So, tech titan Hewlett Packard has lost very valuable archival material, including letters and correspondence from the founders of HP, in the recent California fires.
Is it me or is this ridiculous?
Am I the only one asking WHY a company like HP would keep these valuable materials in ONLY their original paper state?
Has anyone at HP ever heard of scanning, digitizing, or other methods of document preservation and backup?
It does’t surprise me because I actually used to work for HP via the acquisition of the enterprise software company that I worked for, and I worked for HP for 5 years. Granted, this was in New Jersey and not in Palo Alto, but through company teleconferences and such you got the feeling that for such a big company, many obvious things were always just out of grasp of those who were steering that ship.
Whether it was Carly Fiorina, whose leadership was underwhelming right up to when she opened her golden parachute, or through the horrible time when Mark Hurd (disgraced bean counter CEO wo left amid sexual misconduct allegations and also got a nice golden parachute while he laid of thousands), there was always this clueless vibe in the air at HP.
So, it’s not surprising that it NEVER DAWNED on the brain boxes at Hewlett Packard to SCAN AND DIGITIZE their IRREPLACEABLE archive material that also is a partial and very important history of Silicon Valley itself!
Tsk tsk tsk HP. You STILL don’t get it even from way back when I had the misfortune to work for you.
Maybe you should hire people who have a clue and know how to scan and preserve such important material, and you know, back it up somewhere safe.
The loss of the originals would still be tragic, but if there were digital scans at least the information itself wouldn’t be gone forever.
If by chance I missed somewhere where this was done, please let me know below. Even if they did scan the stuff, HP as a company is still a pretty clueless joint. It’s hard to believe that they are still such a large and important tech company with the way they have been led all of these years.
I guess in technology you can really be too big to fail.
