Industry Expert Blogs

A year ago, Meg Whitman decided it was time to venture back into the business world by grabbing onto the HP CEO baton from a badly wounded Leo Apotheker. What for? My best guess is to enter the Pantheon of Great Turnaround CEOs of failing companies, best exemplified by the work of Lou Gerstner with IBM in the early 1990s. It comes too late though, as the $120B company has none of the core legacy that IBM had with mainframes that ultimately allows a company to rise from the ashes. HP along with Dell and the other PC vendors are all locked into a business model whose fate is determined by others. It wasn’t supposed to be this way when the decision was made in the 1990s to cast off Bill and Dave’s legacy for a promise of dominating Computing from Big Iron all the way down to PCs. Many people forget, that HP once designed and built RISC processors in their own leading edge fabs. The surrender of this capability, ironically was not supposed to open them up to their eventual destruction at the hands of system competitors who would build their own (i.e. Apple and Samsung).

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