Bradley breaking news

This just came across the wire... gosh, after my post about HP declining the HP Pavilion naming rights for the San Jose stadium (and Bradley being the "sports buff" at HP), was that a precursor signal?  Some of you may recall that Bradley was the CEO at Palm until 2005; Hurd brought him to HP to galvanize PCs and separate them from printers.  Bradley's style was very compatible with Hurd, and his tenure with PCs was viewed as largely successful for the first three years.  He also engineered the later purchase of Palm from the VC firm who bought it after he had left.   Jon Rubinstein (see last week's post re Jon's lament) was brought in by the new VC team to replace Bradley's open post.

Of late, of course, the PC business (and printers) has been desultory or worse.  Maybe it caught up with Bradley?  

Jun 18, 2013, 11:42am PDT

No CEO post for Bradley, here's what HP shakeup may mean

HP's Todd Bradley has a new job, just not the one anyone was expecting for him.

Cromwell Schubarth

Senior Technology Reporter-Silicon Valley Business Journal

Hewlett-Packard honcho Todd Bradley has a new job, but not as a CEO despite persistent talk in recent years that would be his next move.

HP CEO Meg Whitman announced on Tuesday that Bradley, the head of the tech giant's biggest unit, is becoming executive vice president for strategic growth initiatives.

That's the kind of title one usually gets when you are being moved out of the mainstream and is a far cry from the positions he has been rumored to be in line for in recent years. Amid the turmoil at the top of HP, Bradley has come up several times as a possible CEO there. He was also reportedly offered and turned down an heir apparent role at Intel and most recently was rumored as a potential CEO at Dell.

But now his job will be to improve HP's business in China and Asia, where it has been challenged by Lenovo since that Chinese company bought IBM's PC business several years ago.

He will also be in charge of building up HP's network of resellers, where relationships have reportedly been frayed by several years of turmoil and uncertainty.

Big jobs, but again not the kind of thing you might expect a 54-year-old executive with bigger ambitions to stay with for a long time.

Bradley is credited with building HP's PC and printer businesses into No. 1 positions since he left as CEO of PalmOne, mobile computing pioneer Palm's hardware unit in 2005. But PC sales have been in a steady decline and printers are growing less relevant, as well.

It was expected that Bradley would be CEO of that unit when ousted CEO Leo Apothekerannounced plans to sell or split off PCs and printers.

Now relative newcomer Dion Weisler, who has been in charge of printers and PCs in Asia-pacific and Japan since lat in 2011, will run the company's entire printer and PC business. He had been a top exec at Lenovo before that.

And Bradley will work on strategy and report to Whitman, at least for now.

Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1823.