Reborn and rebooted

BREAKING up is hard to do, as Neil Sedaka's 1975 hit song says. The move to cleave the US$110 billion-a-year Hewlett Packard in half in November 2015 couldn't have come lightly. The 75-year-old high-tech giant - a Silicon Valley pioneer that was a household name even before Apple Computer was born - was seen to have fallen far behind the market by the early years of this decade. Personal computers (PCs) and printers were still Hewlett Packard's main revenue drivers when selling high-tech hardware was no longer a lucrative business.

Hewlett Packard's weakness was laid bare for all to see in 2015 when global PC sales plunged almost 11 per cent from 2014, the biggest fall in the industry's history. The company's market share shrank by as much in the last three months of 2015. The future was in software and technology services, but investors thought Hewlett Packard had grown too big and fat to catch up. It was so far behind that th…