Booz Allen Hamilton
HP's PCs: The handwriting was in Léo Apotheker's resumé
August 22, 2011: 8:02 AM ETThe board sealed the fate of HP's personal systems group when it hired the CEO of SAP
What the hell happened to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last week?
The simplest explanation is the one suggested Thursday by Techcrunch's MG Siegler and picked up Sunday by Daring Fireball's John Gruber: HP's board put an enterprise software guy in charge of a low-margin PC business and a high-risk play to outflank Apple (AAPL) in smartphones and tablets. When PC sales slowed and the tablet bombed, the enterprise guy stuck a fork in both divisions and announced that he was spending $11.7 billion on a British enterprise software company nobody in America had ever heard of.
The Street didn't take it well. It lopped $16 billion off HP's market cap. By Sunday analysts were openly calling for CEO Léo Apotheker's head.
In retrospect, however, nobody who had read Apotheker's bio should have been surprised. Enterprise software is what he knows. Just look at his resume (below): 20 years at SAP (SAP) preceded by stints at Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM), EDS and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH).
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Amazon's cloud nightmare
The exact feature that was supposed to be Amazon EC2's strength -- reliability -- is what failed and brought the cloud low yesterday. Still, cloud computing isn't going anywhere.
By Dan Mitchell, contributor
FORTUNE -- The snafu at Amazon's EC2 hosting service on Thursday, which knocked several big web sites out of service, is being called a "black eye" for the cloud-computing business -- a "we told you so" moment, according to MORE
Apr 22, 2011 10:24 AM ETPosted in: Amazon EC2, Amazon.com, Booz Allen Hamilton, cloud computing, Foursquare, Michael Hussey, New York Times, PeekYou
