Is This Where H-P’s Turnaround Begins?

Investors and analysts alike think that Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) is in trouble; the personal computer manufacturer has seen shares drop 43 percent in the past twelve months as investors have increasingly lost confidence in the company’s ability to resurrect its business.

Chief Executive Officer and President Meg Whitman has faced tough criticism regarding the direction the company is taking to combat declining personal computer sales — a phenomenon that is a problem industry wide — and she has responded, most notably at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo, that 2012 was a year of self-diagnosis. All the action, she said, will come in 2014. But the turnaround has begun, a point she reiterated in the earnings press release.

H-P’s first quarter earnings, released after the markets closed on Thursday, definitely showed signs that the company has not even begun to transition away from its core personal computer business…