How Meg Whitman Intends to Retool H.P.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Hewlett-Packard needs four more years “to have confidence in itself,” says Meg Whitman, the company's chief executive.

IT'S not as easy being as Meg Whitman might have expected.

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is:

Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn't quite get it - doesn't quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.

Even, it seems, when the stakes include her company and reputation. In all likelihood, this is Ms. Whitman's last great public performance. She became rich by building eBay, then spent more money than any candidate for public office in the nation's history trying to become California's governor. She was sometimes portrayed in that race as an aloof 1 percenter - as someone who pushed around subordinates, once literally, and who was unkind to her housekeeper, an illegal immigrant. “I left a little bruised,” Ms. Whitman, a Republican, says of the 2010 race she lost to Jerry Brown. “It was hard, it was personally very hard.”

So now Ms. Whitman is focusing her energy on H.P., the company founded by the tech legends William Hewlett and David Packard. Bill and Dave, as they are referred to at the company, spawned Silicon Valley. Last year, H.P. posted revenue of $127 billion. It employs 320,000 people directly, and easily that many again through a network of manufacturers and computer resellers across 170 countries.

Ms. Whitman has plenty of impressive-sounding stats at her fingertips. H.P., she says, employs thousands of people in Costa Rica, Houston and Boise, Idaho. “In India, we have 60,000 people,” she says. A new program for selling printer ink is in exactly 87 countries. Every 15 seconds, the company turns out 60 new printers, 30 personal computers and one powerful computer server. Still, she yearns for even more data, something closer to the command of the day-to-day process she had at eBay.

THE fact is, H.P. isn't what it used to be. Next to Apple or Google, it looks like a bit of a loser. In the most recent quarter, as Apple soared to new heights, H.P.'s revenue fell 5 percent and its operating margins dwindled. Profit margins at I.B.M. and Apple are several times that of H.P. And H.P.'s share price, at just over $17 on Friday, is about where it was in 1995.

“It's staggering,” says A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “This is now the cheapest big stock in the last 25 years. That reflects an industry belief that the company is going to decline.”

Ms. Whitman is impatient to move H.P. closer to a global computing explosion that is transforming the industry. Smartphones and tablets from Apple, Google and others are now flying into consumers' hands worldwide. Those computers are tied via the Internet to cloud computing data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and hundreds of multinational companies. Information from all the consumer devices, in addition to data from billions of sensors and Web-crawling robots, is crunched in these supercomputing clouds, creating a Big Data revolution full of business opportunities and dangers.

From Ms. Whitman's high vantage, the trends of mobile, cloud and Big Data resolve into a single phenomenon: the creation and exploitation of Information Everywhere. H.P. makes consumer devices, in addition to servers for the cloud, sensor networks, and analysis software. Instead of standing at the confluence of the phenomenon, though, H.P. is on the sidelines, with most of the parts but none of the integration to make it a leader.

The Internet is Apple\'s Achilles Heel

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Scott Forstall showing the Maps app at the iPhone 5 debut.

IPhone users grew more annoyed all week. When they used 's new mobile maps, they found nonsensical routes and misplaced landmarks. Bloggers and talk-show hosts mocked the sometimes bizarre errors.

Nine days after the maps' release, the Washington Monument was still on the wrong side of the street. But something else changed.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, released an apologetic letter to customers on Friday, making the remarkable suggestion that they try alternative map services from rivals like Microsoft and Google while Apple improves its own maps. “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers, and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” Mr. Cook wrote.

The map problems were an embarrassing misstep for a company that strives for perfection in its products and, in the eyes of consumers, often gets pretty close to the mark. Its track record in delivering quality is one reason Apple is now the most valuable public company in the world.

Apple executives have tried to explain their move into maps by saying that the company could no longer afford to rely on Google, its former map provider and growing rival, for such a crucial function. Many analysts and technology executives agree that this was the right move for the long term. But Apple appears to have rushed its map service out prematurely, even though it could have continued to rely on Google until next year.

The outcry shows how map services, which Apple treated as an afterthought when it built the first , have become critical tools for millions of people. And the company's stumble fits in with its pattern of bungling services that rely heavily on the Internet.

Apple has a reputation for obsessive attention to detail in its hardware and software products, down to the beveled edges of the iPhone 5 and the shade of the icons on its screen. But it has stubbed its toe again and again when it comes to releasing reliable, well-designed Internet services. Its less proud moments include Ping, a social network for music that never took off; MobileMe, an error-plagued service for synchronizing data between devices; and, more recently, Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant that is often hard of hearing.

The company's weakness in this area could become a bigger problem over time as smartphones become more intimately tied to information and software on the Internet - a field where Google, which makes the competing phone software, has the home-turf advantage.

“I always felt if you had to name an Achilles' heel at Apple, it's Internet services,” said Andrew Borovsky, a former Apple product designer who worked on MobileMe and now runs his own design firm in New York. “It's clearly an issue.”

An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, declined to comment.

Some have sought to pin the blame for the maps debacle on a relaxing of standards under Mr. Cook, who was elevated from the No. 2 position at Apple just over a year ago. He took over shortly before the death of Steven P. Jobs, a notorious perfectionist known to shelve products that did not pass muster.

But numerous interviews with former Apple employees in the wake of the maps controversy made it clear that Mr. Jobs and other executives rarely paid as much attention to Internet services as they did to the devices for which Apple is best known. Nor did they show the kind of consistent foresight in this area that has served the company so well in designing hardware and software.

Including a maps app on the first iPhone was not even part of the company's original plan as the phone's unveiling approached in January 2007. Just weeks before the event, Mr. Jobs ordered a mapping app to show off the capabilities of the touch-screen device.

Two engineers put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.

At the time, relying on Google, which had introduced its map service a couple of years earlier, made sense. Apple and Google had generally friendly relations, and Google's chief executive at the time, Eric E. Schmidt, served on Apple's board.

Australian Scientists Move Closer to Quantum Computer

Competing teams of Australian scientists have given that country a significant lead in an increasingly intense international competition to build a working quantum computer.

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today's machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today's digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits - perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak's team involves placing a single electron - embedded in a silicon chip - in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach.

In both cases, the research teams are international. There is an increasing awareness, however, that Australian scientists have made significant advances this year toward this long-promised new type of computing.

While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world's population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero.

Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today's technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.

The achievements of the two teams is a payoff from an investment the Australian government began making in the 1990s.

“Both groups are highly competitive and leading in the world in what they do,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who has collaborated with both groups and was a co-author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper.

Dr. Dzurak's group's work contrasts with a research team led by Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. That group has taken an approach based on placing individual atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, allowing great precision in building devices on an atomic scale.

The team led by Dr. Dzurak uses conventional semiconductor techniques to implant a phosphorus atom just 10 to 15 nanometers below the surface of a silicon chip. That approach has the twin advantages of using industry standards and potentially extending the individual electron's duration in a quantum state.

The United States has federally financed, corporate and university research efforts under way to design usable quantum computers. I.B.M., for example, recently expanded its research at its Almaden laboratory in California.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist who is a quantum researcher at I.B.M., pointed out that neither Australian group had shown the ability to interconnect multiple qubits. That capability is necessary for a quantum computer.

Dr. Dzurak said he believed that capability could be achieved as soon as a year from now.