Apotheker appears to be the fall guy for some unpopular decisions that the board wanted made anyway.
HP Board: We think we want to focus on the enterprise, but we need a hatchet man to cut the consumer stuff. We know it's going to be unpopular and destroy your reputation, and we're going to fire you for doing that. We're willing to pay you about $30M for your trouble. You in?
Apotheker: Hell, yeah.
I don't see how Leo would go rogue... he was clearly a fall guy and he might have been ok with it.
For a guy whose credibility was already in tatters, $35 mm to be a fall-guy for hire seems like a pretty good deal. I suspect he felt the same way when he signed up. I just wonder if he realized the payout was going to come so swiftly.
The kind of boat-rocking that HP is engaging in is every corporate buyers nightmare and will cause a lot of sleepless nights in the houses of people procuring their enterprise product line.
I work in this field, with lots of HP hardware, and its not even discussed.
The lifecycle of new enterprise hardware is ~3 years. No one thinks HP would leave any enterprise customer screwed in the 3 year timeframe. Even if they sold the business everyone understands you will be supported that long.
Also, companies change hands all the time in the enterprise market. We're used to it, and generally a change of ownership is greeted with a meh response.
I have at least some first-hand evidence to this fact. $DAYJOB is currently at a large enterprise service provider. We are currently buying HP switches like crazy, and I don't expect that to change. I've also been privy to some aspects of the sales process. We can go through the sales song and dance forever and ever, going deeper and deeper in to technical and business details. However, when the prospect asks about company stability, size, and governance, this always signifies they are about to ask for a formal contract.
In other words, for big, enterprise customers, stability matters. It's impossible to tell what sort of effect this will have on HP. Maybe none. But these sorts of subtle changes to reputation have a funny trajectory of their own, independent of the instantaneous news cycle. I wouldn't be surprised if IBM et al. started using the shake-up to their advantage during the sales process. We very well might see some of the after-effects in the next six months.
The way HP handles this transition will be critical. If the board looks like they are floundering, I think they will be toast. If they can keep up the appearance of running a tight ship, they'll be alright.
I don't know much about how smart a purchase Autonomy is (was?), but I do know that IBM has been acquiring data companies like crazy over the past 3 years.
This is absolutely the case. But people still don't even bother asking about HP (same as IBM & Oracle & Microsoft & SAP). It's just not an issue at all at the moment.