Maybe he's the right guy for HP's trousers

I just finished up my early report on HP's new CEO, Mark Hurd, for the 3000 NewsWire. He looks like a much better fit for the company than his rock-star predecessor, Carly Fiorina. It was a hoary marriage between HP, the reticient gentleman of the Silicon Valley, and Fiorina; nothing could illustrate that better than the board's selection of a successor. Hurd has worked for NCR, his only employer, for 25 years, and lives in Dayton. Few things could be more vanilla than a 118-year-old business machine company or its headquarters city which grew up in the shadow of Cincinnatti. (The town does sport a crackerjack baseball writer in Hall of Famer Hal McCoy, still knocking out knockout columns even though he can hardly see anymore.) I know a lot about that kind of industrial Ohio, since I grew up in another town on the I-75 corridor, Toledo. Glass capital of the world, you know, and then there's those scales...

Hurd took his degree from Baylor, which might be the opposite end of the universe from Carly's Stanford alma mater. (For a fabulous novel about the Baylor and Waco, Texas culture, check out Greg Garrett's novel "Cycling." Willie Nelson tried a year at the Baptist college and fled.) Hurd's kids attend public schools alongside the children of people Hurd had to lay off to lift NCR out of a sea of red ink. Carly doesn't have kids and concocted a merger that left thousands jobless, all while she lived behind a security gate and travelled with bodyguards. (In a 2003 radio interview Carly noted that thank goodness, her bodyguards weren't the kind that "pack heat.") Kids in class with schoolmates whose parents were laid off -- bodyguards and gates. That's a wide difference in accountability.

How glad is HP to be rid of Carly? In its "Hurd's hired" press release the company didn't even mention Fiorina, noting that Hurd is replacing interim CEO Bob Wayman. It's a good bet that Hurd won't be tempted to take to a stage alongside Gwen Stefani like Carly did anytime soon. That hubris spawned a top-drawer parody site of the HP Carly era. Hurd might be poked fun at because he isn't flashy, but his career and demeanor at today's press conference bears a striking resemblence to the archtypical HP executive, like Lew Platt, or Bill Hewlett himself. One report at Computerworld described NCR as collegial as HP. The times I've been to HP's HQ have felt like campus visits to me.

Business analysts like writers at The Motley Fool are calling Hurd's appointment brilliant, which also seems to cast aspersions on his predecessor. Not that she made that difficult; there's a wickedly funny parody of Carly's post-firing diary, a la Bridget Jones, on the Fool's Web site. My analysis is that Hurd will be able to return HP to the profit machine it was during the first 15 years I covered the company. NCR is about the size now that HP was when I started reporting on it in 1984. That Baylor Bear should enjoy his honeymoon, but I think he won't be so tempted to knock out the walls of his new home in computing the way Carly did.

Hurd might let some HP customers forgive the company for quitting its legendary legacy business, the HP 3000. Many held out hope when Carly arrived in 1999 that HP would treat the computer as more than a withered stepchild. That certainly didn't turn out to be the case. This time the CEO arrives with a healthy appetite for vanilla, a flavor easy to attribute to the 3000. HP just isn't a miniskirt-and-fishnet kind of company, deep in its soul. Maybe now it can put its pants on one leg at a time, instead of trying to merge itself into better business. It might be safe to start calling the company Hewlett-Packard once more. Perhaps Hurd can restore those words to the company's logo. There's been enough "invent" on HP's underbelly to last another 66 years.