Michigan sues Hewlett-Packard for being 5 years late on project

By Patrick Hogan  |  September 22, 2015 | 8:07pm
Latest

If you’ve ever been a few days late on a school or work assignment, relax. You’re still doing better than Hewlett-Packard.

The Michigan Secretary of State’s office announced this week they were filing a lawsuit against the computer company for failing to deliver on a modernization project that was only supposed to take five years. The project started in 2005 and, ten years later, still is not finished.

HP was supposed to move the Secretary of State’s 130 offices to a new system for processing vehicle registrations. The old system, which is still in use thanks to HP, was designed in the 1960s.

The original contract was for $49 million, and The Detroit Free Press says the state has paid more than $28 million of that and is still stuck working on the Mad Men-era system.

This isn’t the first time HP has slacked off on a state contract to modernize systems. New Mexico and Vermont pulled the plug on HP computer upgrades in 2012. California did the same in 2013, followed by New Jersey and Minnesota in 2014.

Clearly whoever agreed to all these state deals has never tried to clear out a paper-jam in an HP printer.

 
Join the discussion...