“Last year was an interesting one, but in the last six months since, it’s all been positive news,” Gillai said in an interview on Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit.

Saar Gillai, Hewlett-Packard senior VP of converged cloud

During that timeframe HP brought its public cloud online  and  the compute, block store and object store subsystems are all broadly available. This week, it announced new “cloud bursting” capabilities for HP CloudSystem and that it had integrated its 3Par fibre-channel storage with OpenStack.

As for actual customer adoption of that HP public cloud? The company will only put the number at “thousands.”  And, Gillai reaffirmed that the company will make OpenStack available on all its major platforms, which in theory would include its glitzy new Project Moonshot servers. OpenStack is HP’s operating system for cloud, is the message.

But HP’s version of OpenStack will be  “hardened for the enterprise” vision and backed by enterprise-class SLAs, a stance that echoes what Zorawar Biri Singh, HP’s last cloud chief, told GigaOM a few months ago.

Here’s the thing: despite HP’s dramatic ups and downs of the past two years, it has lots of long-standing enterprise accounts that really would prefer not to defect to another vendor at this stage. “Our customers want us to succeed,” Gillai maintained. And many of these companies have barely tested cloud deployments.

The Amazon Web Services question

Many of those same customers are no doubt using Amazon Web Services for some storage or running non-mission critical workloads, but Gillai said AWS has a long way to go to become a true enterprise technology provider.

“Enterprise customers require business continuity assurances, they want someone to call and interact with,” he said. “Sure, AWS  is going after the enterprise, but it’s not that simple. You need feet on the street and you need account management. There’s a reason it takes companies time to build all that. You need a brand and you need trust.”

And, he said, echoing a now familiar theme, once big companies get a true picture of how much it costs to run some loads in AWS, they may find it cheaper to bring them into their own data centers or use a private cloud deployment instead. That’s where AWS may find some tough going, despite its moves to build bridges between AWS and private clouds.

Given AWS’s momentum, and the full court press it’s made on enterprise sales, this may be wishful thinking but, as many GigaOM commenters have pointed out, the percentage of total IT spend going to cloud now is pretty damn small. These are early days.

OpenStack consolidation to come

Unlike other OpenStackers at the show, Gillai expects there to be a shakeout of OpenStack vendors over time. “If all you’re doing is [an OpenStack] distribution, that’s not a business. I can build a distro right now for a one-server system, it’s a lot harder when you’re dealing with networked systems,” he said.

This is one big reason OpenStack will not follow the Linux model, he said: “The question is, how do you make money?  Linux is all about your compute system with some drivers — it’s an operating system. OpenStack is a plug-in architecture with myriad plug-ins and that can take you from one node to a million. To certify and install it can be miles more complicated than with Linux, so you need another business model.”

Companies that run public clouds — like, say HP — will be the experts with lots of insight, he said. “I would be wary of getting OpenStack distribution from someone who doesn’t run it on a huge cloud.”

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The Slate7 is HP’s new entry-level tablet, a cheap-ish 7-inch Android device that has two main selling points: its shell is stainless steel, and it features Beats Audio, just as the TouchPad did. The choice of materials means the Slate7 is not the lightest in its class – at 368g, it outweighs the 340g Nexus 7 and 308g iPad mini — although it is lighter than the 395g 7-inch Kindle Fire HD. As for Beats Audio, well, it should produce decent bass.

The tablet runs on an ARM dual-core 1.6GHz processor and has a 3-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front for Hangouts and Skype There’s no word yet on screen resolution or the possibility of a mobile-broadband-equipped version – the initial announcement is of a Wi-Fi-only affair that will go on sale in “selected” countries in the EU, Middle East and Africa for €149 ($196).

Multi-platform strategy

HP’s mobility chief, Alberto Torres, joined the company in September last year – he was previously in charge of the MeeGo project at Nokia. In a statement today, he laid out HP’s new mobility strategy pretty plainly:

”To address the growing interest in tablets among consumers and businesses alike, HP will offer a range of form factors, leveraging an array of operating systems. Our new HP Slate7 on Android represents a compelling entry point for consumers, while our ground-breaking, business- ready HP ElitePad on Windows 8 is ideal for enterprises and governments.”

Also taking into account HP’s Pavilion Chromebook and its Envy X2 Windows 8 tablet, it is clear that HP is hedging its bets in both the tablet and notebook spaces. A major question now is which platform the company chooses for its smartphone strategy, which CEO Meg Whitman hinted at last year.

And across all these platforms, we still need to see what HP’s big differentiators will be. Hopefully I will get my hands on the Slate7 at Mobile World Congress in the coming days, so we can see if HP is counting on style alone to set itself apart from the plethora of 7-inch rivals.

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Revenue for commercial or business PCs fell 4 percent, and for consumer machines it was off 13 percent, but Whitman saw the bright side.

“Against the backdrop of overall PC market contraction in the fourth calendar quarter, we gained 1.4 points of market share in PCs over the prior year, including a 4.6 point gain in the U.S.,” Whitman said Thursday night. She also cited the company’s new EliteBook Revolve convertible, ElitePad 900 as well as its new Google Chrome-based notebook as reason for optimism going forward.

After Whitman’s opening remarks, Raymond James analyst Brian Alexander pressed her on PSG, noting that its profits were off  50 percent year over year.

“We are committed to this business,” Whitman said in response. “We are going to compete on differentiation, whether that is form factors, increased focus on mobility, a multi-OS strategy, multi-chip strategy, frankly relevant to various industries, we’ve got great response to our ElitePad 900 that can be customized by industry and then services.”

She also acknowledged that pricing will be “problematic and quite competitive … but we think we can manage that.”

HP has wavered on whether it would keep or jettison various businesses over the past year. Its proxy statement in December noted that the company would consider selling off or divesting some businesses as needed. So, given that the company had broached — then retracted a possible PC business spin-off once before — that got tongues wagging again.

This news comes just weeks after PC and server rival Dell announced plans to go private – news which prompted HP to put out its own comments inviting Dell’s customers to avoid the uncertainty of a leveraged buyout and jump ship to Hewlett-Packard.

Given Whitman’s statement of support for this margin-stressed business unit, HP is either in it for the foreseeable future, or talking it up to enhance its value to a potential suitor. Hey, you’ve got to wonder, right?

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A lot is being said and a lot will be said about Michael Dell’s decision to take the company he started in 1984 in his college dorm room private (with some cash from Silver Lake Partners, Microsoft and other investors.)

People are also going to point out that karma is a bitch. Others will say that the cloud will prove to be the ultimate undoing of Dell, and that mobile is Roundrock, Texas-based company’s Achilles heel. I would agree with some if not all of those assessments. I would also be hard pressed to ignore the harsh reality of tech-land — turnarounds rarely turn.

And despite knowing all that, I cannot help but applaud Michael Dell, the founder.

Dell is doing what few people do — putting both his reputation and his fortune on the line in order to save and perhaps revive the company with whom his name and legacy will always be intertwined. This is high-stakes poker: he is putting millions of dollars of his own money in addition to investment from his investment firm, MSD Capital, on top of kicking in his stake in Dell.

He doesn’t need to do any of this. If someone else made the very same offer he is making for the company, he stands to be a few billion dollars richer. Dell is filthy rich and his empire is spread wide and far. There is a lot he can do with his time — politics for example. (If HP alums Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman can think about political careers, why not Michael as governor of Texas.) The fact is that the next three to four years are going to be hell for Dell.

While the company has made some bets on cloud technologies, and there are ways (as Derrick Harris spells out in his article) out of this gloom, Dell is not on the sunny side of the street by any means. The big infrastructure buyers like Google and Facebook are looking to upend the server business. The battle for Dell is not just Lenovo and Hewlett Packard, but it is also Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco and Apple.

This is Dell’s Battle of Britain. This could be his finest hour or it could be him and his ego, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s last stand against the Bolivian army. Who knows.

So why do it? My explanation — you don’t really have a rational choice, so you make an emotional choice. As a founder whose name adorns the shingle outside the door, Dell is playing a high stakes poker to literally save his good name. Just the idea that some faceless Asian company would own “Dell” the brand and his name is anathema.

Every so often people say that its not personal, its business. Nonsense! It is always personal and it will always be personal. If you spend your lifetime nurturing and growing a startup, it is nothing but personal. Outsiders will never understand — for a founder, failure, defeat and ignominy are always personal, just as success and fame. For founders, our identities are intertwined with the companies.

Think of it this way — when you start a company and spend about 15 hours a day on the company, that is more time you spend with your family. I have more memories of my startup than I have of my own life. I can’t remember a single birthday over past seven years, but I can tell you who said what and when and why. And that is just us, a tiny little company. That is why I disagree with the theory offered up by the otherwise admirable Ashlee Vance at BusinessWeek on why Dell is doing what he is doing:

The worst-case scenario for Michael Dell would have occurred if an activist shareholder had gotten into the mix. Dell would have faced the prospect of being kicked out of the company that bears his name.  I’m certain this is why Dell went private. Dell, Silver Lake, and Microsoft get a company that pumps out enough cash to keep all parties happy, while Michael Dell shields himself from being berated by analysts, investors, and the media. Best of all, he gets to keep his company.

Admittedly, my explanation is tinged with bias of a founder whose name hangs on the door of his shop. And yes, it is a bit of an emotional explanation, but I get it.

And that is why I want to applaud Dell and welcome him back to the founder fold — this is where it starts. Good luck… for you’ll need heaps of it on your mission impossible.

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However the story has more hedges than an English estate. From the story:

The HP directors have discussed the details of a possible breakup scenario, but also the merits of the company staying whole, since a recovery seems to be slowly taking hold and its share price has gained steam since it fell below $12 last November, the people added. In January, the stock went above $17 and has been trading around $16.50 in recent days.

There is no overt pressure to break up HP—whose divisions include units selling computers, corporate servers and services—and no final decision has been made, the people said.

HP declined to comment on the possibly of a breakup, and the Quartz story, when I reached out for comment. However, the company (and its board) is probably as muddled as the story. With Meg Whitman as its third CEO in three years, HP faces a market crisis on top of a leadership crisis. The number of problems HP has are complicated and numerous, so its no wonder the board is unsure of how to best create “the most shareholder value.”

I can barely wrap my head around it. Let’s start with a bulleted list:

• It purchased Autonomy, for a whopping $10.2 billion and late year recognized it overpaid. So it sued Autonomy for accounting fraud.
• It has seen its cloud strategy coalesce and dissipate like so much mist over a succession of years. It’s most recent cloud chief left just last month.
• Meanwhile the emergence of other cloud providers, and their disdain for HP’s hardware has led to analysts to question the viability of HP’s hardware business over the long term. The same questions loom for the printing business in a world going digital.
• On the consumer side it missed the boat on mobile, much like its rival Dell, and has since failed on the smartphone (It bought PALM!) and has an inconsistent mobile strategy.

But as the board looks at HP’s future it’s likely eyeing Dell’s decision to go private today as a huge data point to consider. There many similarities between both companies in terms of the challenges to their hardware businesses, and the Dell transaction now leaves the company free to pursue businesses that might cannibalize existing server sales for the sake of getting in on the high growth scale out web market. I believe that Dell will use the freedom it has as a private company to come back as a player in the new infrastructure world. I’m not sure I have much faith in HP.

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Fiorina led HP from 2000 to 2005 where she engineered the buyout of Compaq and was deemed by one publication as one of the 20 worst CEOs of all time.

In 2008, she was economic advisor to Republican presidential Candidate John McCain’s failed presidential bid; two years later she she ran and lost a US senatorial campaign in California to incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer.

There was quite a bit of commentary on Twitter, much of it negative:

#CarlyFiorina who started HP on its death spiral after buying Compaq, says private sector spends smarter than public sector #ThisWeek—
Eric (@diggaduh) February 03, 2013

Remember the last time Carly Fiorina said anything factual or important? Me Neither. #ThisWeek—
Eric (@diggaduh) February 03, 2013

It's nice to see Carly Fiorina on morning talk shows where she's harmless rather than in a boardroom where she can do some serious damage.—
David Poole (@linuxlizard) February 03, 2013

But Ms. Fiorina did have her defenders as well:

Me too, I re-read Tough Choices recently…strong leader! “@amyjane12: Carly Fiorina looks fantastic on "This Week." I remain a big fan.”—
Gabriela Dow (@GabrielaDow) February 03, 2013

carly? liking what you said about closing loop holes and simplification of tax code. hopefully the electeds will act to do this #thisweek—
Cheryl Mann (@NewVentureMktg) February 03, 2013

The resurgence of Ms. Fiorina was the topic of discussion at my house later Sunday where another tech reporter said a big part of HP’s current problems could stem from the fact that two of its last three non-interim CEOs  – Fiorina and current CEO Meg Whitman — are would-be politicians. Whitman, became CEO of HP in September, 2011 lost her $160 million campaign for governor of California to Jerry Gerry Brown in 2010.

“Say what you want about [former IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner. He was a businessman and wasn’t off running for something.” And the respective fortunes of HP and IBM could not be more different.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Gage Skidmore

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The news muddies HP’s already unclear cloud situation, although Singh’s departure is not all that surprising. He was recruited out of IBM two years ago by HP’s then-CEO Leo Apotheker. Apotheker himself was axed by HP less than a year into his tenure, replaced by current CEO Meg Whitman.

Last September, citing an internal memo, CRN reported that HP had formed a Converged Cloud business unit under the leadership of SVP Saar Gillai, who reported to Singh. Last week, AllThingsD re-reported  the formation of that group, but said Gillai reported to HP COO Bill Veghte. There was no mention of Singh.

Updated at 6:52 a.m. January 17: An HP spokeswoman emailed this statement:

“HP remains committed to our Converged Cloud portfolio. In particular, HP Cloud Services is critical to HP’s efforts to deliver superior public cloud infrastructure, services and solutions to our customers. Roger Levy, vice president, Technology and Customer Operations of HP Cloud Services, will serve as the interim leader for HP Cloud Services. The company thanks Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh for his passion and commitment to drive our public cloud vision and wish him well.”

She also confirmed the AllThingsD report, saying that HP  announced the formation of a “pan-HP organization dedicated to overseeing the company’s full range of HP Converged Cloud offerings” last week and promoted Saar Gillai to Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Converged Cloud.

HP, which could not be reached for comment, has been hindered by bigger issues around its costly Autonomy acquisition and plateauing PC-and-server business, and has struggled to make its vision of enterprise-class cloud heard above the competition. In an interview last year, Singh told me the company could differentiate itself from other public and private cloud providers by offering the types of high-level and specific service level agreements (SLAs) that Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers do not.

It’s easy to write HP off after all its management chaos and poorly handled acquisitions. In its proxy statement last month, the company reopened the possibility of selling off business units. Since then, speculation has amped up that it might even sell off Autonomy – which it bought in 2011 for more than $11 billion — and Enterprise Services unit, which grew out of its 2008 $13.9 billion buyout of EDS. But, the company still has many, many large, enterprise accounts, many of which have barely tested the cloud computing scenario. If it gets its act together any time soon, those companies may stay with the program. If not … well that’s the multi-billion-dollar question.

This story was updated at 6:52 a.m. with comments from HP.

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If you’re an Amazon devotee you have to hope this honor isn’t the equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover jinx because as successful as Amazon is — in online retail, in publishing, and in cloud infrastructure services — it faces very big challenges.

For one thing, the sales tax advantage Amazon’s retail business has enjoyed for 16 years is evaporating as more states are forcing it to charge sales taxes on in-state purchases. That could erase some of its traditional advantages over brick-and-mortar stores.

And, Amazon Web Services, the company’s giant IT infrastructure business, faces growing competition as well from players like Rackspace, IBM, VMware, Joyent, SoftLayer and others. In addition, at a time when AWS is trying to lure more enterprise workloads, it’s seen its share of embarrassing snafus including an issue at its US-East data center on Christmas Eve which brought down Netflix streaming video. Netflix is both a big Amazon customer and a rival to Amazon Prime Instant Video service.

Perhaps most worrisome for Amazon is that Google, the one company that many people say can challenge AWS on pure scale, appears to be serious about competing in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) fray.

But back to the list: Bezos rose to the No. 2 spot on HBR’s roster this year, from No. 7 in 2010. According to the authors:

“Under his leadership, the company delivered industry-adjusted shareholder returns of 12,266% and saw its value increase by $111 billion. In recent years the online retailer has expanded aggressively into new segments such as cloud-based computing services, while working to get the most out of the markets it already occupies. Its revenue growth shows no signs of slowing: Sales increased by 40% in 2011.”

The authors acknowledge that Bezos, who prioritizes consumers over shareholders, “vexes” Wall Street at times. (No kidding, take a look at all the “dump Amazon” posts on Seeking Alpha), but that Amazon, the online-retail-giant-now-IT-services-provider, has done well by long-term investors. And, long-term thinking is something Bezos talks up a lot, including last month at the AWS: Reinvent event in Las Vegas, and is also a focus of the HBR Top CEO list.

Another interesting tidbit from this year’s list: Meg Whitman, the embattled CEO of Hewlett-Packard is the top-ranked female CEO, coming in No. 9 out of 100 overall.

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Apple and the horrible, no good, very bad Maps app

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps Tumblr

The September launch of the iPhone 5 was marred by the disastrous reception Apple’s new Maps app received. Parody social media accounts popped up within hours, as disappointed users complained of poor or missing location data. CEO Tim Cook felt compelled to make a public apology, and it’s thought that the episode was the last straw that caused Cook to send SVP Scott Forstall packing. To rub extra salt in the wound, Google’s own Maps app for iPhone was greeted with the Twitter equivalent of a Hallelujah chorus when it arrived last week – and was downloaded 10 million times in 48 hours. – Erica Ogg

Google’s media player that never got a chance to play

Google surprised many in June when it announced the Nexus Q, a wireless digital content player dubbed as “the first social streaming media player.” But not all surprises are good ones. The small orb-shaped device launched at an introductory price of $299, triple that of the more capable Apple TV. And aside from the high price point, the Q offered no media services save Google’s own Play store for movies, television shows and music. The unique DJ function — allowing anyone’s Android device on the same network to mix the music — was hardly enough to justify the Q, which Google suspended indefinitely in July. — Kevin C. Tofel

Facebook’s troubled IPO

The initial public offering of the world’s largest social network was supposed to be the tide that lifted all technology boats, but the IPO instead turned into a stock-market train wreck and crushed the hopes of many other tech-stock hopefuls in the process. Thanks to a combination of mismanagement by the NASDAQ stock exchange (which used a new trading system for the issue) and a misreading of the initial demand by Facebook and its brokers — which resulted in an over-supply of stock — the company’s share price tumbled by more than 50 percent in the days and weeks following the offering. The company still wound up raising more than $16 billion, but the episode gave the tech darling a black eye as far as some investors were concerned, and likely set the market for tech-stock issues back by months, if not longer. — Mathew Ingram 

Two words: HP and Autonomy

The $11.1 billion purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard may have been announced in 2011, but the enormity of the screw-up didn’t fully surface till 2012. In May, HP management booted former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, and in November the company asked authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to look into Autonomy’s accounting practices prior to the buyout. That process is ostensibly now underway. Nevertheless, after airing all this dirty laundry in the November earnings call, HP CEO Meg Whitman asserted that HP remains “100 percent committed to Autonomy.” For the record, HP took a loss of $6.85 billion for the full fiscal year ended October 31, 2012 — most of that from an $8 billion writedown related to the Autonomy business. — Barb Darrow 

Nate Silver’s an idiot and Romney wins in a landslide

Except…Nate Silver isn’t and Mitt Romney didn’t. Silver, the founder of the New York Times‘ popular FiveThirtyEight politics blog, and several other notable statisticians mathematically predicted Barack Obama’s reelection with perfect or near-perfect accuracy. Meanwhile, Karl Rove sputtered through election night on Fox News, futilely defending his prediction like a child trying to convince a teacher a dog ate his homework. Maybe there’s something to this data analysis after all. Go figure. – Derrick Harris 

Amanda Palmer crowdfunding fubar

Alt-rock fave Amanda Palmer experienced the downside of social network savviness in September after she raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund her new CD — then solicited musicians to play for free on her subsequent concert tour. Reaction was heated and Palmer quickly regrouped, saying she would pay more than beer, hugs and “merch” for the help. The alternate theory is that this was all a massive publicity stunt — in which case, it was hugely successful. (Palmer has since cancelled her 2013 tour to help a friend deal with cancer.) — Barb Darrow 

Twitter gags NBC Olympics critic

What do you when someone says mean things about your friends? You shut them up; at least, that’s what Twitter did during the London Olympics when it suspended the account of journalist Guy Adams, who tweeted snarky things about the TV coverage of Twitter’s corporate partner NBC. Twitter blamed an internal communications snafu and restored the journalist’s account two days later. Still, the incident became Twitter’s first full-blown PR crisis and a reminder of its growing shadow over our media lives. — Jeff Roberts 

The Western Mail’s caption fail

Tweeters celebrate epic #fails on an almost minute-by-minute basis. And for digital media aficionados, ye olde newspaper sub-editing and caption errors rank high on that dreary list. But there was none more epic in 2012 than Welsh newspaper the Western Mail, which committed what was labeled “the worst caption fail of all time” when it identified a photo of an airport manager, who died when the plane he was travelling in hit a mountain, with “LOL.” Although British prime minister David Cameron may think the acronym stands for “lots of love”, everyone else knows not to “laugh out loud.” The internet was not amused. Nor was Western Mail publisher Trinity Mirror, which responded, “We apologize for any offense this error may have caused.” – Robert Andrews

AT&T’s face-off over FaceTime

Trying to convince your customers, the public and your regulators that you’re just a big, cuddly carrier without an anticompetitive bone in your body? Maybe blocking a wildly popular app that happens to compete directly with your core service isn’t the best way to score points. Oh, but wait, AT&T didn’t block FaceTime over its cellular networks. You could use Apple’s video chat app to your heart’s content if you signed up for one AT&T’s (more expensive) family share plans. It’s not every day that a carrier stifles competition and jilts its customers for more money in a single brush stroke, but Ma Bell is a very efficient painter. Eventually consumer protests and the threat of the FCC involvement caused AT&T to backtrack. It offered FaceTime over cellular to more subscribers, and sheepishly claimed it was just protecting its customers from the inevitable network overload FaceTime would bring. Okay, but if AT&T’s new fangled 4G networks can’t handle video, what was the point in building them? Email and Twitter updates? — Kevin Fitchard

Bravo’s Silicon Valley startup trainwreck

Silicon Valley has been abuzz with Randi Zuckerberg’s Bravo reality show “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” which attempted to portray the craaaazy lives of startup founders and their companies in the Wild West. However, the show has been widely panned by techies and journalists in the Valley, who are obviously underwhelmed by shots of people in the pool with iPads and dialogue like ”Silicon Valley is just…balls to the wall.” Of course there’s an element of hilarity to the shenanigans associated with tech startups in the Valley, but it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s show will be the one to effectively dramatize it. And now that the final episodes are being downgraded to a 4 PM PST time slot, looks like the show’s on its way out. – Eliza Kern

J.K. Rowling’s unreadable book

Getty Images

J. K. Rowling fans who’d preordered the ebook edition of her hotly anticipated new novel, The Casual Vacancy, were in for a surprise on September 27: Thanks to improper formatting by publisher Hachette, the ebook was literally unreadable, with a choice of two type sizes — microscopic or massive. Hachette pushed out a new file later in the day, but this was one of the biggest books of the year, and in 2012 there’s no excuse for failing to test an ebook before you release it. – Laura Owen 

VeriFone copies Square’s user agreement

VeriFone launched its mobile payment acceptance system Sail to compete with Square. But it went a little too far in emulating Square when it copied big chunks of wording from Square’s user agreement. When called on it by GigaOM, VeriFone cut about a third of its user agreement out to eliminate the copied text. – Ryan Kim

So who didn’t suffer a data breach?

Shutterstock/deepspacedave

So much for consumer confidence. In 2012, several of the biggest names in tech were forced to ask for users’ forgiveness after hackers gained access to customer records. In January, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh apologized after hackers accessed names, email, billing and shipping address and scrambled passwords for potentially 24 million customers. And, in June, Yahoo, LinkedIn , Last.fm and eHarmony followed up with confessions of their own after a spate of hack attacks that compromised user passwords. In April, electronic transaction processing provider Global Payments also confirmed a data breach of 1.5 million credit cards. – Ki Mae Heussner

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The company has been through the wringer over the past 5 years, so news that the famed corporate raider might swoop in and shake up HP’s board — threaten to cut loose divisions as needed to maximize share holder value —  struck them as good news.  Especially since CEO Meg Whitman is asking them to wait out a continuing  ”multi-year” turnaround. Most shareholders have had it up to here with HP and waiting for it to get its act together.

In August, UBS analyst Steven Milunovich said HP would be worth more in pieces than whole, and before that a former CEO had floated the idea of selling off the PC business. That’s just the kind of thinking Icahn, chairman of Icahn Enterprises,  has perfected. Most recently, Icahn’s been up to his ears in Netflix, snapping up shares and lobbying for the streaming media power to put itself on the block. Before that he has taken on Motorola and other tech companies.

HPQ data by YCharts

Given the damage that HP’s board has helped inflict on the corporate brand and reputation over the past 5 years, Icahn might be just what the doctor ordered. That’s a pretty sad commentary on what was the icon of Silicon Valley.

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