Why is HP such a punching bag?

Stupid question, right?

From Apotheker to Autonomy,the pissing contest over Itanium and now the ill-advised shot about Dell – the wounds at HP appear self afflicted and never ending.

But….talk to CIOs about their really unpopular vendors and about products they would love to eliminate in their budgets and other larger vendors come up more often than does HP (ok, many do complain about EDS)

More positively, look at a metric important to me as an innovation watcher – percent of revenues from products introduced in last 5 years. HP towers over most other enterprise tech vendors when you look at the 3PAR storage, Virtual Connect networking gear, Vertica Big Data analytics , PageWide printers and many other products it has introduced in the last few years.

Time for HP to take the bull by the horns:

a) If IBM can continue to milk Watson for years after the Jeopardy! showing even with little overt commercial success, surely HP can show off some of the intelligent infrastructure, immersive experience and other research at HP Labs

b) If SAP can line up fanboys to cheer at every HANA pivot, can HP not do the same with its Pathfinder ecosystem?

c) If Verizon can claim credit for third party innovations, surely HP  can start to leverage more of its VAR and other networks?

There is enough positive press in HP products and customers. HP just needs to quit being defensive about itself and whiny about others.