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It's hard to know if Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd was briefed on the video-taped questions that were thrown at him on the stage at OpenWorld yesterday, but he made the most of the opportunity to reflect on the computer-maker's place in the technology ecosystem.
One inquisitor, apparently pulled off the street outside San Francisco's Moscone Centre, where Oracle's OpenWorld conference is being held, asked Hurd if he saw web giants Google and Yahoo as competitors or allies. Hurd didn't miss a beat - he sees them as providing the momentum for HP's growth.
"We at HP love that the ecosystem of content is continuing to explode. In fact, more content is fantastic for us, and in fact the desire to have content global is also great for us," he said.
"The fact that a farmer in China wants to access the same content as a doctor in Chicago is a fantastic IT opportunity for us."
HP is best known as a computer and server maker, but Hurd reminded his audience that the company is now the sixth biggest software maker in the world.
He said the company was focusing its software business on being the leader in a fairly niche area - management software to run networks, data centres, IT infrastructure.
He had an observation to make on the generation entering the workforce, which, weaned on the internet, expects to have a lot of information instantly at its fingertips.
"The tolerance for our traditional business response is pretty close to zero... the problem won't get easier. As the data inclines, customers get less patient," said Hurd who revealed that Wikipedia had got his birthday wrong.
"I am actually massively younger," he claimed.
Hurd had a point to make with the reference - with so much content being generated on open, often insecure networks, through social networking and user-generated content amassed on the web, HP sees an opportunity to provide infrastructure to organise and make sense of it all.
Said Hurd: "All of the content has to get rationalised, people are begging for it."
