I'm not sure what's worse, the HP earning calls where Meg Whitman just reports progress on HP's slow slide into becoming Dell, or the ones where she drops bombshells like saying Autonomy messed with its books before HP purchased it. Either way, it's a melodrama that mostly confirms the opinion many investors have long held: The road to profitability will lead to a much smaller company -- and one that hopefully has some focus.

And not just any focus, either. A smaller HP must find a niche to own, much as IBM hung its hat on high-end services and consulting. But that type of deliberation doesn't seem to be happening. At one time, HP talked about secure, cloud-based information management. Company officials actually referred to it as "anytime, anywhere access," but they were, at least in part, implying cloud. That effort would be led by Autonomy, bolstered by technology from ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint, and further enabled by HP services, networking, servers and storage. Read full story on InformationWeek


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