I think he agrees with you. The solution he has come up with is to turn HP into a company he is the right CEO for. No hardware, more ERP type software. Shades of SAP which is where he was before HP.

Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.

Another CEO did the same thing. Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple. Jobs brought in his own team and basically just kept the Apple name. Seems to be working so far.

On the other hand, Jobs had founded the corp, had an almost mythical aura and the previous executive team had spent a decade fucking up Apple.

Oh, and he refocused the company on its original core business, where Apotheker is moving HP away from its historical roots.

HP no longer has historical roots, it spun them off into Agilent some time ago.

yeah, that seems to be the common analysis of the move: the founder's vision was abandoned a while ago, they're just setting fire to the remnants junking the yard.

The difference is when Jobs started NeXT it was a new iteration of the Apple idea, so when he brought that team in it was a new heart for the old body, with the same DNA. There's literally no available comparison to that situation, and nothing remotely to do with HPs situation today.

He's awful. He got quietly shuffled out of SAP after 18 months as CEO. If you're trying to innovate in a technology company, he's definitely not the person to do so.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but that's only a small piece of the pie.

Because the person buying the software isn't the person using the software.

This one line sums up all the issues of the Enterprise and Health care information technology and everything that is broken about it.

Startupreneurs who are looking to white-label to enterprise, STOP. dont waste your time.

I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.

And the person writing the software never uses it either. The definitive recipe for shitty enterprise apps the world over.

And hardly anyone ever sees it in action, so it's harder and costlier to attract talented developers.

"The question is what software do they have to sell?"

A few years ago, under Mark Hurd, they bought EDS and Mercury for that.

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

Never heard of their software? Be glad.

Apotheker has a vision. His specialty is to steer companies away from the consumer market and to make them enterprise oriented. I have to believe that this was the game plan when he was hired.

This sounds reasonable, and I also think it is better for HP to just sell their hardware to enterprises and add software to create complete appliances, instead of competing with Apple in the consumer market. However, was this really the best exit he could get for Palm in the span of one year? Also, why did they buy Palm? To compete in the enterprise mobile market (which surely will be large) But then, why not sell the Touchpad to enterprises and integrate it with the software from the start? Could be an unbeatable combination. Well, let's see what happens in the next months. I know that some executives from SAP/SAP Business Objects followed him but I haven't seen any big announcement of software offerings.

I thought Ruby was running WebOS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Rubinstein

Of course, he might have been constrained by the CEO.

Nah, he got 'repositioned' a month or so ago.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110711006653/en/HP-D...

Either way they are all doing a terrible job. How long have they had webOS? Like a year and a half? How many products have they managed to ship out in that time? Like 2? Guess you can't buy your way out of incompetence.