HP has been in the computer business from pretty much the start of it. Now after all these years, they are dropping the PC business right after they dropped what they were hoping was an iPad killing tablet, that was on the market for just 4 months, and went no where.

Hewlett-Packard To Cut 9,000 Positions
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HP has announced that they will be spinning off their computer sales division and will be acquiring Cambridge, England based software company Autonomy. Their claim to fame is database searching and is considered a leading innovator in cloud computing. So could HP getting into the cloud computing biz?

Google, Amazon, Apple and now HP it seems, are all heading to the clouds for the next step. Offering services online. Google offers laptops with it's Google Chromium OS that leverages the web and it's own services like Google Documents and Gmail. Amazon has been doing web hosting for years and is now gotten into the music business with it's Amazon Player, and Apple with it's iCloud for it's iOS devices.

When HP announced their intentions to spin off the computer business, their stock dropped 26% to it's lowest in years. Not a good sign for investors in the company. But rarely does a company take one step without knowing what the next few steps are going to be.

Some time ago, HP bought webOS from Palm Inc., which was what ran much of Palm's devices, like the Palm Pre smartphone. Combine that with the upcoming Autonomy purchase, and you get to thinking it's more software HP is getting into. But we won't know that for sure for some time. Till then, we hurry up and wait.

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