Revisiting the Past

Well that is a pretty bad signal, it turns out. Eight years ago I posted that I was worried about Hewlett-Packard due to them putting on some commercials that did not actually promote any particular product, but were just vague "HP brings you nanotechnology" spots. This one, N is for nanotechology is one of the ones I was talking about. But looking back now on the performance of HP since then it seems like it was a very poor predictor of the success of HP. Now, this year, they are taking a big fall and losing there direction, but that is an awful long time between prediction and result. So I think that the vague "we're cool" ads are not as good of a signal of what a company is doing as I thought. Looking at HP stock price they only stumbled a bit in the year after I posted about that advertisement.

Too bad... it would have been a useful thing to be able to point to.