The family was upset at the merger from day one because it did represent the end of an era. But that same family turned or let HP go the way of a big national publicaly traded company and turned day to day decisions over to the ceo position. This was no longer a family company.
And after y2k tech upgrades a lot of tech & office equipment company business went flat or dropped only to be saved by a bubble. At the same time personal tech or the personal computer really started to ramp up. That also ment individual employees could do at their desk what had to be sent away to a copy room, printer or office to be digitized. Now a milk crate size printer could do what the piano size copier did and a disk & hard drive cut out a lot of middlemen AND equipment for a permanent digital record. HP had to get into the fiercely competitive pc market one way or another.
Layoffs suck and are frequently misused or abused by management. But many are necessary. You can't wait until accounting says broke in two weeks and the checks won't clear. CEOs are responsible for avoiding that quite frankly any legal way possible. If a company doesn't or won't have work for an employee keeping them on payroll is not a viable option That doesn't mean you can't be generous with severance and/or retraining expenses. That was one of the costs of the merger-buyouts and severance.
