Friends,
News has come down today that newish Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, in a financial call today, killed the company’s PC and mobile device business (not the calculators! Nooooo!) in favor of their server, software and services business. This, dear readers—even though I’m not at all bitter—comes a little late, don’t you think? Carly’s purchase of Compaq ten years ago cast my life and the lives of my dear friends into a wee little bit of turmoil, so only now I can sit back here in my Secret Alpine Laboratory and gloat a little. But only a little.
I’ve spent the day thinking about how the timeline was damaged by the HP/Compaq merger. We’ve all figured out how to deal with it in the ensuing decade, but what could we have done together if we’d been allowed to continue on an unperturbed path? It’s a fun thought experiment.
Not that I’m bitter,
– bob