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If Facebook’s massive IPO represents the wealth created by the rise of social networking, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT, these tectonic shifts hold dramatic challenges to old-line technology companies built on yesterday’s revolutions. So even as Facebook mints a crowd of new millionaires and billionaires, Hewlett-Packard is preparing to send pink slips to some 30,000 of its employees.

HP's Itanium debacle provides plenty of lessons for anyone who is willing to pay attention. For the past decade, HP has been making a valiant, if extremely misguided, attempt to support the high-end Itanium chip architecture and the HP-UX Unix implementation that runs on it. Oracle's open letter and drop of documents as part of the companies' legal battle shows just how much HP has been keeping from customers in order to prop up the good ship Itanic in the face of disinterest even from Intel, which actually makes the Itanium chip! Things are getting ugly.

Remember when computers were cool and printers were boring peripherals? Well, these days there seems to be fewer and fewer differences between the two devices.

At least HP seems to think so. Reports are circulating today that the hardware giant plans to combine its not-all-that-profitable PC division (you know, the one the company's last CEO wanted to spin off) with its high-margin, market-leading printer operation.

It's no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.

But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors' press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.

"Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community. By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications," announced eBay's CEO in September 2005, Meg Whitman, "we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net."

By 2005, what Meg Whitman had learned about "ecosystems," such as they are, would have had to have come from her tenure as president of Stride Rite Shoes, the maker of Keds; and later as chief of Hasbro's Playskool division, where she directly oversaw the marketing of Mr. Potato Head. Inspired by the reintroduction of the toy brand into popular culture with Pixar's Toy Story, Whitman's innovations included the licensing of the brand to television, leading to the 1998 premiere of Fox Kids' "The Mr. Potato Head Show."

With today's announcement that Meg Whitman will become the next CEO of HP, it is time to a look at where she has come from and what challenges are ahead for the computer company. Certainly, in its 72-year history, the fortunes of HP have never been more at risk than they are now.

eBay history

Meg Whitman served as President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay from 1998 to 2008. Those were the go-go years for the online auction house. When she started they had just 30 employees. She grew it to 15,000 employees and $8B in revenue. eBay also bought Skype, selling it for about half of what they paid. Other notable eBay purchases during the Whitman era included Half.com, Paypal, Shopping.com and StubHub.

The worst CEOs in tech, OpenStack announcements from HP, and rumors about Google Dart are all in this ReadWriteWeb channels wrap-up.

Steve Jobs may have been the best tech CEO ever, but the worst is open to debate. Last week, we also looked at L-Soft Listserv turning 25, and how many Android devices still run Froyo. After the jump, you'll find more of this week's top stories on ReadWriteWeb's channels.

Tech CEOs are getting a lot of attention lately. With the exception of exiting Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the attention is not a good thing. From Carol Bartz's abrupt firing to Andrew Mason's IPO-icing shenanigans, many tech CEOs don't seem to be earning a janitor's salary – much less the inflated compensation they're getting.

So I decided to take a look around and see, who are the worst CEOs in tech? I limited the selection to those CEOs currently (or very near currently) working. So that means that some of the worst tech CEOs in history (see, for instance, SCO's Darl McBride) aren't on the list.

It's often said that business leaders make their companies in their own image. In that case, no two images ever stood in starker contrast with one another than the Hewlett-Packard of former CEO Mark Hurd, and the Hewlett-Packard of present CEO Léo Apotheker. Whether for better or worse, HP is becoming a different company than the one many enterprise clients signed their contracts with just a few years ago.

That fact has led one Forrester analyst to recommend this to his firm's clients: not that they dump HP, but that they make a careful re-assessment of their business relationship with the firm, taking into consideration whether a contingency plan for switching vendors might be in order.

What ground Hewlett-Packard lost in recent months in revenue from personal systems - which triggered last week's surprise shutdown of webOS device operations - it has gained over the same period from enterprise products and services. Paying off in spades is 3PAR, the network storage device manufacturer that HP literally swiped from Dell's hands for a $2.35 billion purchase price. Last June's quarterly report pinned a big star on 3PAR, crediting it with turning the tide in storage revenue to 3% positive, quarterly year-over-year.

The keyword is "federation," which HP is invoking as a replacement for today's storage virtualization schemes.

Now, HP is making good on 3PAR's plan to rethink the infrastructure of storage networks. Today it announced new P10000-class storage systems, and a new class of storage management software called Peer Motion, which HP says utilizes both thin provisioning and peer-to-peer networking to shift workloads faster and more efficiently. The same peer-to-peer concept that eliminated the need for an administrative hub in home networking, is being put to use here by eliminating the need for a separate storage management appliance.