Hyper Tag Cloud of Computer Generated Twaiku

Theory #1: HP Strategy was written by Charlie Sheen on Twitter

It is possible that HP’s strategy was written by the Internet’s favorite High Priest Vatican assassin warlock? HP is bayonets, baby–HP is an F18 fighter jet, ready to blow you out of the sky or deploy  ordinance to the ground. Having both Windows and WebOS on a single PC is not bipolar, it’s bi-winning, you win here, and you win there. HP is on a drug called WebOS. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”#WINNING #TIGERBLOOD The Scoreboard does not lie.

Theory #2: HP Strategy was a haiku love poem written by IBM’s  “Watson”

One possibility that this was written by IBM’s Jeopardy playing computer, Watson, as a way to completely subvert and demolish its largest foe, HP. However, this doesn’t adequately explain how this got onto Leo Apotheker’s slides. Unfortunately, the thing that blows up that theory is that you would expect the phrasing to be more consistent. For example “What is Optimizing Traditional Environments Alex”. That would be good for a “Daily Double”. Still, the phrase “Random Number Generator” seems to drift unbidden from the sub-basement when reading the kind of strategy you might expect to find in the left nostril of a wildebeest infected by cryptosporidium.

Theory #3: Leo Apotheker is a freestyle rap artist

A freestyle rap artist can explode the fringes of grammar to discombobulate their opponents. I got so many ways to dis you that I’m playful wit you. By disgorging a rap fiesta of hyperlucid bricolage, they  shock and awe their opponents into complete aphasia. This theory is supported by the satire implicit in recombining every buzzword from every software company into a single set of powerpoint bullets. Another supporting point is the tendency for West Coast gangstas to smoke trees. It’s clear from the diction and lexicon that whoever wrote these words smoked many, many trees.

Theory #4: HP’s strategy was written by Miss Teen South Carolina

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww[/youtube]

Apologies to Miss Teen South Carolina.

Theory #5: HP is airing their political dirty laundry in public

This kind of glossolalia is not in fact, computer generated haiku. It is a form of political interplay, where the company uses an external communication platform to address internal political issues. This is also known as “airing your dirty laundry in public”. I think by actually saying something, you might be favoring one division of HP over another.

For example, take “Optimize Traditional Environments“. Hello? Perhaps this is a reference to legacy systems or mainframes. But no, we wouldn’t want to bias the company strategy on any specific product line or business unit, so instead we have to come up with a tagline that would be more suitable for an interior decorator than a 90 billion dollar tech company.

The same explanation applies to “Build and manage cloud architectures“. I mean to be honest, how does one build, let alone manage an “architecture”? The problem solved by this incoherent backwash of polysyllabic combinatorics is that if HP decided to actually build and manage a product or service, the CEO would be again, showing favoritism.

The Winner: Dirty Laundry

Perhaps one of the best recent examples of complex public laundry airing was Carol Bartz explaining “What is Yahoo!” to Michael Arrington. An exceedingly complex answer and one where we can see (the exceedingly politically astute) Ms Bartz stepping carefully through a very complex question in the midst of a company reorganization.

An astute use of external communication can be seen by Nokia CEO Steven Elop and his famous “Burning Platform” memo. Instead of being incoherently political, this statement is focused, brutal and represents a very simple unified perspective. It’s rare when the stars align in such a way, but it’s clear that he’s speaking on behalf of a board-approved strategy.

But back to HP’s strategy statement… Enable Transformation to Hybrid Models is a joyful, bizzare and yet meaningless buzzword bingo that evokes Darryl Hannah’s Pris character in Bladerunner–a sort of transgender fashion runway android.

The whole thing ends with a whimper rather than a bang with Define and deliver the connected world from the consumer to the enterprise. In this context “Define” almost shouts “we dont know what we are doing!” to the world. I mean get real, you obviously have to define something before you can deliver it. But we haven’t defined it yet, so lets get to that first. The whole thing is comically self referential, since the previous sentences are so grammatically and semantically unmoored.

Please don’t take this the wrong way. I mean I’ve had a lot of fun writing this, and certainly at HP CEO Leo Apotheker’s expense. I’m sympathetic to the fact that companies are exceedingly political and complex, and that when those politics are given a voice, the results can be bizzare.

In this case the results read like a machine generated tag cloud sucking from the IT section of Wikipedia. It reads like a high school machine language experiment or the last phases of Dilbert struck by a tragic neurodegenerative disease.

Nuff said, thanks for a laugh.

Miko