its own directors. Private investigators hired by HP used “pretexting” – a euphemism for lying – to obtain private telephone records, to try to find the culprits whose offence, when you get right down to it, was that they helped make information available to the public – among them customers and shareholders – about the activities of a publicly traded company.
What happened here is unforgivable. The “pretexting” tactics of HP’s investigators were strikingly similar to the sort of social engineering tactics we’re warned about in any basic primer on data security. If they’re not illegal, they should be.
The public generally has a short memory, particularly for things that don’t affect them personally. No doubt anyone who had to deal with the hassle of replacing a laptop battery – and certainly anyone who had a computer catch fire on them – will remember the great battery recall longer than HP’s slimy behaviour.
Maybe my perspective is a bit different because some of the victims of HP’s spying were reporters, and I’m a reporter and don’t take kindly to attempts to intimidate my colleagues. Or maybe the reason I see HP’s little escapade as an infinitely more serious thing than the battery problem is that for most of my 26 years covering the technology industry, Hewlett-Packard was regarded as a paragon – a company that produced over-engineered, reliable products and conducted itself with an integrity that, let’s face it, isn’t universal in this (or any other) industry.
They used to call it “the HP way” and it goes back to when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard co-founded the company in a garage in 1939. The nastiness and boardroom infighting around the acquisition of Compaq in 2002 had already provided a hint that things had changed. Now we know for sure. The HP way is dead. I suspect Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett are spinning in their graves.
Comment: [email protected]
