Having worked on the Proliant support team in the past, I could possibly see where Bitt had some bad experiences. Post merger, Carly, or some other high end HP exec really didn't like how much the support division was costing the company. They started outsourcing enterprise non contract support, and later even started doing so on the contract side a bit. This was also around the time when the company was under a pay freeze policy, including for promotions.

The combination of those two things was disastrous. Employees were either being culled in layoffs, or leaving due to the lack of being able to earn more money as they took on tougher positions. They did back off on the outsourcing on contracts when several high profile customers were complaining. But the warranty only support took a big hit.

Compaq took enterprise support very seriously when I started. All people on the frontline phone support had 9 weeks of in depth hands on training time. Then about 2 weeks of shadowing on the call floor. I'm not sure how drastically this changed once the company was HP, as we never hired any new support engineers at the site I worked at.