It's rarely big news when a large company shuffles an executive from one corner office to another. But that changes when the promotions and demotions say something significant about the company's strategy -- and the benefits of this simple move could be huge.
That's the case with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) this week, as the old Palm platform started to suffuse throughout the enormous HP beast. Former Palm innovator Jon Rubinstein has given up hand-holding the webOS division and moved on to a prominent position in the much larger Personal Systems Group.
In his new role, Rubinstein will help HP "to provide a seamless, secure, context-aware experience across HP’s product portfolio, and to deliver innovation at unmatched scale." That's a perfect assignment for a man formerly responsible for hardware development and industrial design at Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) just as that tech icon unleashed the iMac and the first iPods upon an unsuspecting world. If Rubinstein can pull off a similar Herculean feat at HP, the Personal Systems division would be just the place to do it.
Of course, Rubinstein was also CEO of the failed Palm business, so letting him move on to more creative work while replacing him with a proven business mogul is probably a good idea. So HP is basically swapping his duties with those of former Personal Systems chief Stephen DeWitt, responsible for making HP the leading maker of computer systems in the world ahead of Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), Acer, and Lenovo.
Under DeWitt's leadership, HP-branded phones could make a splash in the crowded smartphone market. If I ran Nokia (NYSE: NOK) or Research In Motion (Nasdaq: RIMM), I'd worry myself sick.
So HP does a quick shuffle move that seems to improve the business prospects of its former Palm division as well as the consumer-pleasing powers of its PCs. What's not to love? After all, the tech titan could use some fresh thinking these days.
