Growing old, but not together

摘要

Founded by two tech guys in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, the giant created by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is remembered as Silicon Valley's original startup. In its heyday, its flair for innovation was unrivalled, and it devised technologies that shaped people's work and personal lives, from calculators to cameras to computers. Today it is regarded as a has-been: a reminder of Silicon Valley's past but not a beacon of its future. Meg Whitman, HP's boss, knows her firm needs a reset. On November 2nd it began trading as two separate companies on the New York Stock Exchange. The split creates a seller of printers and computers, called HP Inc, and a purveyor of information-technology services to businesses, called hp Enterprise. The latter is thought to have brighter long-term prospects, and that is the one that Ms Whitman will run, while hp Inc will be overseen by Dion Weisler, who previously led the firm's printer and personal-computer division in Asia. The two HPS will be behemoths, each with around $50 billion in annual revenue. "We have scale that startups could only dream about," says Ms Whitman.