Leader: Fiorina - good to go?

So Carly was finally pushed. Speculation has now turned to the future of the tech stalwart that is HP, slightly more so than her eventual successor.

That's understandable. Much as HP might like to claim otherwise, this split wasn't just about the wrong leader. Sure, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that Fiorina didn't dovetail with the 'HP Way', that she was autocratic and perhaps a tad too progressive in style.

The big question is about the future shape and direction of the company. In a recent poll on these pages, we asked our readers which vendor has the widest range of offerings in IT. IBM came out on top, garnering 39 per cent of votes, HP second with 31 per cent. However, HP clearly has the wider spread these days, playing in low-, mid- and high-end servers, clients from PCs to PDAs and soon smart phones, storage, IT services and of course printing, the biggest cash cow.

And therein lies the dilemma. There has been no shortage of expert punditry saying that now, more than ever, is the time for HP to bite the bullet and make one or several tough decisions.

These could range from hawking off its PC business à la IBM to, er, hawking off its profitable PC business and leaving the rest of the company to get it right or make other decisions. There is a precedent. When Fiorina came in the company's testing and semiconductor division was spun off to become Agilent.

For HP to admit it must refocus in any of these ways remains tough. Most of the board signed up to the idea of the Compaq merger in 2002. They saw big as good.

The company's annualised revenues are still around $80bn - second only to IBM's - so we're not talking about any spun-off unit being a minnow.

But we also know that the printer business is by far the most profitable. PCs lose money for HP in a market increasingly dominated by Dell and Chinese vendors. The markets for enterprise IT and services are tough, though hardly insurmountable for a company with HP's resources, reach and know-how.

Fiorina may be out - and expect lots more personality-related stories in the next few days - but the real decisions will be about strategy and the way many people at the company and their advisors, not just her eventual full-time replacement, see the future.

Take our poll about Fiorina's exit here.