Wow, did Cringely ever nail this. Right on target with the observation that Apotheker "has no history in hardware"; six months later, Apotheker has basically eliminated most of HP's hardware business. PCs, phones and tablets are gone; only printers (and hopefully HP-41CX calculators!) are left.<p>Meanwhile, Apotheker has decided to compete in the cloud space. Some company named Apple has also decided to go big in the cloud, I hear. Gee, I wonder who will win that battle.<p>HP better hope that none of the big boys decide to eat their lunch in the printer market, or they may not survive at all.
His Meg Whitman theory is nonsense. Not only does she have not a lick of hardware <i>or</i> software experience (her expertise is in consumer internet, which is different than both those businesses), if the board is really looking for somebody to "knock back brewskies with the engineers," Whitman is probably the last person in the world they'll pick. When she was at eBay she was fanatical about insulating herself from the engineering organization.
Clearly they didnt have enough money to buy SAP, hence the purchase of Autonomy.<p>If they sell the pc and printer businesses it might be possible I suppose. Or more likely a merger.
Doesn't the article actually explain why he won't get fired? It suggests that in order to survive he needs to increase HPs market share in enterprise software. Hardware decisions aside, this purchase seems to me to indicate he is doing just that. SAP may be out of their league - for now.
I doubt SAP would want to be sold. HP is in no position for a hostile takeover.<p>Their [HP] best bet, IMHO is dump this guy, sell off the consumer pc business and get back to their core.<p>How many predicted this would happened when HP merged with Compaq?.
Article loses credibility (imo) when it says Hurd was a worse hire than Fiorina. Hurd practically doubled the stock value for shareholders during his tenure and was considered an AMAZING CEO. Yeah, he disgraced HP a little with the sexual harassment issue, but that doesn't mean he wasn't an effective leader.