The History of Hewlett Packard

Good evening. Our guest tonight is Michael Malone. I told him earlier that he is a legend himself here in the valley because I watched him for years on PBS, I have read his columns. Of course he grew up here and he joined the Mercury News as one of the nation's first daily high-tech writers. And that was especially interesting to those of us in the high-tech in the very early days because there weren't very many people writing about it on a level that anyone could understand. And Michael certainly was able to do that for a good many of us. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Economist, he was editor at Forbes ASAP and of course as I mention the host of Malone, the long time running PBS Series. He has recently co-produced the award winning series on social entrepreneurs called "The Heroes". Since 2000 he has been a Silicon Insider columnist to ABC News.com and if you haven't read his columns on that I strongly advice you to do so because he has been raising a little theory lately and they are very, very interesting. His previous books of course include The Valley of Heart's Delight, Infinite Loop, Virtual Technology and the Big Score. Please welcome Michael Malone. Good evening every body. Shall I just stand? I'll sit easier. And I must admit I am a little intimidated and I because sitting in the front row right here is one of the guys who taught me how to write. So if you read the book and you don't like the prose style you could speak to John Cane over here who right out of college, I am actually local boy, I I went to Monta Loma Elementary School, and I went to Crittenden Junior High School and then and there are some other guys going to that school too, at Mona Loma, Steve Jobs was when I was in sixth grade he was in fifth grade. I found some of his home work once and I gave it back to him 30 years later. And then we all moved over to Sunnyvale so I am I am pretty much a Sunnyvale boy, a Freemont High School grad and then Santa Clara and Stanford. So this is my old stomping grounds here. We even my family and I just went over to Colonel Lee's which were some Mongolian barbeque which I first had, I think in 1968. The owner asked me if it was my first time here and I I obviously didn't know what I was doing. So anyway, it's great to be here. It's great to be at Books Inc. I've been coming here since it began. I think the first time I bought a book at Printer's Ink was the day it opened. So it's marvelous to see a book store like this still survive, especially in the heart land of high technology that the there are some places and some things that web can't touch. And one of them is human nature, human interaction, the need for us to talk to each other and learn from each other and that's what this place is all about. So it's a great honor to be here. And I get the pleasure, if things go bad; I have a little wall of my books here apparently that I can hide behind. That's my last little bastion. So anyway let's talk about Bill & Dave. But I'll take questions from anybody; we can cover anything you want. We can I have been writing about Silicon Valley for 27 years twenty, yeah, something like that for various publications and before that I worked at Hewlett Packard of all places. And this it's a it's not entirely coincidence that I wrote this book about Hewlett Packard but I noticed the reviewers, I can tell when I start the review, if they like the book; they say noted Silicon Valley journalist or Silicon Valley Legend. But if if they are not going to like the book I think one I think I was Business Week, started up by saying former publicist for Hewlett Packard. Come on, I was in HP from the ages of 20 to 24. And that was a very, very long time ago and a different world. But let me tell you why I wrote this book. There were several reasons. One of them was I began this book right during the bad times at HP. And I had pretty much made myself persona non grata at Hewlett Packard. I had written a series of editorials in the Wall Street Journal in which I had suggested that the CEO of HP at the time was going to destroy the company and she didn't know what she was doing. And in response Carly basically, well through the people I was I was dis-invited to Hewlett Packard for a few years. I began the book probably out of heart break, because I remember Hewlett Packard during the golden age or at least the tale end of it. As I wrote the book I realized that really the great time at Hewlett Packard was probably from about 1956 to about 1974, when the recession hit. From the time they wrote public till the hard times in the mid 70s. And the more I thought about the more I came to realize that during those years Hewlett Packard was probably the greatest company there had ever been. It wasn't before that you know that the Bill and Dave of the garage, the Bill and Dave of the early days, the redwood building, they were good managers, but they weren't great managers, they had to learn as they went, they made the mistakes. The Bill and Dave after 1974 were old men; they were stepping away from the day to day activities of the firm. A new generation CEO's were coming on board who really couldn't do what they did and from that point away and by the time by the time the end of the 90's rolled around it was obvious that something had fundamentally had changed at HP and it wasn't the HP of memory. So I wanted to catch back and rediscover that. And my second motive was I looked around Silicon Valley, I have been covering Silicon Valley along with any body and I looked around a couple years ago and I realized all the pioneers were gone. They have all died or they have all retired. You know the Andy Groves and the Bob Noyces and the Charlie Sporks and all of them, they are out of the picture now. And, I thought, who are the new role models? Who are the role models in the Silicon Valley? And I well, but he was a legend you worked at National? - So who were the new role models in Silicon Valley and I wasn't struck by any of them. I think you know Steve Jobs is the genius, I think he has done magnificent thing at Apple, I am not sure I would ever want to work with Steve, I have in the past, don't think I ever want to again, who else are there, who else? Meg you know, Meg Whitman, she is almost invisible at eBay. Sergey and Larry Google, interesting guys but no one is ever going to call them business men. So who you look, Larry Alison? Oh please Larry is the scariest guy I have ever met. So who are the people we look at if I was a young person coming out of business school or engineering school and I wanted to start a company and I want to emulate the best of the best, where would I look? And it just struck me it was Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard and that even the first generation of Silicon Valleyites felt the same way. I remember going I was over interviewing Jerry Sanders for an article, I think it was for the New York Times. And Sanders was just on top of the world you know crazy, wild, Hollywood, Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices and I said you know, I knew the night before he had been at the event when the Queen of England had come to Silicon Valley and I said what was it like meeting the queen? And he said, oh that was great but he said the best part was I walked in the room and Dave Packard was way over on the other side of the room and he raised the hands and said hi, Jerry. He said David Packard knew my name. And I thought you know if a Jerry sanders one of the founders of this valley can feel that you know honored that Dave Packard would even notice them that says something about these two guys even among their peers. The other thing that bothered me was as a business reporter I had spent the last five years writing about bad news, I had written about the bubble bursting, I have watched my magazine get shot out from underneath me, I had seen almost all the journalism in the Valley die, I was watching my own newspaper die by the way Chronicle laid off 80 people today, did you guys hear that? Yeah, it's gone, bye, bye Chron and I was covering Enron stories and all these you know corporate ineptitude and you know criminal behavior and everything else. This wasn't the way I was brought up, I mean this wasn't the kind of corporate culture that I was raised at at like the guys like John Cane and Hewlett Packard, we didn't do this stuff and that that was the final propulsive force I said, I got right this damn book and it is the time to do it. And I was really pondering doing it when I got I got an e-mail from Walter Hewlett of all people, Bill Hewlett's son and he said you know, if you ever want to write a book about Hewlett Packard I will open up the family archives to you. I said done, deal, lets do it and I started writing. And you know, the book I wrote before this, there was a collection of my writing in between but the last big book I wrote was called Infinite Loop and was about Apple computer. And I spent you know, typically a book is like a baby. You know, you spent ten months researching getting ready and then it takes nine months to write a book, basically. And and you give birth to this book when it goes out in to the world and the Apple book at the 16 month mark I was still writing and this damn thing kept growing. And at one point, I was at the nine month point when I should have been done and I realized I hadn't even introduced the Macintosh yet, I thought oh my god, I am never going to finish this damn book. I am going to die writing this book. And it just wouldn't end and even worse than that was and this is a classic, every body has ever written about apple, you always mis-time it. So there was a book called the Little Kingdom which is the best book, better than mine, about Apple Computer in the early day and he managed to publish the book just before the Macintosh came out which basically rendered his book obsolete. And I did the same thing. I finished the book like a week before Steve Jobs came back which meant that my book was my book was superfluous. But the and so I was really telling I wasn't telling the good stuff iMac and the iPod. I was basically telling the long sad story of a company dissembling itself over the course of 20 years. And so for 20 months I sat there every night writing this increasingly sad ugly tragic story. And it got to the point right near the end, I seriously thought about joining the Marines. I just I was going to be on the next bus Camp Pendleton Main because I just couldn't do this book any more. And I finally got it done and that's why I haven't written a book in about six years seven years I just couldn't do it. So Bill and Dave, I started this one and I I knew that I had a limited amount of time to write this book. I started the book on January 4th and I knew that I was on a plane to Africa on June 4th okay, so I had exactly six months to write this book. Now as John will tell you I am not the most disciplined person in the world. When I was writing Infinite Loop I got to the point if any of you are writers you know that once you get untethered from reality, you start slipping your circadian rhythms and your lifestyle starts deteriorating and so it was like a death march near the end whether you are going to finish the book or succumb to your various vices and what happened to me with Infinite Loop was I got to the point I just started writing after the 11 O'clock news. And I would finish about 4.35 in the morning. And I got to be that weird creepy guy that was out, getting his mail on the bathrobe when the kids were coming home from school. And I got completely out of sink with mankind and everything else. So I thought okay, this going to happen again I better like you know, start taking long walks and going to the gym and eating better because I am going to kill myself on this book. And it was just the opposite. I wrote 1000 words a day - every single day for six months and I wrote it during the day. And I had like dinner with my family you know, I asked my kids what they did in the school that a day. I had a normal life writing this book. And I wrote 180,000 words in six months and I finished on June 4th and got on the plane the next day. And this was the first book I ever wrote that I was sad when I finished writing it. I did not want this book to end. I didn't want I didn't want Bill and Dave to die, I didn't want the Carly Fiorina era to come back. I didn't want any of those things. I I had so enjoyed telling the story of these guys that this book was this wasn't even writing. I mean writing doing a column is is easy but this book was this was the easiest writing I have ever done in my life. And it was fun because these two men are just absolute archetypes of great business practices, enlightened management and integrity. And to tell that story was so much fun. That I was I am very proud of this book. You know most books you get them done and its like oh god, you know, got to go out and there and leave it now and you rush off and you you kind of leave it behind but this one this was important to me. And the wonderful thing was even as I was writing the book HP was turning itself around. And that was the marvelous thing, so as I began the book just as I began I found myself being invited to the Packard Garage thing. So I went over there and the camera crews were out and there was a 1000 people and there were all these old HPers going through the through the garage like it was Lourdes and I was one of them. And there were the Packard children and there were the Hewlett children and there was Mark Hurd and I met him for the first time and I thought, this could be the turning point of this company. It's coming back. They are doing it right. Well you see what happened to HP in the last six months. I don't know if you have kept track of what's happening at that firm. This is a company that you could argue three years ago was going to die. It fulfilled all of my reporter's criteria for it for a dinosaur company that was just going to fade away. It was immersed in endless meetings, senior management doesn't seem to have a clue, employees were alienated. No one took the product seriously, quality was slipping. And they hadn't come up with any thing innovative in a long type. It looked like a doomed company. And believe me I am in the business of writing about doomed companies. And if you looked, in the last three months Hewlett Packard just became the largest technology company in history. It's a $100 billion company. Now if you didn't read that, there is a reason it's because I interviewed - I did a Q&A with Mark Hurd for the Wall Street Journal about three four weeks ago. And I said you guys just hit a $100 billion, you are bigger than IBM was at its peak. You just roared past Dell. You just ate their lunch. And you are now on the PC business too. How come there aren't like Billboards and Sky Writers and all that? And he said well you know as I learnt more about this company it struck me that that isn't the kind of thing we do. But wow that was kind of the rules that we have operated under 20 years ago. John and I here we were doing PR that - you don't you don't thump your chest, you don't bad mouth the competition. HP actually quietly became the largest high-tech company in history. And that was an interesting insight into how that place has changed and how it has begun to revert back to the original HP way. And I think that's the heart of it. And even as I was writing the book I was tracking the company, it was kind of fun. To see that Hurd the smartest thing Mark Hurd did when he got to HP was he shut up. You know, we had heard enough of that company. We had seen you know, Fiorina on stage with Gwen Stefani. You know we had seen we had seen the Garage aggrandized in advertising campaigns. Do you know HP actually built a phony garage by the headquarters building? Now I was as I was writing the book I was talking to Dave Curby who was my boss John's boss and he was the Vice President of Public Relations and he told me a story about Packard that when they made the Garage into a state historic site they had little ceremony. I guess it was turned into a national historical site yesterday. They had little ceremony, this was in the 80s and Curby drove Packard over to the Packard Garage and Curby was expecting you know, Packard to talk about it and be all excited and all that. And Packard there walking up the drive way and Packard turned to Curby and said - you know, it's the first time I have been back here since 1940. And David said you never been back here and Packard said, no I hated the damn place. But that was the whole point. The Garage was the Garage was in in you know, in the company's soul but he didn't pull out the Garage and make TV commercials out of it. You didn't reap you didn't build a mark up of it. So you can have like a little shrine at the corporate headquarters. I mean that's how far this company had gotten off track. And I finally asked, I said to Hurd I said you know, when you think of the HP way what does it mean to you? Because when you got here you were bad mouthing at the way your predecessor was as obsolete. And he says I come to realize that it's a family. And that's the heart of it. It might be a little dysfunctional you might have some family members that aren't much fun at thanks giving dinner, but you are still a family. I thought okay, this is good. This is good the guy is getting it. Now that HP come all the way back you want me to talk as a reporter. They need some more innovation. I I have some interesting questions. One of them is as writing this book I came to this realization that almost every great company in Silicon Valley history was run by a pair of people if you think about it. Oracle, eBay eBay is Jeff and Pierre, Sergey and Larry plus Eric at at Google, Noyce and Moore and Grove at Intel. It's two or more people. Right now HP is one, and I am not sure of one guy can bring this company all the way back to its old glory. It's doing great, I am waiting to see that I am waiting to see the HP 35; I am waiting to see that great new innovative product that knocks every body on their ear. I think right now they are still - you know, taking profits of old products lines and that's not a long term strategy. So can HP come all the way back, we will see but I put that aside because my my interest was not I didn't want to write the story of Hewlett Packard. I wanted to write the story of Bill and Dave. And there are certain things I learned about these guys as I wrote it. I think the single most important thing I learned about David Packard was that this was the least nostalgic human being that ever walked this planet. Here is the man who created this shining edifice, he changed the world, he was the model for every entrepreneur that ever followed and yet he never ever looked back ever and the Garage is an example of that. But there is a story of him in his 80s and he was on a plane flight down to Southern California to get some award or another and there was a bunch of odd HPers on the plane with him. Like Chuck House and some of these guys and they were flying down and they also were reminiscing about the good old days at HP and you know all these board stories and Packard didn't say a word and he got angrier and angrier and he finally said, all right you know that's enough. Let's talk about the squid population in Monterey Bay because he was working on the aquarium. He had no nostalgia for products, for buildings, for news clips, for awards, for any of those things. All he cared about was the future and the people of HP. Now Hewlett Hewlett to me was the great revelation of this book because Bill Hewlett is always that other guy you know its HP and he is the H. But everybody knows about the P you know because Packard was six foot four and he was a three letter man at Stanford and Packard is one of these guys, I don't know how many of you ever met him, but he was apollonian and he was this gigantic guy he looked like George Washington with his big forehead and his long roman nose. Yet, he shook my once when I was about 23 and he just enveloped me up to like the forearm, and he had this deep rumbling voice that got deeper as he got older, so he sounded like god in his 80s. But if Packard had a flaw it wasn't he had no flaws, everything had for him had always been easy - everything for him had been a success and so there was something lacking there in his understanding and empathy for human failure. If Hewlett Packard had been just the Packard company it might have been it would been a very successful company because Packard never failed in anything but it wouldn't have been a great company and the reason was because it lacked that human touch. The human touch came from Bill Hewlett and Hewlett's is the hero of my book. I didn't know much about him. You know he was always there you kind of know his reputation and his record. But the more you study this guy, the more interesting he becomes. First of all he is very flawed human being. In obvious ways for one thing he was profoundly dyslectic, so - you know when people write about the history of Hewlett Packard you tend to get a lot of Packard because Packard wrote everything. Hewlett never wrote anything down. So you have very little record of what Bill Hewlett had to say. When he did say something it was usually profound because it took a lot of work to get it out. The other thing was this is a guy short, pudgy his father was the dean of the Medical School at Stanford University and his family was quite you know San Francisco aristocracy and then his father died when he was 10 from a brain tumor and Bill Hewlett become a lost boy. He he got almost flaunted out of school because no one had recognized his dyslexia, he was tricky lad, he was difficult, he didn't talk much, people figured he was pretty smart but they couldn't really tell. He only got into Stanford because he got a good letter recommendation, he wouldn't have gotten in otherwise. I mean Stanford went out to Colorado to recruit David Packard you know and Packard went on to the play in the Rose Bowl and you know, all these things. Hewlett barely got in and others have wonderful story about the two of them meeting for a freshmen football try outs on the Stanford football field, a myth that I perpetuated in Wall Street Journal and they did meet but they didn't become friends, they had very little to do with each other in the four years at Stanford. They were in Thurman's class but Packard was you know thus god like figure moving through, getting straight A's, Hewlett was the guy that had to take copious notes and listen really carefully because he couldn't read the book very well, it wouldn't stay in his brain. And Hewlett doesn't really bloom until graduate school. And I think that deep frustration you sense in Bill Hewlett was a young man and the unhappiness and this failure was absolutely crucial in making Bill Hewlett what he was because the Hewlett of Hewlett Packard, really is the heart of the HP way. He is the one who cares about human beings and he is the one who forgives human beings. There is a sort of mythical notion that HP, you know, everybody happy family a big koom bi ya, sitting around. David Packard would knock tables in half, he was tough and he was loud and he was pretty unforgiving. Hewlett on the other hand especially as he got older he had tremendous understanding of human, human weakness and he managed people brilliantly and he is one of these guys that he doesn't get enough credit because he was the inside guy but it is interesting to note that when Packard went off to Washington to become a Deputy Secretary of Defense, he left Hewlett Packard in the hands of Hewlett and there were a lot of people at the time especially on at at the three upper, at management row there were really worried that Hewlett Packard being run by Bill Hewlett, would go off a cliff. And if you remember that was the period when HP introduced the HP35. It started the HP 3000 program and it did what I think is the single most humane active personnel policy in the history of Silicon Valley. An act of enormous bravery and that was in 1974 when the recession hit. Every company in this town laid off people, every company, National semiconductor, Intel, you know, on and on, every company laid off 20, 30 percent of their staff except Hewlett Packard and if you know what HP did its still mind boggling. They announced the nine-day fortnight which meant every two weeks of work you work 10 day, 10 week days but you only got paid for nine and that extended from the receptionist and the janitor, up to Bill Hewlett. Every single person in the company donated a day every two weeks and it saved Hewlett Packard but more important it saved every single job in that company. No one had ever attempted that before in Silicon Valley, no one has had a guts to attempt it since. All these masters of the universe strutting around out there, talking about what brave mangers there are and what risk takers there are, this is real risk taken. This is the real deal. Hewlett put the whole company on the line on that one and he pulled it off. So think about that all those innovative products and he pulled this off and saved HP and saved all the employees. During those four years Hewlett, Bill Hewlett was a better manager than David Packard. In fact during those four years Bill Hewlett may have been the greatest manager in hi-tech history, okay. And then Packard came back and Hewlett went back to the lab and, you know, and almost disappeared down memory hole. If his name wasn't on Hewlett Packard we wouldn't remember Bill Hewlett. There is another story that's almost forgotten that I have made it, you know, one of my duties in life to forever tell the story and I have always that it should be taught in every business school and this was in the early 80s HP got into trouble and what happened was, John Young was the CEO and the company began to, just sort of one of the problems with the HP way, these whole family, every body worked together is you can start clogging up with meetings, you get corporate bureaucratic arterial sclerosis, where nothing happens and you go to meetings all day long and you never actually do a damn thing and HP started to getting that way and Bill and Dave had been, were pretty much out of the day to day activities of the firm, And as the story is told and only reporter found the story and it was Eric Nee an Upside magazine and I actually I ran into him in Oxford a year ago and he sent me a copy of the story because I had always heard this and I had to tell the story. Some Secretary at Hewlett Packard wrote a letter to David Packard and said, Mr. Packard you don't, you probably don't know what's going on in the company but we are having problems here, nothing seems to get done we are only holding meetings. The company is grinding to a halt, you know, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now think about that, you have, you have a secretary writing a letter to the Chairman of the board on the belief that the Chairman of the Board will actually open that envelope. Okay that's step number one, think of how many, how many companies in Silicon Valley would a Secretary dare to do that. Okay number two Packard opened the letter and Packard read it but now here is the big one and this is what makes Hewlett Packard at least during the HP Bill and Dave era so unique in all the business history. It was a company built entirely on trust. Trust from the top to the bottom and it began with a perfect trust between Bill and Dave. It's not that it didn't have arguments. I wrote that ones too that they never seem they have an argument. I found out from Walter Hewlett, oh yeah, no, that's not true at all. Hewlett came home when I poured a drink and said I am so damn angry at Dave Packard. But these guys trust each other so completely they would hand off a $20 billion company to the other guy and walk away and that trust went up and down that corporation. And so when that Secretary sent that note to David Packard, he opened it up and said something is wrong and gathered, he grabbed Hewlett and remember Hewlett was already - had already had a stroke or two and they went back into HP mainly driven by Packard and Packard took that place apart. He was grabbing consultants grilling them on what they had seen inside the company. He was going top to bottom in that company and he tore HP apart and put it all together. Now the crucial part of that is he was 78 years old when he did that, which makes that arguably, you know, they say there is no second act in America. This is the greatest business second act of all time, these are old men. They these are old men who come back and they are more maverick and they are greater risk takers and they are greater innovators, that all the people a third of their age working for them. That's pretty incredible and it and what they did HP was they brought it back to the point that it became the fastest growing large company in the world and maybe the fastest growing ever up to that point which showed that if you trust your people and that was the mistake that Carly made. If you trust the HPers the family they will get you out of any scrape, they will innovate you back to success. The mistake that Ms. Fiorina made when she came in was she saw an old corporate culture and confused it for be it being antiquated and obsolete, when in fact it was just clogged up and if she had just gotten, just entrusted people to fix it HP would turn itself around, which is what Mark Hurd just did. Mark Hurd didn't make any profound structural changes at HP, what he did was he trusted his people. He went on and started asking everybody what we do we need to fix this place and now this now these machines are juggernaut again. So I I keep wanting to tell that story about the great return and I wrote about in the book because I find it astounding and it was such a close call because I worked with Packard a few years after that when he was working on the HP Way. They brought me and I talked to him a little bit and he was very, very old and he couldn't he couldn't have done it. Two more years, three more years Hewlett and Packard could not have gone back in and saved Hewlett Packard. They were too old physically, their mind which is as strong as ever. I mean, Packard, Packard in his 80's there was a story that he was put on he was invited on the board of Genentech and he said all right but I don't know anything about genetic engineering so he sent his - the guy who worked around the house down to Stanford book store, there was a list of like 30 books on biotech and genetic engineering and recombinant DNA for him to read. Brought it back Packard went to the first board meeting and they made the full fancy board presentation and then said do you have any questions and Packard says, yeah I have one and the question he asked was so arcane that the Chairman had to stop the meeting go out and get their R&D guy to come up and answer Mr. Packard's question and this is a man in his 80s. That's the story I want to write one of these days by the way. I am we always think of age as being a limiting factor on entrepreneurship and I think it's only the more I look here, and I think age is really the limiting factor on ones energy as an entrepreneur. You know I think when you are 65-years-old, the grand kids you really don't want to put in that 100 hour a week sleeping on the floor of your cubicle but I am also struck that looking around the value right now I found myself in a meeting the other day. It was a new start up company and there were four guys in that room and two of them had taken four companies public all with a net value of more than $1 billion, okay and one of the guys just got admitted to the inventor's hall of fame and I was the youngest guy in that room. This guy was over 80 and he was doing another start up with the most innovative technology of all. I can't even tell you about it yet. Wait wait about a year and a half and you'll know. But the idea of an 80-year old, he was taking bigger risks than any of those 23 years old I see out there with dot-coms. It is possible. And and I think that's maybe that is the other lesson that we can still get from Hewlett and Packard, the new one, which is age is not a limiting factor on being innovative or being an entrepreneur or being a risk taker. All the other lessons, we live all those other lessons. I mean, all you got to do, every CEO in this town, every successful entrepreneur follows the Bill, Hew and Dave Packard trajectory. You know its all its its all in our DNA right now. You start in a garage, you have the start up, you know, then you go public, then you go global, and then after you go global, then you you begin to move out and become an industry leader and industry spokesman you know. And then you go to Washington and you do your part in Washington DC. Then you come home and become a big time philanthropist. And then you know, you head off into the empery and the streaming clouds of glory. And that's kind of the dream of every, you know, every entrepreneur and and CEO in this town. Not, many have done it. You know, you can probably count on one hand the number of guys who would actually pull this one of. And even then, most of them, they just can't go all the way. For example, I don't know if you've ever noticed but Packard didn't put his name on anything and neither did Hewlett. There is a Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. But that's Mrs. Packard and she died before they opened the hospital and the Board of Directors insisted upon putting her name on it. But you go to the Monterey aquarium; it's not the David Packard Monterey aquarium. You go to the Engineering School at Stanford, what's the name of the building? It's the Fred Terman building; they named it after their teacher. They didn't name it after themselves. They stipulated, "We don't want our name on the stuff". Okay. So, a younger guy even more financially successful than him following the same trajectory named Bill Gates goes to Stanford and it's his turn to build the building. Okay. What a computer building there. What name did he put on it? William Gates building, yeah you bet. And, you know, its it's so hard to get you know, these guys want to do it but there are several things you just can't do. It's so the Bill and Dave model looks so easy, you know. It's sort of like you hit the triple and you hit the home run and all you got to do is hit the single and the double go for the circuit and you just can't bring yourself to get a single. And it's true with these guys in Silicon Valley. First of all, you don't become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to give away power. Right. You are not there to give away power, you are there to take power. So a management model where you drive decision making down through the organization is anathema to these guys. The other one is, you take your ego out of it you know, and you don't put your name on things. Well, we we have seen what comes out of that. The other one is you put your employees before products and buildings and corporate cars and desks and all that. Easy to say, I - believe me I have spent how long - 27 years covering this valley. And every time there is boom, everybody is an enlighten company. They have all got, you know, they've all got pilates balls in the lobby, they got lava lamps. You know, he used to let you bring your dog, you know, they got the exercise room; they got all these wonderful things. And, it all looks great these guys have got these most enlightened managers, what a wonderful work place, right until the moment, that semi-conductor book to bill ratio goes below one to one. And at that moment, the economy goes south and the pilates balls go flat and the lava lamps get unplugged. It's everybody is a genius during good times and every boss is an enlightened manager during good times. The real test if you can be a great boss during the hard times. And as we saw, you know, in 2001, there were awful lot of, you know, young masters of the Universe out there with their dot-coms who were all paper billionaires. And not a one of them figured how to get through that one on life. So, I my sense is that Hew and Packard, Bill and Dave, whatever the fate of HP, and that's you now as reporter, you know, that's that's my concern. But as a writer, it's not. You know, good luck to HP, I had a wonderful time there. But the story of Bill and Dave, I think will resonate for a long, long time. I think these guys were the best of the best. And when you have a company that in the early 60s was growing as fast as Google, was as innovative as Apple and created almost all the things that we considered as enlightened personnel policies that make our daily working lives bearable. Stock options, profit sharing, flexi time; all the way to the Friday afternoon Beer bus and the and the coffee breaks twice a day, all of those things and the no layoff policy, Packard was once asked about that. He says, "Yeah, no layoff. We didn't say "No Fire". We'll fire people. Damn it. But we are not going to layoff masses of people." But even that too, all those things that we think of is what makes you know our jobs bearable on a day to day basis come from those guys. And that's you know, that's a hell of a legacy. And its was an honor to write about.