HP Is Splitting in Two. Which Would You Run?

Here's a Silicon Valley parlor game for a Monday morning: If you could choose which half of Hewlett-Packard to run, which would it be?

As my colleague Isabelle Roughol neatly summed up this morning, HP is splitting the baby. Small(er) is the new black: Big companies are breaking themselves up into more easily defensible verticals — witness eBay/PayPal. Part of the trend is about unlocking shareholder value. The more interesting (but related) aspect is unleashing potential: Giving what was a division as much running room as the market — and not some competing or clueless senior executive — will bear. Per Ms. Roughol:

HP confirmed the split will happen by the end of fiscal 2015 to give rise to two publicly traded companies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. Current HP CEO Meg Whitman will be CEO of the enterprise business, as well as chair of the consumer business, to be headed by current PC and printer chief Dion Weisler. So all bridges are not exactly burnt: even more so than with eBay and Paypal, the companies will remain linked by their leadership and by the very name that anchors them into Silicon Valley lore.

As for which will be the better ride, I don't think there's a wrong choice, per se. But, depending on how the blood flows through your veins, I do think there's a better choice. Much better.

Enterprise requires a perpetual 30,000-foot view. The wins are big and can pay dividends for years, but they can be far between. Most of what you're doing is drumming up business and maintaining major account-type relationships. Your competition includes old guard companies — like IBM — and upstarts nipping at the edges for only a piece of the action, like Google and Blackberry. And, all of a sudden, security tops every client's non-negotiable demands.

This isn't a staid business, and the titans of this industry didn't become titans overnight. But it is in flux. It isn't Microsoft's world that we just live in anymore. Apple is a player now — partnering with IBM — and even Linux is seriously in the mix. In office productivity, Google and Microsoft are duking it out. An HP that can offer hardware and software solutions agnostically is a different, new kind of play.

Still, it seems ... comfortable. The PC business, while commoditized, is in the midst of an extended disruptive phase, sparked by the iPhone six years ago and reinvigorated by the iPad in 2010. Mobile —work anytime, anywhere — is rapidly becoming more important than portable — work here and there, but not so much in between.

It's the Wild West. For traditional portables like laptops the margins are thin and the must-have scenarios are dwindling. For comfort and convenience, I'll do the final touches for this piece on laptop, but it was written entirely on a smartphone, on the Google cloud, while I was standing on a commuter train, with some flourishes courtesy of Siri dictation as I walked the final stretch to the office.

Imaginative PCs are still essential, but the PC business now naturally embraces mobile, which we assume will be the successors to portables — that in our lifetime we'll witness a tipping point where the mainstream instinct is to reach for something tablet-like to create as well as consume.

Netbooks are enjoying a Renaissance, and hybrids are only beginning to make sense. Wearables — and who knows what — are coming and may redefine the computing business again. I can't think of a more scary/fun time to have a chip in this big game.

Now, suppose you ran this little HP startup and didn't have to worry too much about PC revenue right away because you had a reliable "razor blades" revenue stream to finance your audacious hardware experiments. The printer game is about selling blue meth — few things are pricier than black printer ink: snake venom, LSD and, surprisingly, Chanel No. 5).

By the way, isn't that how HP decided on the name for this soon-to-be separate company? It's HP Ink, right, not HP Inc?

Don't get me wrong — both of these companies will offer huge challenges and satisfying upside potential. Both are going to be tough environments in that exhilarating kind of way that some of us thrive upon.

But one, I think, is going to be way more fun.

There's no better place for entrepreneurship — dare I say of the sort William "Bill" Redington Hewlett and Dave Packard themselves epitomized — than HP Inc. It will be a scrappy startup in a field where the gunfights have already thinned the field to fastest hands. Dion Weisler has a solid base and plenty of room to dream up how to take out Michael Dell, Satya Nadella and all other comers in the unforgiving public square.

Bring it on, I say. But what would you do? Does finding solutions at massive scale float your boat? Or are you all about inventing the future of computing?