New H-P CEO aims to remake company's soul

Apotheker is reversing Hurd's emphasis on cost-cutting in a bid to improve product quality and spur homegrown research, and he's touring H-P's offices to find ways to get products to market more quickly.

Apotheker, 57, resigned as CEO of German software maker SAP AG in February 2010 amid falling sales, clashes with unions over job cuts and a price increase that vexed clients. At H-P, he has taken the helm of a company facing slowing revenue growth and accelerating competition in cloud computing, a fast-growing area of innovation that delivers software and storage via the Internet.

The company said inaccurate expense reports filed

Hurd resigned afterwards the company said inaccurate expense reports filed by him or on his behalf concealed a personal relationship with a contractor, in violation of H-P's standards of business conduct.

"I happen to know something about software," said Apotheker, who spent more than 20 years at SAP, the world's largest maker of business-application programs.

Apotheker says he as well wants to make better use of WebOS, the computer-operating system acquired last year when Hewlett-Packard purchased smart-phone maker Palm Inc. for $1.2 billion.

Starting straightway year, every one of the PCs shipped by H-P will include the ability to run WebOS to boot to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, Apotheker said.

The move is aimed at enticing software developers to create a wider range of applications that would differentiate Hewlett-Packard PCs, printers, tablets and phones from those sold by rivals.

Programmers have built more than 350,000 apps for devices made by Apple Inc. and more than 250,000 for Google Inc.'s Android Market. WebOS has 6,000 apps, according to

"Their Achilles' heel is software," said Brian Marshall, an analyst with Gleacher & Co. in San Francisco. Hewlett-Packard gets 70 percent of sales from computers, storage, networking and printers; 27 percent from providing information-innovation services; and 2.2 percent from software.

German-born Jew whose Polish parents fled the Nazis

A German-born Jew whose Polish parents fled the Nazis, Apotheker went on to run SAP, one of Germany's largest companies. At H-P, he inherits an icon of American business, begun in a garage in Palo Alto, Calif., by William Hewlett and David Packard, who used $538 in working capital, including a used drill press from Sears Roebuck.