CEO Mark Hurd is not running Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard, but he’s not running Bill & Dave’s old shop either. He is trying to do to HP what Lou Gerstner did to IBM a decade ago, transform his company into a services powerhouse, growing through acquisitions and lay-offs.

Carly Fiorina, the woman John McCain sent out to defend Sarah Palin and rip anyone who calls her a tabula rasa on foreign policy and the economy, admitted Tuesday that Palin was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard. That’s pretty damning coming from Fiorina, who also was not capable of running Hewlett-Packard.

The workforce reduction is intended to “streamline the combined company’s services businesses”, and once complete is expected to “result in annual cost savings of approximately $US1.8 billion ($A2.2 billion),” Hewlett-Packard said in a statement. About 7.5 per cent of the combined workforce would be affected, HP said.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system.

For everyday users, the semantic desktop will allow enhanced searching of the type that has already been introduced by applications like Beagle, but with more user control than any existing program. For more sophisticated users, such as academic researchers, while Nepomuk will not actual do data-mining itself, it will assist such processes.

Lining up the support of CEOs and their small-business brethren offers both candidates a chance to bolster their economic credentials while sending voters the message that they’re ready to be the nation’s chief executive. The courtship goes both ways. For executives, a smooth working relationship with the White House is essential.

Hewlett-Packard’s new $500 incarnation of the Mini-Note boasts a “92 percent full-size” keyboard, the vendor says, along with unusually large stereo speakers flanking the mid-sized (for a netbook) 8.9-inch LCD display. The Linux Mini-Note variant runs Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.