>In HP's defense, they produce an awful lot of machines and customers often vote with their wallets, reliably choosing a $100 cheaper machine with a flexing plastic case over an aluminium competitor with higher quality parts.

I suspect that Hewlett and Packard wouldn't recognize the present iteration of the company they created.
In retrospect Carly's insistence on buying Compaq, which I thought was whacky at the time, might have been a wise move.