WebOS was for Hurd just a fig leaf to make a future orientated impression, in reality were all the profits he made short term.
What HP needs now is focus and that is what Apotheker is doing. Some people are disappointed that it is not consumer orientated, but when you look at the "smart phone wars" this seems reasonable to me.
HP can't compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft there. Look at Nokia and Blackberry.
> What Apotheker is doing is to change HP's business altogether.
No he isn't, he's reducing its scope to the most profitable and future-proof business units. HP is one of the world's biggest enterprise software business. Yes, also before they bought Autonomy. They just also make PCs and printers and the likes, which makes consumers not know any better than "HP is a PC and printer maker".
Uh... before they decided to end it, "PCs and printers and the like" made up the majority of HP's business.
HPSD is a very tiny fraction of HP: 14000 employees out of 320000 worldwide, and that's after having bought 15 companies in barely 5 years. We're talking $3.5bn revenue, out of $126bn for the whole company. HP is a very small software business, it's a big hardware and services business: HPES, formerly EDS, makes up ~$35bn of HP's revenue
That reminds me, HP acquired an Australian company Tower Software back in 2008 [1]. That was three years ago. I think these acquisitions have paid dividends and now HP are signalling they are "all in" and put up all their chips in the software and services space.
I'm actually curious to see now if we had this same discussion when Dell started to pull back on their consumer division. It's still there, but their business offerings seem to either have been given more attention, or for whatever market reasons have dwarfed Dell consumer.
Palm was "saved" by HP, and WebOS, but where Palm was already too little too late, I think the HP aquisition didn't speed it up yet. Palm couldn't compete, and HP with their already dead Windows Mobile line of PDAs just added to the mess...
What HP needs now is focus and that is what Apotheker is doing. Some people are disappointed that it is not consumer orientated, but when you look at the "smart phone wars" this seems reasonable to me. HP can't compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft there. Look at Nokia and Blackberry.