Bayosphere

Mercury News: One year later, `HP Way’ no longer rules workplace. But some employees say that HP’s culture seems to be losing. There has been a strong feeling that many HP managers were replaced with Compaq managers, purely to inject new blood into the company and to implement their more aggressive, faster-moving ways.

It’s no surprise that HP is killing off the HP Way. Carly Fiorina has made it clear that she considers it mostly a vestige of an unaffordable past.

The way HP now values its employees has changed fundamentally. The rough-tough Compaq culture is ascending, with its more Darwinist approach to business.

Maybe there’s no choice. But it’s sad to see the demise of a Silicon Valley culture that valued people and communities as much as profits.

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Stopped yesterday at the Omni Group HQ in Seattle to chat with co-founder Wil Shipley about new and old technologies. He and his colleagues came out of the NeXT world when they formed Omni, and they’ve been among the most active and interesting in the OS X world.

I downloaded the “SneakyPeek” version of OmniWeb 4.5, which uses the core rendering engine in Apple’s Safari browser, which Apple has released for all to use. It’s innovative, but Shipley says just wait for version 5.0.

The latest beta of Safari seems fairly strong, by the way. It has tabbed browsing, a necessity in today’s world, but doesn’t handle popups with anything like the flexibility you find in Mozilla (or OmniWeb, which can be configured to open JavaScript windows only if you deliberately click on something in the original screen).

Nice to see progress in this area. Now if only someone would do a browser that used weblog tools to create serious WYSIWYG blog editing, I’d be thrilled.

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April 15 is no one’s favorite day, partly because we have such a screwed-up tax system. Naturally, President Bush and his allies in Congress are angling to make things worse, with the most reckless fiscal policy in a long, long time and a determination to make life even easier for the wealthy at everyone else’s expense.

More in my Sunday column.

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I’m heading to Seattle to speak on a panel Monday at the Internet Law Institute meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General, the organization of top state law enforcement officials. More on that tomorrow.

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CNet: Report criticizes Google’s porn filters. Google argues that SafeSearch is designed to err on the side of caution.

Caution? According to Ben Edelman’s detailed report, caution includes wiping out access to such things as presidential candidates’ campaign sites.

Google needs to think hard about what it’s doing here. Then it needs to fix what’s broken, or risk losing its considerable goodwill in the Net community.

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