A Month To Remember In The World Of Tech

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Huge hurdles

As with IBM when it executed a similar transition, the hurdles facing HP are immense. “HP is reforming as much more of a broad software company more like Microsoft/Oracle than even IBM,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, wrote in an 18 August email to eWEEK. “In effect, they are repeating what IBM did with Palmisano and what Apple did with Jobs in that the new HP will be optimized for their new CEO.”

But HP will have to bulk up its software and services muscle in the face of what will surely be aggressive countermoves from the likes of Oracle and IBM.

Roller coaster month

Evidently, the fates didn’t think that Google and Hewlett-Packard made August enough of a roller coaster, so they threw in a third major event: Apple CEO Steve Jobs resigning his post.

In a letter to Apple’s board of directors and employees, Jobs said he could “no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO”. He asked the board to activate a prearranged succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO—a familiar role for the latter, considering he’s stepped in as interim chief whenever Jobs’ longstanding health issues drove him to take medical leave.

At this early stage, analysts generally seem to think that Apple will more than survive its co-founder handing off the reins to Cook.

“Apple has been run by a team of very accomplished visionaries that includes Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Jonathan Ive, Scott Forestal, Ron Johnson and a host of others,” Carl Howe, an analyst with the Yankee Group, wrote in a 25 August blog posting. “Steve was [the] public face of the company, but we shouldn’t think that he was the only one making all the decisions.”

Indeed, Apple is widely expected to release its next-generation iPhone (widely dubbed the “iPhone 5” by the media) in either September or October, following that with the next iPad sometime in early 2012.

With an August this busy, people in tech might need September to recuperate.