Gutting the HP legacy to make short term profit
Pros
Good culture among remaining employees Decent pay
Cons
No strategic direction Frequent layoffs No real innovation, only incremental new products Agilent used to be an amazing company, and our name used to mean Quality. We used to joke about being "fifth to market, most expensive, but giving the highest quality results." Mike McMullen was great, he somehow grew the company while improving morale AND respecting employees...but those days of the Agilent Family are gone. Now there are no real new launches, and the profits are made by CDMO parts of the company scaling up other people's innovative research. Instead of NPIs, we have new skins on old instruments ("infinity 3" "new Omnis" etc) but that's not sustainable as the market advances. Meanwhile R&D was deeply cut across the company, and other than BioVectra (CDMO), there have not been successful large acquisitions since Dako > 10 yrs ago. Biotek and Acea looked interesting and promising but they gutted R&D to cut costs and then complained about lack of growth. We used to invest in Early Stage Partner companies but stopped doing that. There's some new focus on "Software" that ignores the fact that we don't pay competitive SW salaries, and therefore, all of our SW platforms are dated and bad. All of this looks good for the near term balance sheet (we got such big savings by underinvesting and laying off the people who develop the products) but the future looks dim. Where is the new technology going to come from? I'm guessing it comes from elsewhere, and Agilent will only be a commodity producer and a CRO for other people's innovations. If you make it, maybe we can automate it or scale it up, but don't look here for anything new.