[time-nuts] HP Reliability

[Richard (Rick) Karlquist]

A few clarifications:

Before 1999, HP had a Medical Division that made
equipment you saw in hospitals and a Scientific
Instrument Division that made chemical analysis
equipment used in medical laboratories (and also
other laboratories).  IIRC, both began as
acquisitions.  The Agilent spin off in 1999
started a trend of additional divestiture.  The
Medical Division was sold to Philips, so former
HP hospital monitors were rebranded Philips.
After the Keysight spinoff, the remaining Agilent
company has two main parts:  chemical analysis,
descended from the old Scientific Instrument
Division, and life sciences, which grow organically
with the invention of gene arrays

What is now Keysight underwent massive reductions
in force after the dot com bust.  Around the
same time they started off shoring the Rohnert
Park manufacturing complex to Malaysia.  The
combination of the two eliminated something like
80% of the jobs in Sonoma county.  Some sites
like Liberty Lake (Spokane) closed completely.

This was when we started to see the quality
plummet.  They lost the recipe when they off
shored.  Instruments would arrive DOA, or would
fail after a few months.  Some had annoying
problems that would come and go, and they couldn't
seem to fix them.  When Windows XP expired, there
was a big crisis to upgrade to Windows 7 that
Malaysia fumbled the ball on.  (Many years ago,
the powers that be decided to use Windows internally
in place of Unix).

I wish Keysight well, but at the time I left in 2014,
and from what I've heard since, it didn't look encouraging.

Rick