Stating the obvious doesn’t seem to be a problem for HP CEO Meg Whitman. Barron’s reports that Whitman told analysts on Wednesday that HP has been “a little late to the game” when it comes to making the transition to mobile computing and said that Microsoft and Intel have gone from being longtime partners to “outright competitors.” She also said the company was moving very aggressively to diversify beyond its traditional PC business, which looks more and more like a dead end for the company.
“Wintel-based devices are being aggressively displaced by ARM-based PCs and mobile devices,” she said. “PCs are declining while tablets are growing… Current long-running partners such as Intel and Microsoft are becoming outright competitors.”
Whitman hasn’t been afraid of delivering blunt messages about HP’s competitive position during her tenure as CEO. Last year she said that HP’s laptops still felt like “bricks” and that the company needed to learn how to make lighter and thinner computers such as Apple’s MacBook Air. The result of this goading has been that HP has become more willing to devote resources to Android tablets and Chromebooks, including the super-thin HP Chromebook 11 that it revealed earlier this week.
