“I’m not baffled by the choice” of Leo Apotheker as Hewlett-Packard’s new CEO, said Sascha Segan in PCMag.com. “I’m depressed.” HP was once serious about challenging Apple in consumer electronics, and its recent purchase of Palm suggested that HP was ready to take on the iPhone. But Apotheker’s interest in the consumer market appears to be “a flat zero.” A former CEO of German software maker SAP, “he spent 20 years selling hideously boring but profitable enterprise software,” which corporations use to link operations. He’s hardly the guy to steer HP back toward the consumer after his predecessor, Mark Hurd, relentlessly steered it away.
The point of hiring Apotheker, said Stephanie Overby in CIO.com, is that his “résumé screams software.” In choosing him, HP is betting that world-class software will give HP’s hardware a decisive advantage. True, he might not have much feel for the consumer market, but he knows corporate customers—and they’re more profitable than consumers, anyway. Combine HP’s unquestioned skill at making hardware with Apotheker’s proven ability to sell software to some of the world’s biggest companies, and you might get “the best of both worlds.”
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