What the hell? This is a serious change in direction. HP was supposed to transform its PC division into a higher margin business by more aggressively pursuing the luxury market. Also the PC division was part of the WebOS master plan by bundling it with every new PC by the end of the year.

What does this mean for HP's consumer business? What does it mean for WebOS? It seems like Leo is returning to his SAP comfort zone which looks a lot more like IBM than Apple.

Even though the article does not mention Compaq, I can see the new company inheriting the brand name instead of sharing HP. But just how much of the consumer business do they plan to abandon?

I've got a good friend who was in EDS when HP bought them, and is still there now. This move by HP doesn't surprise me at all. That company has been floundering for a while, and their management is clueless as to where to go from here.

Nice little tid-bit: HP finally ended the EDS name after a yearly financial report (I don't remember which year) showed that the EDS division was the only profitable group in HP that year, and not only that but profitable enough to offset the losses everywhere else.

HP should go back to printers and stay there. Their computers have been horrible, buying Palm AND Compaq destroyed their bottom line, and the WebOS tablet is failing miserably.

Their computers are not horrible, at least not on the higher end. But the fact of the matter is, if people are looking at higher end devices, they may lean towards a Mac. Their tablets are clearly not selling well. And on the low end, asustek is competing aggressively.

Focusing on services seems to be the way to go, I think the Opsware acquisition has done ok for them.

I don't think their computers have been horrible.

I love my HP workstation, and their blade offerings are pretty impressive

Do you mean EDS? What was EBS?

Bah yes, EDS. Fixing my post, thanks.

I can't imagine how much money is wasted by this constant acquiring, rebranding, spinning off that seems to be getting more prevalent (in the banking and tech industries especially). Is this a US-only thing, or does this occur elsewhere as well?

>money is wasted by this

somebody's wasted money is somebody else's revenue/fee/salary/bonus. Follow the money :)

That's a fair point, but as a consumer it's frustrating to know that things likely cost more because of this wasted money. Ditto for an investor, I imagine.

HP's twists and turns over the last 10+ years really reflects management-by-mbas

Where does it say anything about Compaq?

It's implied in the first sentence:

"...plans to spin off its personal-computer business, people with direct knowledge of the matter said."

And given Compaq's parent company is HP and is a personal computer manufacturer:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq

But you're right that it doesn't explicitly say.

HP made personal computers before they bought Compaq. The headline is misleading, because it implies they would continue those lines while only spinning off Compaq.

The only refs I can find on the Compaq part is that what the PC models in question are branded (e.g. "HP Compaq 4000"), but you are correct that nothing is mentioned in the article. Maybe someone has some knowledge of the internal divisions of HP?

It's an erroneous leap by the submitter. HP is spinning off their entire PC business.

Next week, Compaq will spin off Digital and they'll will relaunch their Alpha-based lineup...

One can dream...

Oh no, bring back the PDP-10 architecture, that was a nice piece of work. Of course you'd want to update it to be a 72 bit architecture instead of 36, maybe it could be the xPDP-72 product line :-)

That would be really cool. And a small gizmo you could hang off the DVI port of your LCD, attach a VT-440 keyboard and serial cable and have a VT-440.

Or a VAXStation. Or a DECStation... Would be cool.

I'd rather see them come out brandishing the palm brand, and acquiring Fon, and then going after a "home cloud" machine. We could use the "unlimited" home connections we already pay for that are often pretty good (<40ms latency, at least 2mbps up).

Watching many large companies, merge then split again, one might postulate that:

Free markets look for solution by brute force, this means that most business (both small and large) is unprofitable, but the few winners make up for everyone else and then some.

evolution.

I have a couple of friends who works at the former Compaq campus in Houston. They've been laying off former Compaq staff and outsourcing for years. The speculation has always been that they've been trying to entirely outsource the PC business to Chinese subcontractors and shut down the Houston campus completely. It's already a ghost town. This is just the other shoe dropping.

When this is all said and done, I wonder if they will change their ticker symbol from HPQ back to HWP, which is what it was before their purchase of Compaq.