Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by astrodust 2595 days ago
Brand necrophilia. Compaq consistently built better gear than HP before being absorbed. HP used that brand for their junk as a way of getting back at Compaq.
1 comments

Wrong. Compaq had much higher DOA and other defects in the mid 90s. They relied on customer institutional memory from the 80s when they really were the best.
Sounds like Apple's current laptop strategy.
Counterpoint: my Compaq Presario 1210 survived for about 20 years before it finally stopped POSTing. Even the original hard drive still worked (albeit with a range of bad sectors around which I had to partition).
True, Compaq started to go down-market and that did dent their reputation.

HP had already been racing to the bottom for years, though.