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Investors and analysts kept a surprisingly respectful tone while they gently held (now) HP executive chairman, Ray Lane’s and (now) president & CEO, Meg Whitman’s feet to the fire on last night’s concall (see HP and Apotheker). The new top team were quizzed as to the seemingly indecent haste to appoint Whitman as permanent (if there is now any real meaning to the word at HP) CEO, and indeed questioned whether the entire board was ‘fit for purpose’ given the debacles over the past few years.
Ray Lane, who movingly ‘spoke from the heart’ (perhaps because there was a momentary disconnect from the brain), assured the herd that there was no need for an external CEO search as Whitman was so obviously the right person for the job. Well, obvious to him, anyway.
Lane and Whitman paid perfunctory lip service to Leo, “appreciating his efforts” on his strategic changes, and then said that the big one – the divestment of the PC business – may be ‘revised’. However, it seems very unlikely that HP’s proposed acquisition of Autonomy would be back-tracked (and you all know what we think about that one!).
But the big message from Lane and Whitman (other than the fact that it would be hard to find a better double-act to run HP on the planet) was to “underscore our commitment to the hardware business”, banishing the word ‘transformation’ (in the context of the Autonomy deal) from the HP lexicon.
Unfortunately Lane-Whitman didn’t seem to make a similar commitment to HP’s services business.
“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar” (Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene II)
