But recently, Wall Street analysts have raised concerns about H.P.'s direction and loss of momentum as industry growth shifted from hardware and personal computers, sectors that H.P. dominated.
Nokia's failure to capitalize on the smartphone boom has cost the Finnish company market share and prestige as the center of gravity in its industry has shifted from hardware and communications to software and applications.
SDR platforms allow traditional radio functions, such as decoding or encoding, to be shifted from hardware to software.
"But just like Sony, Nokia has not found a way to shift from hardware to software," says Stéphane Téral of Infonetics Research.To allow Nokia finally to shed its hardware skin, Mr Elop, a former senior executive at Microsoft, was brought in and apparently given what Mr Kallasvuo never had: carte blanche.
"Industry-wide tech development is shifting from hardware to software," said Lee Samsungon, Samsung's president and chief financial officer.
The move is seen as a sign that Sun will increasingly become a software company and shift its hardware strategy to rely more on lower-cost computers.
The example of the computer industry, in which the centre of gravity began shifting from hardware firms to providers of software and services over two decades ago, is not terribly encouraging: of the industry's former giants, only IBM really made the shift successfully.
Long-time Facebook ads engineering head Mark Rabkin will be taking over Bosworth's ad responsibilities as he shifts to hardware.
As consumer hardware shifted from desktop PCs to portable laptops, and infrastructure became increasingly networked, the fundamental architectures of applications were re-thought.
In 2002, the technology manufacturer shifted away from hardware and boosted its consulting services with the purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers to the tune of about $3.9 billion in cash and stock.
