HP stands for _____?

LATimes

Hurd is known for cost cutting and for turning around NCR Corp., where he was CEO and which like HP has several technology divisions. As an outsider, analysts say, Hurd might be willing to take the drastic measures that HP's critics advocate. His predecessor, Carly Fiorina, also came from outside HP. She was ousted by the board in February for failing to revive the company's profit and stock price.

Hurd "is a guy who's going to do things from a business perspective and try to accommodate and keep as much of the culture as possible," said Harry Blount, an analyst with Lehman Bros. in San Francisco. "But to keep HP truly competitive against his competitors, he needs to get the organization right."

Analysts said HP, in essence, would have to choose which businesses matter, especially as it works to protect its core printer franchise against fast-charging rivals such as Dell Inc.

Mark Stahlman of Caris & Co. in New York said he expected those areas to include server computers that run corporate networks; televisions, a business HP is just beginning to enter; and products and services for the so-called digital living room, which the company has made a cornerstone of its consumer strategy.

"They haven't been able to carry the strategy through to the organization, which I believe is the reason they hired Mark Hurd," Stahlman said. "Carly refused to do it. She wanted to keep strategy in an ivory tower."

Well, the so-called "digital living room" is really HP bundling and reselling tech from guys like Apple, MSFT, Seagate, etc and so on. Maybe HP: Invent is really HP: Pro-formate? Here's an idea: Take Vannevar Bush's Memex and make it happen, quasi-creepy as that thought may be:

Michael Hiltzik, LAT:

'I think we've got the Memex dream down," Gordon Bell told me when I greeted him at Microsoft Corp.'s downtown San Francisco laboratory.

To technology aficionados his allusion would be instantly recognizable. "Memex" was a machine envisioned by Vannevar Bush, Franklin D. Roosevelt's science advisor, in a prophetic 1945 Atlantic Monthly article titled, "As We May Think." The device was an intriguing preconception of today's personal computer in which, as Bush wrote, "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications" for easy retrieval through a form of indexing based on the associative properties of the human mind.

Bell's version, embodied in a system known as MyLifeBits (soon to be formally renamed "Memex") aims at nothing less than creating a digital archive of a person's entire life...

Geez, and I thought that powder-blue senior pitcure tuxedo made me want to cringe.