SAN FRANCISCO — In one day, Meg Whitman has created two of America's biggest companies. All she had to do was break apart Hewlett-Packard, the company credited with creating Silicon Valley. Her plan is to make HP's parts bigger than its current whole, allowing one side of the company to return to HP's roots servicing big business customers and solving big computing problems under the label Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. On the other side under the brand HP Inc. will be PCs and printers, the products that powered HP's growth for much of the last decade but are wilting in the face of consumer demand for mobile technology. That Ms. Whitman will stay on as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise says much about where she believes the future of the company lies. And it makes clear that she is very much putting her own stamp on the iconic company that she has led for three years. On Monday, Ms. Whitman, 58, presented this move as something as a victory lap, despite criticism that the PC business, where she will still be chairman of the board, is being treated as a weak sibling. "We've done a huge amount of work to focus these two companies," Ms. Whitman said in an interview. Both companies, she said, "will be well positioned to compete and win." Ms. Whitman's role as the person who would try to fix HP by splitting it into two would have been unthinkable when she arrived in Silicon Valley in 1998 from an executive role at Walt Disney. She came armed with a Harvard M.B.A. and little technical experience, something for which she was widely criticized after several embarrassing site failures on eBay. But she proved a quick learner and helped turn eBay into one of the Internet's giants before leaving in 2008. After a failed run as the Republican candidate for California governor, she returned to the tech world and took on the corner office at HP, where she was already a board member. It was a formidable task. Arguably the largest tech outfit in the world by revenue and employees at the time, the company was struggling with management turnover — two chief executives in two years — and lack of a clear vision of what HP was supposed to be. It appears that Ms. Whitman has found that vision: one that looks a bit like the IBM of the West — with an emphasis on products rather than IBM's consulting services — and another that looks a bit like Compaq Computer, a Texas computer company that HP controversially merged with 12 years ago. Both firms, Ms. Whitman said, will pick up increased value on Wall Street, and will use the money for new research and development, along with acquisitions of other technology companies. "We've got a really clear strategy of value creation for our shareholders," she said. When Ms. Whitman took over HP, she considered but ultimately abandoned the idea of splitting off the PC business. At the time, she argued that HP wasn't healthy enough for such a move. Now, she argues, the time is right. People who knew her said Ms. Whitman, who became a billionaire through her time running eBay, was likely to keep running the new enterprise business for several years. "The fact that she's throwing herself heart and soul into this, when she could be doing anything, says a lot," said Maynard Webb, the chairman of Yahoo, who worked with Ms. Whitman at eBay for seven years. "If she is announcing this to the world it is because she is completely convinced it is the right thing to do." During her time at eBay, Ms. Whitman made several fateful decisions, including the purchases of Skype and PayPal, which took years to make into successes. A move into China was eventually reversed. In every case, Mr. Webb said, Ms. Whitman "gets insights that come from mucking in data, then she socializes it, and gets lots of opinions. "We'd go to the board with a ‘white hat' and a ‘black hat' version of how things might work out, all the wonderfuls and all the horribles," said Mr. Webb. "Everyone looked at all the pieces, and everyone reached a decision. I'd assume every major executive and board member is on board with this decision." Ms. Whitman was equally focused on measurement during her gubernatorial campaign. An aide who worked with her there said Ms. Whitman obsessed about her poll numbers and wanted to personally lead fund-raising efforts, a level of micromanagement that campaign officials tried to discourage. But Ms. Whitman viewed both as a measure of her success — her standing in the polls was the equivalent of her company's stock price, and the amount of money raised was analogous to the amount of revenue generated by a company, according to the former staff member. Others who know Ms. Whitman say her role as a relative newcomer to HP allowed her to make a striking move. "She doesn't have any romantic nostalgia to hold onto things that don't make sense anymore," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a management professor at Yale University who has also known Ms. Whitman since eBay. "This really is driven strategically." At the end of HP's last fiscal year, revenue from the two proposed companies was almost equal, with each having half of HP's total revenue of $112.3 billion. Both companies would still be among the Fortune 50. HP, which had 317,500 employees at the end of its last fiscal year, also said that a program of retirement and layoffs announced in 2012 would eventually reach 55,000 people, 5,000 more than previous plans. The split is expected to be completed in October 2015. In other ways, including markets, competitors and possibly prospects for profitability, the two companies are markedly different. HP Enterprise is targeting a market that appears full of potential innovations, while HP Inc. seems stuck in the low-margin consumer hardware business that has proved a slog for companies not named Apple or Samsung. As a result, critics say the split will not fix HP's problems — it only divides them. Count among those critics Michael Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell Inc., a longtime HP competitor in PCs and servers. In an internal note to his vice presidents, Mr. Dell said "I suspect that the only reason to do what these news reports indicate is that the current HP leaders ultimately want to sell one or more parts of the company." Wall Street cheered word of the split, sending HP shares up 4.74 percent, to $36.87, on Monday. Over the long term, however, many expressed skepticism that the two companies would be any better off. "This is not a spinout like PayPal from eBay, where a company is now free to grow unchecked. These are all growth-challenged businesses," said Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein. Ms. Whitman said she was hoping innovation in new technologies like 3-D printing would buoy HP Inc.'s prospects. But she sounded a realistic note about its prospects. "I don't think this company will take on Apple and Samsung," Ms. Whitman said.
