HP blames poor sales on one-man sabotage

TROUBLED COMPANY Hewlett Packard earlier this week took legal action against Hock Beng Lim, a former employee, who, it claimed, was responsible for sabotaging its Superdome Unix server.

That led to poor sales of the high end server because Lim was alleged, in the law suit, to have sabotaged TPCC benchmarks.

That cost HP over one million dollars in an attempt to find why the SUperdome benchmarks were so poor, and they charge Lim with sabotaging machines and want damages and restitution from him.

HP claims that the sabotage meant it was unable to sell as many Superdomes as it expected to, but did not explain how one individual was able to wreak so much damage without being discovered.

Lim is alleged to have admitted to spoiling the tests on a repeated basis in October, and got his marching orders from HP then.

Another puzzle here is that if HP's claims are true, surely this would be a matter for criminal investigation? If HP succeeds in its claims for civil redress , HP is unlikely to recover an amount of money which would compensate for the alleged lost sales and subsequent damages, unless the individual is quite rich. µ