The Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ) is an iconic brand name in American business history, and one of the 20th century’s greatest business success stories. From humble beginnings in a one car garage in Palo Alto, California in 1939, it has grown to number nine on the Fortune 500 list today, with 320,000 employees and 2010 revenues of $126 billion. The firm is a global leader in personal computers, imaging and printing systems, and enterprise computing, application software, and information technology services.
More important than its scale, however, has been its effect on the global economy: H-P was the origin of what has become an historic provenance of entrepreneurial invention and innovation, branded by a moniker known as Silicon Valley — words that now connote a mindset far more than a mere geographic location. Founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built and embedded within the firm a deep culture that came to be known as “the H-P Way”, and called upon employees to relentlessly pursue invention that could be commercialized even as they pursued excellence in all dealings with customers — and with each other. Outside of IBM (IBM) and the AT&T (T) orbit of companies, no other American corporation can match H-P’s long and consistent record of patents and technological innovation. From a macroeconomic standpoint, there is no question that H-P is one of the progenitors of American greatness and indeed, of our modern civilization.
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