14 DAY TRIAL // With HP's decision to oust Leo Apotheker and put Meg Whitman in his place, there is little doubt that some things will be changing, perhaps ever reverted, though nothing official is known yet.
HP made not just one, but multiple questionable business decisions over the past couple of months, not the least of which is the one to spin off the PC business.
The outfit scrapped its webOS plans and even said it would focus on enterprise software and such.
This worked out as well as one might expect, with falling stock prices, Europe placing more orders with Acer (and others) and mild to serious shock on the part of everyone else in the IT industry.
Now, HP officially announced that Leo Apotheker would no longer serve as CEO, after just 8 months, and that Meg Whitman will take the place at the helm.
Officially, nothing was said about just what this means for the company as a whole and whether or not any of the decisions taken by Apotheker would be changed or reverted.
Nevertheless, certain people have already started to speculate on the odds of at least the PC spin-off plan being canceled.
If anything, it would definitely help in restoring the level of the stock prices, to some extent.
It also can't hurt to continue as the world's greatest supplier of personal computers, though it remains to be seen if all these happenings didn't seriously cripple HP's 2011 sales performance.
The company hopes to sell 37-38 million notebooks for the whole year and, adding desktops to that number, that leads to quite the large figure.
It all probably hinges on whether or not vendors start to again place big orders with HP, something that probably won't happen until the latter can clearly say whether or not it will stay in the PC field.
The sources behind this Digitimes report, at the very least, definitely think that ODM partners (Quanta Computer, Inventec, Wistron and Foxconn Electronics), plus users, will regain their confidence in HP if the answer to that is yes.