I was reading through Schumpeter’s blog on The Economist and I came across something quite interesting.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is the world’s biggest producer of computers. Recently with the stiff competition  of hardware in the IT field HP decided to switch battles. Instead of spending more money to keep up with innovative, high-tech hardware HP spent $10.3 billion on a software firm, Autonomy. The software market provides larger profits and Autonomy has really targeted a direct market. Autonomy produces software that sifts through unstructured data such as email, and documents. This software is very useful for large businesses and corporations.

This move is bold. HP had just spent $1.2 billion to expand to the highly competitive but profitable cell phone market, by buying palm. They had little luck with the expansion but the OS system designed for the phones is widely recognized for quality and performance. HP hopes to keep the OS but if unable it will sell it along with the rest of their assets. This will be a huge change to the computer industry and will give another company to claim the top the title selling computer brand.