And Ashlee Vance was about the ONLY reporter I can think of to believe in HP after the Compaq acquisition. When the WSJ, NYT, Ziff-Davis, and the rest of the herd sheepishly denounced the merger.. ONE MAN stood alone and saw the value.

The Reg, (and Ashlee in particular) should be applauded as the only medium who saw "beneath the covers" and refused to follow slavishly with the rest of the Media (and Wall Street.) If you trace back with Google (and you can) everybody was applauding Dell (then the Wall street Darling) and doubting the possibility of a combined Compaq / HP. The naysayers were sure the merger would fail. Sure, it took a ride through the Carly days to emerge a success, but the fundamental concept proved a good idea. Nowhere to go but up !!

Ashlee showed guts to buck the tide (and I hope he bought some stock !!! ) He deserves some reward for courage (as well as insight.)

I'd not touch an HP PC with a long stick (but then I tend to cobble my own together so that's largely true of any off-the-peg PC really) and I have never touched Compaq... but my g/f had been wanting me to replace the printer since the heads went on our old Epson inkjet at home.

We don't use printers much so I just wanted to get something cheap-n-cheerful that'd do for a year or so. Got a little HP from Dabs (it was cheaper elsewhere, but Dabs allow for evening deliveries) for £40, was just expecting, well, a bog standard inkjet like my old Epson. But it's actually quite a nice little printer, with slots for various memory cards and USB ports so you can just chuck your camera or flash drive in without booting up the PC, if you want. The print quality isn't bad (once the magenta ink was flowing properly - took a couple of head clean runs) and it can (apparently) do photo printing, you can switch out the black cartridge for a photo-print one and use glossy paper.

I was actually quite impressed, possibly because I wasn't expecting much, but if HP can keep this up then they deserve to reap the rewards... not much of an advertising slogan though "HP - much better than I was expecting".

I'm not sure HP is counting on the business of "Cobble-your-own" PC types to make its revenue goals.

That being said, when was the last time you cobbled your own printer or scanner?

I've had Laserjet IIIs I had to take outside and shoot in order to replace. Likewise, I gave up my 15-year-old HP scanner ONLY when I could no longer fit the ISA SCSI card in any new MOBOs.

Anyway, the downside of selling Consumer stuff is that it dilutes HP's image as an Enterprise-Class player such as IBM, Sun or EMC (when, in fact, HP is trumping both in growth.)

IBM was wise to dump the low-end off on Lenovo and concentrate on software and services where the real margin is. Maybe it's time for HP to spin off the cameras, injkjets and Walmart shelf-candy, and get taken seriously.

They make money on all that stuff stupid a lot of money

that makes them serious the last thing

thing the world needs is another IBM of which it already has

two. Ashlee is still a bonehead even a blind pig can find an

acorn once in a while HP's motto ought to be we don't suck

as much as Dell because thats how they made such a nice

quarter by not being quite as shoddy and poorly behaved

towards their customers (or quite as thieving and dishonest) as the other commodity box vendor. HP will self destruct too give it

time.