惠普目前公布了分拆前最后一個財季及全年的業績。上一財季，惠普營收同比下降7%，至284億美元，基于匯率波動進行調整后同比下降2%。當季，惠普每股收益為93美分，同比下降12%。

這是惠普作為一家整體公司的最后謝幕。

自11月初，擁有76年歷史、曾經多次調整業務方向的科技巨頭惠普正式拆分為兩家公司，開始了一個新的時代，變成兩家上市公司——惠普企業（HP Enterprise）和惠普公司（HP Inc）。拆分后的兩家公司，是否會比作為一個整體的惠普表現更好？且讓我們拭目以待。

這并不是這家史詩級的科技行業先鋒第一次經歷巨變。早在2002年，惠普就曾剝離對于該公司極為重要的測試與儀器業務，組建成安捷倫公司。但這一次無疑是惠普史上規模最大的一次分拆。惠普企業將銷售服務器、軟件、存儲、網絡和相關服務。惠普公司將銷售打印機和個人電腦。

惠普CEO梅格?惠特曼于一年前宣布了這項拆分計劃，并于今年7月份提交了正式文件。

After 76 years, the tech giant will split into two companies. Can its two spawn do better than HP as a whole?

Hewlett-Packard will no longer be a single business. Instead, it will start a new era as two publicly traded companies, HP Enterprise and HP Inc.

This is not the first seismic shift to shake the storied tech pioneer—it spun out its bread-and-butter test and instruments division as Agilent in 2002 — but it is definitely the biggest. HP Enterprise will sell servers, software, storage, networking and associated services. HP Inc. will sell printers and PCs.

Plans for the move were announced by HP CEO Meg Whitman a year ago; formal paperwork was filed in July.

惠普成立于1939年，從帕洛阿爾托的一間車庫里起家，主要生產音頻振蕩器、計算器和其他奇怪的產品。而此次拆分最引人注目的一點是，這家專注于工程、非常遲鈍的公司，在創始人威廉?休利特和戴維?帕卡德及其繼任者卸任之后，是如何走上迷途的。

惠普走上歧途的具體時點，是一個爭議頗多的主題。但許多人認為，2001年，時任CEO卡莉?費奧莉娜錯誤地收購了康柏電腦公司。而正是這筆備受爭議的交易，醞釀了惠普走下坡路的起點。

從那之后，這家公司一次次地品嘗著自己種下的苦果：“假托”丑聞導致一名董事會成員、一名高管和該公司雇傭的調查人員因竊聽記者而面臨刑事指控；2010年，為了加強手機業務，該公司以10億美元的價格收購Palm Computing公司，后來又出售了后者的知識產權。

2008年，惠普進行了另外一筆規模更大、但更有爭議的收購——以139億美元收購計算機服務公司EDS；三年后，惠普又斥資110億美元，收購了軟件公司Autonomy。這些收購交易均導致惠普的資產減值80億美元。

除此之外，惠普還有一系列淪為笑柄的糟糕舉措。比如，在2010年9月聘用李艾科擔任CEO，但在一年后卻將其辭退。導致李艾科下臺的主要原因正是Autonomy交易，因為這筆交易最終演變為惠普和前Autonomy高管之間就欺詐問題展開的訴訟與反訴大戰。

早在李艾科任職期間，就有傳聞稱惠普有意出售PC業務。他的繼任者惠特曼上臺伊始就宣布，出售PC業務是錯誤的。在她看來，保留PC和服務器業務，有助于惠普從芯片與存儲供應商那里獲得成本優勢。她說道，惠普“在一起更好”。但在去年，她又推翻了自己的這種觀點。

惠普的云計算業務也經歷過類似的起伏。幾年前，惠普高管表示，公司將在公共云計算領域，與亞馬遜網絡服務展開競爭。所謂公共云計算模式是指各家企業從亞馬遜、微軟或谷歌等供應商那里租賃計算能力，而不是自己建設數據中心。

但后來，惠普在這方面卻鮮有動作，并且宣布放棄對公共云業務的競爭，重新專注于幫助客戶使用亞馬遜或微軟Azure，來支撐它們購買的惠普私有云。通過私有云，各家公司依舊可以增加或刪除計算資源，但這些資源僅限于自己使用，無法共享。在公有云與私有云混合的情況下，如果一家公司資源處理的工作量急劇增加，額外的工作將被轉移至公有云合作伙伴。

所有云業務將屬于新成立的惠普企業，包括相關的硬件、軟件和服務。現在一個有趣的問題是，業務重心調整是否會帶來回報？抑或，惠普現在才想在云計算分一杯羹，是否已為時太晚？

惠普公司將包括利潤較低的PC和打印機業務，但說句公道話，這項業務一直是惠普一項巨大的收入來源。

在11月份召開的惠普第四季度收入電話會議上，惠特曼稱，此次拆分規模龐大，情況復雜，是史上規模最大的一次。“這并非一次資產剝離，而是分拆成兩家《財富》500強公司，每家公司的收入均達到570億美元……這將是最好的惠普——一臺執行機器。”

有人指出，惠普一分為二，與戴爾收購EMC（和VMware）形成了鮮明對比。前者將變成兩家更加細化的公司，而后者則致力于提供一整套產品與服務，以發揮規模經濟效應。

但孰優孰劣，時間將會證明。惠普的拆分已經結束，我們將見證這兩家新公司是否會比過去10年，作為一個整體的惠普表現更好。但愿如此！（財富中文網）

譯者：劉進龍/汪皓

審校：任文科

What’s so striking about this is how an engineering-focused, rather stolid company started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 to build audio oscillators, calculators, and other geeky stuff, lost its way after founders William Hewlett and David Packard and their successors stepped down.

Exactly when things went off the rails is subject to debate, but many point to the controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2001 by HP’s then-CEO Carly Fiorina as the start of the decline.

Since then, the company’s had to weather such self-inflicted wounds as a pretexting scandal in which a board member, an executive and HP-paid investigators faced criminal charges for spying on journalists; the $1 billion acquisition of Palm Computing in 2010 to beef up HP’s mobile capabilities; then the sale of Palm’s intellectual property.

Then there were other bigger, more questionable acquisitions notably HP’s $13.9 billion buy of EDS, the giant computer services company in 2008; followed three years later by its $11 billion bet on Autonomy, a software company. Those purchases resulted in $8 billion write-downs. Each.

And then there was an almost farcical round robin of screwups that included the hiring of Leo Apotheker as CEO in September, 2010 only to fire him a year later, largely due to the Autonomy deal which degenerated into charges and countercharges of fraud between HP and former Autonomy execs.

During the Apotheker regime, word of plans to sell off HP’s PC business leaked. When Whitman, his successor, took the helm, she claimed that would be a mistake given the cost advantages HP got from chip and storage suppliers by fielding both a PC and server business. HP was “better together,” she said. Then, last year she reversed course on that.

There have been starts and stops in HP’s cloud computing story as well. A few years ago, HP execs said the company would compete head on with Amazon Web Services in public cloud computing, a model in which businesses rent computing capacity from a provider like Amazon, Microsoft or Google rather than building out more of their own data center capabilities.

HP subsequently started soft pedaling that notion, and last week threw in the towel on the public cloud business, refocusing (again) on helping customers use Amazon or Microsoft Azure to backstop their HP private clouds. With private clouds, companies can still add or delete computing resources, but all those resources are dedicated to that company, not shared. In a hybrid situation if there is a spike in the workload handled by company resources, the additional work get shipped off to a public cloud partner.

All of that cloud stuff, will fall to the new HP Enterprise unit, along with associated hardware, software and services. It’ll be interesting to see if that new-found focus will pay off or if HP is already too late to this party.

HP Inc. will get the lower-margin PC and printer business which, to be fair, was a huge money maker for HP for a long time.

In November, on HP’s fourth quarter earnings call, Whitman called the breakup a big and complicated separation — the biggest ever done. “This is not a spin-off, but two Fortune 50 companies, both with about $57 billion in revenue … But this is HP at it’s best — an execution machine.”

Some see HP’s decision to cut itself into two more narrowly-focused businesses as a direct contrast to Dell’s decision to buy EMC(and VMware) which is all about scale and the ability to offer a federated set of products and services.

Time will tell, but now that the HP split is nearly final, we’ll get to see if the two pieces can function better than HP as a whole did over the past decade. One can only hope so.