HP Pulling All NASA Promotional Materials
from the rewriting-history dept
It’s becoming more and more common for companies and organizations to use the easily changeable nature of the web to rewrite history as it suits them. This explains how, when the anger rose over the Total Information Awareness group, suddenly key member bios (and the scary logo) quietly disappeared from their website. So, it’s not a huge surprise when Vik writes “In the light of the Columbia crash, HP immediately went through their web site and removed any references to one of their ad capaigns that included NASA. Of particular interest is the online transcript of Carly Fiorina’s Comdex speech The current version omits any reference to NASA, while Google brings up the cached page with the following missing paragraph: ‘The challenge that NASA faces today is that they send some of the most brilliant minds in our country into space, and then they bring them back home. Obviously, there is very little room for error in that scenario. HP has the honor of being one of NASA’s technology partners ? and we see it as our job to help the astronauts get home safely, so NASA can focus on its real mission: to explore, to discover and to inspire.'” Update: Later in the day HP announced that they’ve pulled the ad campaign with the tagline: “With the help of HP’s technology and servers, the world’s space agencies can focus on getting their employees home safely.” That’s completely reasonable. However, removing a portion of the speech transcript seems like they’re rewriting history a little too much.
