This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on November 2, 2015.

SAN FRANCISCO: Seventy-seven years after Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began tinkering in a Palo Alto garage, the company that became the foundation of Silicon Valley is breaking up.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) yesterday officially split into two entities, opening a new chapter for the US technology legend.

The computer colossus is being divided into HP Enterprise, focusing on software and business services, and HP Inc, which keeps the personal computer (PC) and printer operations.

The aim is to develop a sharper focus both for the enterprise unit and the PC-printer division that made it a household name but has become fiercely competitive and less lucrative in recent years.

The new structure splits off the computer arm that became for a time the world’s biggest PC maker, following HP’s 2002 acquisition of Compaq.

The controversial deal was engineered by then chief executive Carly Fiorina — now running for the Republican nomination for president.

Tom Bittman, an analyst at research firm Gartner, said the current tech landscape calls for this approach, with flexibility more important than size.

“The market right now needs to move in this kind of direction, more focused and more nimble than in [the] Carly Fiorina era, when competing with IBM, not Amazon, was critical,” Bittman told AFP.

It remains to be seen whether the break-up will revitalise a company that has been in a defensive, restructuring mode for several years as it lost ground to rivals like Chinese PC maker Lenovo, and as the tech sector’s leadership was taken over by mobile-focused Apple and Google. — AFP