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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."

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.

The rate at which data, or content, is being produced for the Web and being generated for businesses has outpaced the rate at which conventional databases are evolving to better manage it all. It's a fact of life that we perceive on a gradual basis every day, but that we haven't yet acknowledged to be as significant or dangerous a trend as it is: Data is getting slower. Networks are getting bigger as the cloud is getting broader, and data that was already difficult to manage is becoming impossible. Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture.

It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

And in exchange for this, HP is willing to let go of the promise of Palm.

We're spending the next two days at Hewlett-Packard, discussing its networking strategy and the changes it sees in the networking market.

The discussions echo conversation we've had with people in recent months about how the networks will have to adapt as the amount of data scales to a point where it can not be managed without some intelligence built into the infrastructure.

VMware's acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It's one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market.

The acquisition shows how VMware is seeking to do more than provide virtualization technology. By packaging Zimbra's popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a more enhanced service, one that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications.

It rings similar to Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard's alliance announced today that will package Microsoft technology on HP servers.

Hewlett-Packard will acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion to compete more effectively against Cisco Systems in the competitive computer networking market.

The deal, announced this afternoon, appears on the surface to help HP gain a position in China. This is where the action is in the computer networking market and a main reason for the acquisition. But below the surface is a story about 3Com's falling position in the Chinese market and the rise of Huawei Technologies, a player that everyone is watching, including Cisco, which considers the Chinese company its biggest rival.