By Rachel Chalmers

Hewlett-Packard Co’s incoming CEO Carly Fiorina took advantage of her Comdex keynote to launch a new brand for the company. Unlike the bold red circle she introduced to Lucent Technologies Inc, however, the new HP logo barely differs from the old, except that it’s underlined with the word invent. The words Hewlett Packard are no longer spelled out; presumably you’re just supposed to know what HP stands for. There’s a certain amount of irony to this. Fiorina insists that by reinventing HP she’s really taking it back to its roots. Indeed, the famous Palo Alto garage where the first HP computer was built features strongly in the company’s new marketing material. This is a company founded by two men who are pretty radical thinkers, she told her audience. Somehow, along the way, we stopped talking about invention. We’re going to start talking about it again.

So far, so good. But HP’s proud history matters most to industry insiders, and Fiorina immediately turned on the engineers she had earlier seemed to praise. Either the internet remains elite, the purview of the technology geeks, or the net becomes pervasive, intimate, warm, friendly, personal, and useful, she said. The challenge is not about technology, it is about culture. You have to wonder how Fiorina will cope with the culture of Silicon Valley if she thinks technology geeks are the opposite of intimate, warm, friendly, personal and useful. In any case, she finished by invoking yet again the buzzword of the new, hopeful HP: e-services. This is the end of the pure product era. It’s happening everywhere, she said. Revenue streams for HP and other companies will come from wrapping services around products. Such services are supposed to communicate through HP’s e-speak technologies, which have just been released as open source. We are committed to freeing our intellectual property from the labs. The challenge is in reigniting our spirit, Fiorina concluded. We will be preserving the best and reinventing the rest. After all, with a new logo, anything is possible. á