Commentary
HP, Alas, Why Did Ye Stray?
That the weight of the spying scandal continues to cause small implosions and aftershocks over at HP isn't terribly surprising. What does surprise me is the lack of a battle cry from other journalists and the complete silence from HP's press team.That the weight of the spying scandal continues to cause small implosions and aftershocks over at HP isn't terribly surprising. What does surprise me is the lack of a battle cry from other journalists and the complete silence from HP's press team.As a journalist covering the mobile computing industry, I have dealt directly with HP for years. I am on a first name basis with good handful of HP's PR representatives. Over the years I've written reports on their handhelds, laptops and other equipment. Everyone at the organization I've had contact with was professional and performed their jobs well.
Then senior management and the board (not some rogue middle manager) were caught spying on one another and several journalists.
More Mobility Insights
White Papers
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Reports
- Mobility’s Next Challenge: 8 Steps to a Secure Environment
- Time to Move: How to Ensure 'Mobility' Translates to 'Agility'
Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- The ABC's of Cloud Computing in the Midmarket
To be honest, when the scandal hit the news last summer, I was angry. I won't quibble with HP's right to conduct an internal investigation to see where possible leaks might be coming from, but they certainly didn't have the right to spy on reporters and pry into their personal emails and phone records to see if they were receiving secret information from HP. That the chairman was forced to step down and other leaders at the company were impacted didn't do enough to quell the outrage I felt.
As angry as I was, I kept my feelings mostly to myself. I never brought it up with anyone professionally, and especially not to HP, and I never wrote about it anywhere, even though I felt it deserved a lot of attention. But a funny thing happened. HP went dark. No more phone calls, no more pitches, no more meeting requests, no more emails. Nothing. This eerie silence enveloped the HP press team. I have to wonder what plan was hatched from the corporate communications team, if one was hatched at all. It appeared to be subject non grata.
Even weirder than HP's silence was the silence of the media. Not a single reporter, writer or editor brought it up in conversation. I just don't get it. Essential, constitutional rights protecting individuals and the press were violated here. No one seemed to care. Well, I do.
Mr. Alexander Wolfe posits that corporate spying is far more widespread than we probably suspect. I am sure it is. I knew a fellow who was a corporate spy for one of the two national home improvement stores. The shenanigans he pulled to get proprietary information from the other were outrageous, and probably illegal. He was never caught. How many instances of corporate spying, or spying on journalists, go unnoticed? Like Wolfe says, "let's not be naive."
Related Reading
| To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. | |
|
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Featured Resource
This white paper focuses on the critical need to manage outbound content sent via various avenues including email, Instant Messages, text messages, tweets, and Facebook posts. Read More












