With all due respect, "worth more separate" is a destructive business philosophy. Unless your line of business is buying up other companies, building up value, and spinning them off.

Be that as it may, the differences between IBM and HP are stark in this instance. I-B-M: it stands for International Business Machines. Services to industry are their roots, and those roots run deep. Whether in the form of census punchcards in the 1890s, or ballistics calculations for the military, or the creation of the SABRE booking system, or the creation of relational databases... the list goes on and on and on, but the point is that IBM has never strayed from its roots. It is a business services company.

Upon hitting a rough patch in the early nineties, IBM took radical steps to revive its profits; one of these steps was the introduction and promotion of the business-oriented Thinkpad brand, which was a huge success and helped bring the firm back to health. But that did not make IBM into a PC company any more than the success of the XBox makes Microsoft a gaming company.

After nurturing the brand and working gradually over time with a Chinese supplier to offshore production, the last step (at that point almost a formality) was taken and the brand "Thinkpad" was transitioned to Lenovo ownership. IBM continues to be a company providing services to government and industry, as it has since its founding.

HP, on the other hand, is a company whose roots are in technical instrumentation and excellence in test equipment. Over time, this resulted in innovations such as the HP 9100A, the familiar tried-and-true HP calculator line, its superb printers, and so on... all outgrowths of HP's core roots in engineering and instrumentation.

The spinoff of Agilent was like HP cutting off its right arm. To add insult to injury, the company was forced to digest the Compaq acquisition at the same time. Still, the core mission of creating excellent electronic machines survived and HP is in a dominant position when it comes to providing reliable hardware in the form of computers, servers, printers from laserjets to industrial presses, networking, etc.

With that as a basis, the move into consulting services and enterprise software makes sense, but a move as unforgivably idiotic as removing the PC business would cut the very legs out from under the business, regardless of what some P/E number on a spreadsheet says. Why would an enterprise come to HP for consulting when it cannot provide a package of desktops, servers, and software? That is HP's mission as it is configured now, with Agilent gone its separate way. It makes sense to push aggressively into new territory, but not to destroy the foundation of the business at the same time.

Apotheker brought no innovative thinking to HP; he merely sought to remake the company in his image and transform it into the SAP that not even SAP would let him create. Whether or not that vision, taken in the abstract, is one worth pursuing is debatable to begin with-- but hacking HP into bits to force it to fit that vision is madness, and the plummeting stock price that you seem to measure value by reflected the market's view of this insanity.

Why is there any need to "bleed heavily"? The PC division is the foundation of the entire edifice. It may not be sexy and it may not fit your metrics-based notion of company value, but it holds up the business and it is number 1 in the world and profitable. That is a strength to leverage, not a "drag".

HP is finally in a position to do exactly what Meg Whitman said it needs to do today: focus on excellence. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d6a4b220-00d8-11e1-930b-00144feabd...