HP to Exit the PC Business

The Wall Street Journal reported yeaterda (Thursday) that Hewlett-Packard will spin off its global PC business. In the same time, HP announced that it is buying Autonomy for some $10 billion.

Clearly the company is moving away from low margin hardware business to services and software.

I am not worried about the PC side, we use HP heavily but just like IBM did and Lenovo ended up being a great player, I hope that the new HP PC business will do well.

The issue with HP is that unlike IBM it lacks the enterprise vendor image .. so how will HP rebuild its imgae in the enterprise .. will be interesting to watch.

In my mind IBM did that at a time where it had its mark in many IT segments outside the PC, from servers to services and from storage to software.

I do not feel HP now has the same stature IBM had when it exited the PC business. Yes it is big but let us not forget that the majority of that is printers and ink cartridges.

I think HP is confused and will struggle to grow under its new strategy

In any case, I think Lenovo did a good job and I hope that same for HP's new PC company. Without the big corp overheads they might be able to do better than when the PC business was part of HP.