A few clarifications: Before 1999, HP had a Medical Division that made equipment you saw in hospitals and a Scientific Instrument Division that made chemical analysis equipment used in medical laboratories (and also other laboratories). IIRC, both began as acquisitions. The Agilent spin off in 1999 started a trend of additional divestiture. The Medical Division was sold to Philips, so former HP hospital monitors were rebranded Philips. After the Keysight spinoff, the remaining Agilent company has two main parts: chemical analysis, descended from the old Scientific Instrument Division, and life sciences, which grow organically with the invention of gene arrays
What is now Keysight underwent massive reductions in force after the dot com bust. Around the same time they started off shoring the Rohnert Park manufacturing complex to Malaysia. The combination of the two eliminated something like 80% of the jobs in Sonoma county. Some sites like Liberty Lake (Spokane) closed completely. This was when we started to see the quality plummet. They lost the recipe when they off shored. Instruments would arrive DOA, or would fail after a few months. Some had annoying problems that would come and go, and they couldn't seem to fix them. When Windows XP expired, there was a big crisis to upgrade to Windows 7 that Malaysia fumbled the ball on. (Many years ago, the powers that be decided to use Windows internally in place of Unix). I wish Keysight well, but at the time I left in 2014, and from what I've heard since, it didn't look encouraging. Rick _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.