EEVblog #1032 Part 1 - John Kenny Keysight Interview

Interview with John Kenny from Keysight
Part 1 of several more to come, released daily, stay tuned!
Patrons and forum supports will get all the videos early.

This one covers the history earlier days of HP, Bill & Dave and their philosophy, early recruitment, the design centres, cash cows, HP-Agilent-Keysight name changes. Keysight vs Danaher/GE business systems, life sciences, Carly Fiorina and renaming Hewlett Packard to HP, the Keysight Black look'n'feel change, the stock market, designing the 34460A and 34401A, system design efficiency, PCB design, FPGA vs ASIC's, price points, analog vs dsp power supply design, simulation, engineering recruitment,

John Kenny is presently the Technology and Efficiency Manager for the Electronic Instruments and Systems Group. After graduating from Lehigh University in 1978, he started in Hewlett Packard, working in our Modular Power System team, designing modular supplies, and later moved to our Lab and Industrial Power group, where he was involved in Analog, Digital and Firmware design for the next 20 years, involved in the rollout of our many programmable power products. In 2005, he moved into a new role as the Technology Manager for the System Products Group, which covered all of the GP products, including Power Products, DMMs, Function Generators, Counters and Data Acquisition products. He was directly involved in the development of the breadth of the GP products that you see in the Keysigt catalog today, with more on their way. Recently, as part of the reorganization in 2015 as part of the new Keysight, he became responsible for Technology and Efficiency management for most of our non-RF based products, as part of the EISG Center of Excellence, which includes products developed in Japan, Penang, Singapore, Loveland and Budd Lake.

Support the EEVblog through Patreon!

Donate With Bitcoin & Other Crypto Currencies!

EEVblog Amazon Store (Dave gets a cut):

[mattmanslim]

12 minutes in and this is probably the best interview you’ve done. Really enjoying it!

[BrunoPOWEEER]

This interview reminds me chatting with my father, an electronic engineer who worked for IBM for 37 years developing the most diverse technologies (IBM still hiring him for mainframe design, the youngsters are just no match in terms of experience).
Awesome interview!!!

[BrunoPOWEEER]

Priceless watching these senior electronics guys telling all these interesting details about the development of the tools we all use or were used to develop things we use today!

[heathwellsNZ]

I was constantly impressed throughout the whole interview, despite Dave offen using the word "you" that John kept saying "we" and emphasized those "unsung heroes" of the company putting in the hard yards in regard to design. Such a mild mannered genuinely nice bloke from what I can tell - I bet he has some really good people under him that appreciate the "boss" they have!
Great video Dave - thoroughly absorbing to watch and listen!

[SudosFTW]

one of the more soft-spoken people in the testing equipment industry where the voice still carries far. Thanks for the talk!

[belesiu]

I'm former H-P (started in McMinnville as an EE designing electrocardiographs) and this really brought back fond memories. I even have a small collection of H-P test equipment, some that is 40 years old and still work! Thank-you John and Dave for the interview!

[jd_flick]

Great interview, excellent questions, big thanks to John from Keysight, that was really incredible to hear some of these stories.

[aicisha]

John's laugh at the end is just hilarious! Thanks for sharing this interview with us, very interesting topics you discussed with a very mannered and diplomatic type of person.

[lawrencel]

I'll still always miss the great HP instrument days of the 80s, what a great hard cover catalog they would send out every year.

[jcddcjjcdnz]

Your best interview to date Dave and done respectfully while still getting the information. Thanks.

[Yaaayishere]

Interesting and informative, excellent stuff. Thanks.

[ricoreyes]

It's blows my mind to see someone that has such a huge breadth of knowledge yet is so humble about it.

[astoops]

I was at HP for about 7 years of John's early tenure. I came in as a Staff Engineer (which was a pre-sales position) and ended up Product marketing manager Australia for MCG (Microwave and Communications Group) and EIG (Electronic Engineering Group) - which together were part of the '01 or Instrument Group. For the first 6 weeks of our employment we travelled all over the US visiting factories as part of neophyte training - and there were lots of them.

The issue of cross funding loss making computer groups (02 and 03?) still rankles when we could have done even better keeping the money inside the instrument fold.

I remember well the classic battles between us (with the hp1740) and the Tektronix products and the wars with Wandel and Golterman and Rhode and Schwarz.

I really enjoyed the interview.

[TimeWasted]

Such a great interview and really kind of John to take time to sit down and talk so openly about his work and history.

[SergiuszRoszczyk]

Really good interview and John Kenny is giving very good look inside the company. Great to see that someone as high in management does EE stuff and design some products. It means he is not disconnected from the company inner works.

[BartAnderson_writer]

I spent 20 years with HP (computers). Why? Because so many people there were like John Kenny: honest, knowledgeable, fair. Your interview really captured the spirit of the old HP. Thank you.

[louies]

I'm 24 and i thank Dave for making these interviews with this truly awesome people.

[MichaelDebro]

Dave, great interview questions! It was especially interesting to get a peek inside the process Keysight uses to share lessons learned between their various teams and the part John plays.

[marklowe]

These interviews are gold. History generating people very interesting.

[jonnysolaris]

This is gold. Very good interview. More of this kind of thing, please. Interview people who have designed game changing products.