Are the members of the HP Prime team doing well?

[bbergman]

As someone living in one of the "HP Country" areas (San Diego) and with many of my friends working for HP, I completely understand and concur with Cyrille's comments. HP has always been focused on their big money makers, and after they jettisoned the original calculator division entirely (what was that, maybe early 2000's? Late 1990's?), I suspect that they really have only kept it alive because of the personal passion and heroics of HP employees who didn't want to see it end.

We've heard from ex-HP folks for decades that they, not leadership, were the ones who pushed internally to keep the calculators alive; that they were the ones who created value propositions and sold others on the value; who put thousands of hours of their personal and family time into the products; and who continued to champion the calculator division.

The sales folks see the market as minimally viable, especially in the USA. TI and Casio are more committed than HP for sure. In other countries, there's a higher profit margin and more demand, and so there is a fair amount of interest among salespeople in those areas, but it's still small potatoes compared to the rest of the HP divisions.

It's my belief that if Tim and Cyrille ever left, the calculator division would die a quiet and permanent death. Any of us who have an interest in any current models owe them our sincere gratitude for keeping some calculators alive all this time. It's a labor of love for sure. I don't expect this will change either, since HP just doesn't have time for it. It's kind of like two guys in the maintenance division trying to keep a dingy afloat because it's still serviceable, while the Navy is really more concerned about their worldwide fleet of 20 aircraft carriers and 100 destroyers.

Within the local HP facility, employees are focused on printers, ink cartridges, accessories, and laptops. It didn't surprise me at all to hear that Tim and Cyrille were redirected towards those money-making areas, rather than calculators. I would bet $10 that they also campaigned hard to be allowed to even keep/contribute 10% of their time to working on them, rather than being completely moved over to other products! The same thing happens here in San Diego. One of my good friends changes focus on her work about every six months (and right now, the hotspot is printers). Anyhow, I guess my point is that when I heard what happened, it made total sense, and was very consistent with my experience with HP here.

I can only send them best wishes and grateful thanks for their continued efforts to do something (anything!) in the way of calculators. They're probably the only ones keeping HP calculators alive.