Dr. Dobb's Journal December 2000
T hey always say that size doesn't matter, but they don't really mean it. Speaking recently at one of those ubiquitous industry conferences, Hewlett-Packard's President, CEO, and now Chairbeing Carly Fiorina said that the world was entering a renaissance of the information age. I'm glad to know that the information age is undergoing this rebirth, although I have to admit that I didn't even know it was sick. Meanwhile, back home in the hallowed halls of HP, it was becoming clear what shape this renaissance would take. Square, and 20 percent smaller. That was because three-hatted renaissance woman Fiorina had mandated that all of HP's honeycombs of 8 X 10 cubicles be downsized to the industry standard 8×8 cell size. "The technology landscape is shifting," Fiorina told the conferees, and I'm sure that the engineers standing in the hallways of HP's Palo Alto offices watching their workspaces being disassembled couldn't agree more.
Speaking at a podium flanked by giant TV screens that probably wouldn't fit in the new HP cubicles, Fiorina urged companies to embrace openness -- open systems, open-source software. And, presumably, open-topped offices constructed of movable partitions that can be reconfigured in response to fluctuations in the company's stock valuation. Fiorina also talked up IA-64 -- which is Intel's 64-bit processor architecture, not a reference to the square footage of the new HP cubicles.
I wondered if this cubicle downsizing was a good idea until I did the math. A 20 percent reduction in cubicle size results in a 25 percent increase in the number of cubicles that can be installed in a given space. Clearly, this is a win: A 25 percent gain must justify a 20 percent loss. I was reassured by this calculation, but I still wondered if this reduction in workspace was in keeping with the HP Way. Hewlett-Packard has a legendary code of business conduct called the "HP Way." It is widely regarded as a model for how companies should value their employees and has been emulated in many other Silicon Valley firms, sometimes with embellishments like free orange juice. So I consulted the HP Way to see what it said on the matter.
"HP does not believe that large size is important for its own sake..." the HP Way said. I guess that's where she got the idea.
An answer to acrophilia: My entire November "Swaine's Flames" column constituted a puzzle. By taking the first letters of the all words in the column, in order, you get one long string of acronyms, most -- but not all -- of which have something to do with technology. For example, "But it's obvious, surely" = BIOS, or "When you solve it what you've got is some dumb nonsense" = WYSIWYG ISDN. Just recognizing what was going on didn't mean that you had the solution, though. Deciding where one acronym ended and the next began was the real puzzle. Here, paragraph by paragraph, are the acronyms:
IBM AC TCP/IP WIMP ATDT CISC YMCA WYSIWYG ISDN
MIMD RAM YACC WWW BIOS WYSIWYG
IRC ACM FM OOP TM NLQ BAUD MPEG IBM SNOBOL AWK FUD
BIT IMD ISDN OA MOS
TTL AI FTD IA BC BIPS IMSAI PC CCD CGA ESP AOL WP TCP/IP TI WOOFFF
(WOOFFF)
OTC AI EMS TM GEM TDL OTC IPO MCC
YACC ISDN RT HTML
CBM HSL
NBC ISP YACC ITC IO PC WWW
CIF HAL
TI GNU YACC MIDI
SWIP TTL IGA URL CIA CTS
PMS OTC IDAPI BASIC CA URL
WAIS CO IRA RLL NSA AOL FAQ
CRM LCD TI FTL ACD TI
NOP CMIP WDM FFT BFT TCL/TK ST OS WP CIS
ASIC IAC TI JEDEC NTSC IGY NTT JPEG BTU MPEG
IA MTB ATT TCI FIFO SNA ICU SCSI CSMA/CD
CGI WYSIWYG APL GWBASIC
WWW IP ENIAC
AT ISAM ASIC
DMA WC SIMD WYSIWYG TRS
ISAM
ACM YACC RAM ISDN
IWW HTML URI OOPS SSC
IMF IT APL OCR FTL PDM NCR
TIFF AAAI
No penguins were harmed in the making of this column.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@swaine.com