Today Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman announced that the company is going to fire or retire 27 000 people between now and the end of 2014. The spin? It's going to use the savings to invest in R&D (no word about whether engineers involved in R&D are among those being laid off). Step #1 of course, will be a permanent replacement for HP Labs director Prith Banerjee, who resigned last month.
The HP announcement states that "HP expects to use the savings to boost investment in innovation around its three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as in other segments that offer attractive growth potential."
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Tekla S. Perry
Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.
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