[Radio Wrangler]

Bill and Dave were massive shareholders and were not enslaved to the stock market as later managers were. The incomes of the later managers were strongly linked to the share price and stock markets are very much 'quick buck' sorts of places. Bill and Dave had unloaded a lot of stock to set up trusts for the family, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and things like that, so the proportion of stock in gentle, ling-term hands diminished.

I wouldn't put too much blame on the later managers, some of them were decent people and grew up in the firm in the Bill and Dave years, it's just that they didn't get the freedom to do things as they had been done before. They did cave in to pressure from stock analysts, but they wouldn't just have diminished bonuses, they'd be replaced, so resistance could never oppose the external pressures. Indeed some were. I got to know Ned Barnholt over a period at the ISEF final in Phoenix. He was a decent guy, well aware of what was going on and why. He came from an old school, very HP-like, background. He was Agilent's first CEO, saw it through the 2001 telecom bubble crash when sales fell by 75%, and back up to profit, delaying his retirement to get that job done. Got replaced by an axeman, though when he retired, and that axeman got replaced by someone with an even sharper axe (and no HP background) when the company split again.

I got to enjoy almost a couple of decades under the Bill and Dave influence. I definitely saw the best years, but unfortunately I got to see much of what the wrecking gang did.

I didn't regret my choice to stay out of management and concentrate on engineering. The salaries were substantially lower, the satisfaction was higher, it was more fun, and there's no blood on my hands.

David