The business section of the Merc today has two articles on the front page about HP’s nascent recovery under interim CEO Mark Hurd.

So many people base their measure of a person on what they heard about them than the evidence staring them in the face of incompetence of their actions—people’s high opinion of ex-CEO Carly Fiorina is an example of that.

What I found so interest was not the articles themselves but in the inset graphics. One part of one inset was fascinating:

Where HP intends to grow

• Distributed Computing: Companies increasingly are moving data off mainframes and onto distributed servers in multiple locations. HP sells servers and storage technology and services to help companies manage big computing tasks. It is also developing ways to automate data centers.
• Mobile Computing: HP already develops mobile technology such as notebook and handheld computers. Security features and its management software will becoming increasingly important
• Digital Printing: HP sells a wide range of printers for consumers and businesses, including pritners for digital cameras. It entered the commercial and industrial digital printing arena with acquisitions like Indico and Scitex and is also developing multifunction copiers/printers.

It is not interesting in the specific the areas they plan to grow—I don’t know any growth potential in many of them and think things like multifunction printers are a stupid idea. What is interesting is that they have one at all. Not only that, the strategy is focused, directed, and “physical.”.

Under Carly, I don’t think anybody could paraphrase HP’s growth strategy—you were pretty much stuck parotting the latest “enterprise” buzzword that she was quoting largely because it was a bunch of fancy prose (“There is only one company in the world today that can stand in at every step of the way to help small and medium-size business get more value out of technology. That company is HP.”) or useless sloganeeering (“2005: The Year for Mobility”) cloaking the fact that under Carly there was no engineering, innovation, or direction at all.

Even if you disagree like I do with HP’s specific strategy, you can really see the advantage in having one.

And I wish one of the “analysts” quoted in the two articles mentioned this.