@ikidd @cm0002 That you see very well. I know companies like this, not the HP, but many similar companies.

Most importantly, they have very strict regulations inside, who does what, who can communicate with whom. Unlikely that you would know anyone out of your direct team or department, except rare cases or if you are a really old employee there, maybe in some leading position.

If you would work at the HP, you would not even know the names of the guys who make the hostile decisions. Not only that talking with them about this would be the most serious violation, but you had no connection to them, like an outsider.

Second, in the unlikely case that you had any connection to them. There is an "internal language". That is English on the surface, but not exactly. Word compositions have different or additional meanings for them. They never say, for example, "we do not publish our driver source code". You can not say that in the internal company culture, they have no communication pattern for that. The closest what you could say, that would be some like increasing openness and user friendliness, or transparent technology or so.

If you would enforce the real meaning of the words, that would trigger defense mechanism in them. Mental and behavioral defense mechanisms. In the first layer, it simply would not be understood. A bit deeper, it would be misunderstood. Yet more deeply, they would attack you back, from behind.

Things would look exactly the same at the Apple, for example.

An evil company never declares itself evil. It only re-organizes, re-structures its moral standards. And it adapts the internal communication to that.

It feels like a nice round tax number.

It reminds me of how US companies get a tax credit of up to $200 for office bonding i.e. pizza parties. That's literally the reason they're so common... It's a tax write-off...

More likely just "our customers are going for other vendors for better support, we need to do something quickly"

Textbook example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.