HP EYES THE FUTURE

摘要

It's after 5 p.m. on the West Coast, but Michael Capellas, just in from Houston, gulps a cup of coffee to get stoked for more work. There's gray in his newly grown beard, but the 48-year-old looks energized despite a hectic schedule. For the past year, the ex-Compaq CEO, now president and No. 2 at the new Hewlett-Packard, has averaged about four days a month at his old digs in Texas, spending the rest of his time either at HP's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters or trotting the globe, meeting with employees, tech-industry allies, and "a ton of customers." Those customers will need plenty of personal attention from the top if the new HP is to succeed. It's been exactly a year since Hewlett-Packard and Compaq agreed to the biggest―and perhaps most contentious―merger in computer-industry history. HP narrowly won an eight-month fight to get shareholders' approval for the deal. The task now facing Capellas, CEO Carly Fiorina, and the rest of the company could make that battle look like a playground spat. HP is betting that business computing is undergoing a major technical shift, moving from the RISC architecture that has defined high-end computing for the last decade to systems based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip, co-designed by HP. The new company needs to prove to its business customers that it can be trusted to lead the way.