At the Global Influencer Summit 2012 this week, HP showed off several new HP Ultrabooks™, but chief executive Meg Whitman also reveled that the company will restart production of consumer tablets. Unlike the previous HP TouchPad running webOS, these new tablets will be using the upcoming Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft.
The tablet strategy was scrapped last year by the current CEO Leo Apotheker after disappointing sales figures, and at the same time Apotheker caused a stir when he decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. It seemed that HP might leave the Personal Computer market all together. After just 11 months on the job, Hewlett-Packard’s board ousted CEO Leo Apotheker, replacing him with Meg Whitman, former CEO at eBay.