If HP merges PCs and printing, executive power will shift
HP Executive Vice President Vyomesh Joshi isn't as close to Hurd as colleagues Livermore and Bradley are. Photo: HP. — If HP CEO Mark Hurd does merge the PC and printing businesses, what will that mean for printing chief Vyomesh Joshi?
Context & Ripple Effects
Mark Hurd has talked openly about consolidation since at least November 2007, when he framed M&A and structural tightening as core HP strategy (his thoughts on consolidation). The new wrinkle is that the consolidation lens has turned inward, onto the boundary between HP's two biggest hardware franchises — personal computers and printing — where a merger of the groups is reportedly on the table.
What makes this an executive-power story rather than a pure org-chart story is who sits where: it is settled reporting that printing chief Vyomesh Joshi is less close to Hurd than Ann Livermore and Todd Bradley are. If the two businesses merge, the question of whose organization survives intact becomes a question about Joshi's standing inside Hurd's circle.
First-order effects
- Vyomesh Joshi's printing group faces absorption into a combined PC-and-printing unit under a single leader, putting Joshi's role and autonomy directly in play while Hurd weighs the move.
- Todd Bradley's PC organization enters any merged structure with the advantage of proximity to Hurd that the reporting confirms Joshi lacks, shaping who controls the combined P&L.
Second-order effects
- A unified PC-and-printing sales and supply operation would change how retail and commercial channel partners negotiate with HP — one contract structure and one executive point of contact replacing two competing internal franchises.
- Rival PC vendors watching HP collapse the wall between its highest-margin business (printing) and its volume business gain a template for bundling ink, services, and hardware pricing against Dell, Acer, and Lenovo.
Third-order effects
- If Hurd merges the units, HP moves toward organizing consumer hardware around customer segments rather than product categories, concentrating power in fewer direct reports and making executive standing dependent on closeness to the CEO rather than franchise profitability.
- The episode is an early instance of a question every integrated hardware company eventually confronts: whether printers and PCs belong in one organization, and how much executive careers bend to the answer.
The trend: Large hardware companies under consolidation-minded CEOs are redrawing internal boundaries around scale and customer overlap, trading product-line fiefdoms for segment-based structures.