I rarely forecast doom for a company. However if my recent experience with HP is any example, the company is doomed. I was looking for 2 laptops to be used in my web mail station project (anyone wanting information on that project should look at Thalasar Ventures I will post updates there). As these are going in a web mail station, they are certainly going to be beat to death. So I considered Dell (the old standby). They were offering a great deal on the 1200s. But I got suckered by the great ads HP is now running. When I added in the price of wireless and support, HP turned out on top at least in price. HP has always stood out in my mind as a high quality provider. So away I went to HP TV. After placing my order, I wondered why I didn't recieve an email confirmation of the order. So I quickly called HP to find out. After speaking with a customer service representative, it became apparent that when I input my email address for confirmation and login, I typed .con instead of .com. The customer service rep of course said it was my fault for making a typo. I then thought back to my team's own software development work in open source ecommerce in 1995/1996. Email address verification (that the email address added followed the form of a valid email address) was added in our SECOND alpha release in 1996. Later we added functionality which checked that the email address actually routed and was deliverable. HP doesn't have the first basic functionality nine years later. They don't bother to check to see if an email address is valid with the order!
The funny thing is this email login is how you are identified as a customer at HP. So when I requested they change it (ie correct it so I can actually communicate with them, I was told this was impossible. Why is email address verification such an impossibility for HP? Could Broadvision (there ecommerce software provider recently taken private) be so inflexible? Is their It infrastructure so brittle?
It doesn't bode well for a company. I had a similar problem at Dell. They were able to quickly consolidate accounts under a single login. If HP's IT infrastructure is so brittle how can they expect to compete?
What struck me as even stranger is that the HP rep didn't think it strange that their ecommerce application doesn't validate email addresses and thus account signons. I guess Carly really did kill the culture of innovation at HP.
