The question wasn’t whether Hewlett-Packard would fire CEO Léo Apotheker (photo ©David Earth) anymore but when it would officially announce it. Yesterday, in the afternoon, a press release was published in which the company also confirmed his replacement with Meg Whitman, who between 1998 and 2008 has been eBay CEO.

Léo Apotheker was named HP CEO not even a year ago and took office on November 1, 2010. Meg Whitman will be the eighth HP CEO since 1999. What’s happening to one of the leading companies in information technology?

Almost exactly ten years ago, Hewlett-Packard announced its merger with Compaq, and at that moment it seemed that nothing could stop the company’s plans. Instead, the company’s value dropped considerably over the years and many employees were laid off. Then CEO Carly Fiorina resigned in 2005 under pressure from the board and from that moment HP tried without success to find the right strategy to bring the company back to its old glory.

Léo Apotheker pays among other things for the heavy debacle of the HP TouchPad tablet. Hewlett-Packard spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm to use its operating system in the tablets and smartphones that the company was designing and is now looking for ways to avoid losing that money after it was forced to sell HP TouchPad tablet at a fire sale.

Another big decision concerns personal computers: Hewlett-Packard could in fact spin-off that division. HP seems willing to focus its efforts on enterprise services, following to some extent in IBM’s footsteps. From this point of view we can understand last month announcement about buying enterprise software producer Autonomy Corporation. Instead abandoning the production of personal computers will not necessarily be useful for this purpose.

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One wonders if Meg Whitman is the right person at this time because her experience covers mainly retail market and not the business-to-business one. Hewlett-Packard is also a much larger company than eBay with several divisions whose future needs to be assessed.

Léo Apotheker can get comfort from a multi-million-dollar compensation: the exact amount of money is still to be quantified accurately by analyzing his contract but it won’t be pennies.

As for Hewlett-Packard, first of all the company must decide which strategy to follow and find the right person to do it. In recent years however it doesn’t seem to have been successful and at this point not much time remains before a company so glorious ends even worse.