A final thought on HP's pulling out of being a personal devices vendor.

Big vendors never did a great job of handling their end customers particularly well. After all, that kind of intimacy is what VARs and retail distribution were there for.

But scroll forwards to 2011 and the web has all but disintermediated and eroded away those chaannels leaving big vendors nothing but a raw, cumbersome and mostly distance selling relationship with their end customers. And unlike twenty to thirty years ago, a large chunk of HP's customers today are increasingly consumers who like to be made to feel more special than a no-name suit with a company budget to spend.

Enter stage left Apple and its flotilla of stores.

Whether it was foresight or not, ten years ago Apple embarked on its then largely derided retail store strategy and in doing so, it seems to have sailed around the very problem that HP and, no doubt, other old tin shifters now find themselves in, now bereft of a smiling face on the front line.

And what remains on high street PC retail is far from optimal - sheds full of racks of over-priced and a revison or two out of date kit accompanied by distantly reverberating muzak and soulless branded polo-shirts who look like they're counting the minutes until the time they clock-off.

It wasn't called the personal computer for nothing.