Some comparisons w competitors

The following graphs show HP's 3rd Q vs all the other company 2Q reports (offset by a month, right):

For the PC world, Intel is close to a Pure Play, as is Microsoft.

Apple derives only about 20% of its revenue from computing these days (depending what you call an iPad), so I am including only the laptop and desktop computing lines for them below

IBM of course 'bailed out' of PCs, so Lenovo is a pure play.

Dell is close to a Pure Play, almost all sales are in computing, but about 25% now are Enterprise level

So this chart is year-over-year gains or losses in percent for the PC portion of the companies shown.  Microsoft had the specific 'advantage' of a one-time 'new' Windows release in this quarter.

The next chart shows year-over-year comparisons of Other revenue and profits , which for IBM is all Enterprise, and for HP includes Enterprise and Printing, while Apple includes Music and Phones and Tablets.  So, note that HP had the largest revenue shrinkage, but held the profit margins the best

The next chart compares year-over-year profit changes for both categories for the most recent quarter.
Question -- is HP doing all that badly compared to these others?  Of course not.  Would you know it from the press coverage?  Nope.  Granted, the excitement yesterday about Steve Ballmer retiring from Microsoft drew some sharp critique, and yes, some folk cheered when Paul Otellini stepped down from CEO at Intel this spring, and yes, the folk who bought Apple stock at 700+ are mad at Tim Cook for not being Steve Jobs, but all in all, HP has done much better comparatively, according to these charts, than any of the reporters seem to acknowledge.

Look at this, wouldja.  HP is second-best of six, beating all but Apple in US high-tech companies?   Or at least high-tech companies in the computing arena.  

So maybe Meg, like John Young when Packard got sore, is doing much better than we think.   With reasoning like this, I decided that Carly (remember her?) atually outperformed most of her cohort CEOs in Silicon Valley during the dot.com meltdown.  She wasn't given much credit for that by oldtimer HPers, but it was true.  And other companies -- Sun, Oracle, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft -- kept their CEOs because the troops didn't have a historic 'voice' anyway.  So much for the HP Way....

Fun and games?