HP Accused of Spying on Dell

An anonymous reader writes "An ex-HP exec claims he was instructed by the company's management to spy on Dell's printer business plans. Karl Kamb, previously HP's vice president of business development and strategy, was named as a defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by HP in 2005, after he allegedly began his own company before leaving HP. Kamb, who has denied any wrongdoing, filed a countersuit in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas claiming he was fired because of shading dealings involved in the corporate espionage. From the article: 'As a member of HP's imaging and printing group's "competitive intelligence team", Kamb said he was in a position to know that HP senior executives signed off on a plan to pay [Former Dell Japan President Katsumi] Iizuka to obtain details of what Dell was up to. Iizuka turned over the information to Kamb and he passed it along to HP, Kamb claimed.'"

All bureaucracies tend this way...

[drinkypoo]

...at least, if they are successful. The purpose of a bureaucracy is to self-perpetuate, like any organism. It is powered by the enlightened self-interest of the employees within it. Every bureaucracy, if left unchecked, will seek to expand itself. Individuals within it may have morality but the organism as a whole does not.

To see these organizations spying is not a shock. If you let them continue to grow they will each run up against each other and start trying to find ways to subsume the others. It doesn't really matter to the consumer since each one is pretty much the sum of its parts...

I remember when...

[hackstraw]

HP actually _made_ excellent printers.

Now, HP spys on its customers and competeters printer habits.

Their stock value should reflect this better.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:And yet...

[Technician]

I own a Samsung laser printer because it has linux support :-)

Tried a newer distro of Linux?

When I finaly retired Windows 98 and loaded Ubuntu on a machine on my LAN, it fould both my older HP printers just fine.

Personally I hope both HP and Dell fail

I am aiming that way quickly. My wife got a Dell printer with her new (not anymore) XP computer. We about fell over laughing when we saw the size of the print carts. We looked up the price of the replacements. They were the same price as the carts for the HP722c but were a quarter the size. We could not pick them up localy but had to pay S & H on top.

We figured to go ahead and install it and use it until it ran out of ink. This is where we got our second laugh.. It cam with drivers for Windows XP and Windows 2K. At the time none of the other computers on the LAN ran either of those OS'es. At the time we had a mix of Win98, Win 95, Linux, and an oddball Win ME laptop. None of them could use the new printer.

To add insult to injury, Dell had a very generous offer.. They would recycle my old printer for free including shipping, just pack it in the printer box and put on the shipping label. Yea right! I was going to ship their printer back for recycling when it ran out of ink, but they probably would pass it on to someone else as a new printer. We donated it to Goodwill instead. It's there if someone really wants it.

HP has very little to worry from Dell unless they put out a decent printer and make supplies easy to pick up at a good price.

I think Cannon will eat both of them for lunch if they are not careful.

Re:This is depressing.

[drinkypoo]

I'd say that hiring Carly wan't the cause, it was a symptom of the company losing its way.

On the other hand, hiring Carly was exactly opposed to what needed to be done.

It may not have caused HP to slide into the toilet, but I'm pretty sure the hand on the lever was attached to one C. Fiorina.

Re:This is depressing.

[Manchot]

I'd say that HP sealed their fate when they spun off Agilent [wikipedia.org] in 1999. Agilent does what HP was originally founded to do: to actually perform R&D, and to make test equipment that is widely used in R&D. It's no coincidence that a large majority of the insanely expensive equipment used in my electrical engineering department is Agilent- or HP-made. They went from being a company that actually does interesting things to being a company that manufactures commodities. Is essence, they moved from being a technically-oriented company to being a business-oriented corporation. In the former, there is actually a spirit of scientific camaraderie amongst the employees, but in the latter, it's a solely profit-driven work environment.