Editor's Note: This column originally ran in October 2010.
I'm hoping HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, has a scintillating personality, because his resume looks like doom for the world's largest computer maker's future in the consumer and mobile markets.
I'm not baffled by this choice: I'm depressed. On paper, Apotheker is an apparatchik from a company that has absolutely no exposure to consumers. He spent 20 years selling hideously boring but profitable enterprise software, and was then vaulted up to CEO and swiftly sacrificed on the altar of the global economic collapse.
Apotheker's seven-month tenure as SAP CEO isn't my problem. It sounds like he was basically dropped into a mess and asked to work wonders. The very fact that HP hired someone from SAP is my problem. Apotheker brings a lifetime's worth of experience selling large enterprise software and services. The stock market may not like that right now, but they may like it in the future; shifting over to a large-enterprise software and service company is, after all, what pulled IBM out of its doldrums years ago. An HP with more of an enterprise software focus could be more profitable, though it would be less interesting to consumers.
My problem is as a mobile tech analyst, as someone who's interested in innovation in the consumer market, and as someone who likes Palm. HP already had an uneasy relationship with the mobile market under Mark Hurd, the man who famously gaffed that he didn't buy Palm to make smartphones. Apotheker's consumer experience (and his apparent interest in the consumer market) is a flat zero.
This is a hideous pity because if HP fumbles it, Palm's WebOS will have become the best piece of abandonware in America. WebOS is an excellent mobile operating system and even after the flight of many staffers, HP/Palm still has a team that could pump out some products to keep the rest of the smartphone market on its toes.
I've spoken to plenty of folks at Palm who say its unit (no longer a company) has an exciting road map ahead. That's great. I want to see the products it's planning. But priorities are set at the top, and I don't see any sign that Apotheker is the kind of guy with a passion for products that actually sell on retail shelves. For Palm to succeed, it can't be a second-class citizen within its parent company.
This isn't just about Palm Pres and Pixis, though those are the products closest to my heart. This is about HP's power in the consumer desktop PC and printer markets, too. The designers behind the TouchSmart are bright, but will they stay at an HP where the CEO has no passion for their product? Here I could throw in a worry about Apotheker having no experience with the complex supply chains involved in consistently producing high-quality hardware products.
Apotheker might have a passion for some of the back-end stuff around WebOS, though. Where Apotheker and Palm's current strategy come together is in cloud services. HP has made a big bet on ePrint, which is basically printing through the cloud. WebOS is a cloud native. SAP, of course, keeps businesses running by giving them networked access to complex data.
So there's the continuity. When Hurd bought Palm, his eyes lit up when he talked about making WebOS a sort of backbone OS to tie all of HP's products and services together in the cloud. He talked about WebOS servers, printers and such. That's a bright idea, and it jibes with a theme I've been hearing from HP about it wanting to offer an "integrated solution" across all technology products.
New HP CEO Leo Apotheker's resume says that he's comfortable promoting an integrated solution for enterprises. But he needs to step up in public, quickly, and reassure us that he has any clue about the consumer market, especially (unlike Mark Hurd) in mobile.