I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to “blog” the announcement by CEO Mark Hurd today about the spy scandal that just won’t go away. Here is the concluding comment I sent:

Today was an effort to sacrifice the queen in order to save the king. But nothing suggests that HP is Bobby Fischer or Gary Kasparov. It has been bungled from the beginning and goes back to the amateurish behavior of Keyworth and Perkins who used leaks for their own political purposes. In my view, Hurd will end up out of HP within a few months as the lawyers, prosecutors and politicians descend on the company. This is a sad day for Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, my engineer father reminds me that the real HP, the HP of garage startup fame, is really not this HP – it is Agilent, the instrument company spun off by HP a few years back. No such scandal seems to have engulfed that entity located just down the road from HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto. Thank god for small miracles – maybe there is hope for the Valley after all.