The huge spike (in the average mind you) was caused by the premature introduction of a new disk drive family which was necessary for a new computer launch. It’s hard to imagine today, but this situation almost put HP out of the computer business.
40 R&D engineers were re-assigned to manufacturing engineering to fix the problems. Within a short time the spike reversed. At this point we heard conflicting inputs. Our US sales force expressed gratitude, but our major Japanese customer announced they were leaving us.
Even though Japan was only 4% of sales, we knew competitors would point out to our US customers that we couldn’t even sell into Japan. We also felt the Japanese attitudes were those of the customer of the future. Fortunately, if we were willing to listen and act, they would teach us reliability.
In January 1984, Chet was recruited from R&D to lead the newly energized Reliability Engineering dept.
We learned all we could from the Japanese, and soon began to push down the failure rates. We also went to every available conference and seminar on reliability, searching for better techniques. We innovated our own improvements and finally reached the 10X goal in 1989.
On May 16, 1989 we announced a free, 5-year warranty.
Our competitors said it wasn’t free; HP meant high priced.
So we made it retroactive, which quieted the competition.
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