Fiorina's departure: The beginning of the end?

And now HP's three server competitors have headed in the opposite direction. IBM now aggressively promotes its own Power processor family, Sun is reinvigorating its Sparc line and embracing x86, and Dell continues its gains with the much more widely used Xeon processors from Intel.

While HP has consolidated many of its server lines on Itanium, it's had troubles, too. In December, it scrapped a plan to bring key elements of Compaq's version of Unix to the surviving HP-UX. And the company sells servers with AMD's Opteron processor, which undermined one Itanium advantage by bringing 64-bit memory addressing to the x86 realm.

Still, analysts expressed some optimism for HP on Tuesday.

HP "might be at the point where the company looks like it's going to take a new direction, and maybe it'll get its act together," said Chris Foster, an analyst at Technology Business Research. "For some of the customers that have hung around, that did business with the old HP, maybe there's some relief" that the company might return to its roots in engineering.

For customers, "I would definitely think there's optimism at this point," Foster said. "I don't think there's anyone terribly upset today."

Management changes are also unlikely to have a big impact on HP's consumer businesses.

"At this point, I don't think anything is going to translate down to the sales floor," said Steve Baker, an analyst at The NPD Group. "I don't think there's any uncertainty that there isn't going to be a line of PCs coming from [HP]."

For its part, HP did share some of its plans for the future. Wayman said during a conference call for press and analysts that the company intends to expand in those areas where it is strong, notably in imaging and printing. At the same time, it will seek to improve the profitability of its other businesses, including its server and storage business, and its professional-services consulting arm.

"In our PC business, we have made great progress in a number of arenas. Profitability has gone from a substantial loss position to a reasonable level of profitability," Wayman said. Meanwhile, "in our enterprise storage and server business, this is where we had significant disappointment last year, particularly in the third quarter. We fully acknowledged and described the execution problems. We have those particular problems behind us, but we now have to develop a steady and consistent track record."

CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.