HP (NYSE: HPQ) flooded the world with news Thursday, announcing plans to spin off its PC business, spend $10.25 billion for software company Autonomy and close up shop on webOS devices.

With its massive bet on Autonomy, HP hopes to edge its way into the data management space because of its growth potential, writes Colleen Taylor in a post at GigaOM. HP CEO Leo Apotheker told investors and analysts Thursday that the company is "at a critical point in its existence."

HP's current lines of business do not have the potential for growth that data management presents, Taylor writes. As many industry observers predicted when Apotheker took over, software is becoming a growing focus for HP, and the former SAP executive is in his element in purchasing Autonomy.

As HP prepares to get out of the PC business, Galen Gruman at InfoWorld wonders who will step in. HP and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL)--which is gradually edging away from the consumer PC business--account for almost half of the PC sales in the United States. Lenovo is the most likely contender to take HP's place, and Acer comes in a close second, Gruman writes.

HP could spin off its PC unit as its own subsidiary ("maybe HP could call it Compaq," Gruman quips). Whether it does that or sells it, for business users the issue will be achieving stable hardware and keeping the same support and software for all devices. "HP and Dell fulfilled that demand, but it's not in the nature of most of the other PC makers to build and stock products that way," he writes.

"IT may need to give up on the idea of a PC monoculture, as it did this past year with smartphones in many organizations. The bad news: Each of us will end up paying for our work PCs, as is increasingly the case for smartphones and tablets."

Wall Street was not impressed by HP's flurry of news. On Friday alone, the company's market value fell more than $12 billion, reports Eric Savitz at Forbes. To critics, it wasn't the right time to shell out so much for Autonomy, and taking a year or longer to find a buyer for the PC business is too long.

They also weren't impressed that the company has decided to drop the webOS tablet and phones just over a month after launching them. "Imagine the dollars they could have saved had they figured out months ago what the world already knew: that their chances of denting either the tablet or smart phone market were somewhere between slim and none," Savitz writes.

For a somewhat tongue-in-cheek "obituary" for webOS, take a look at a post by InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson. "HP's WebOS, the supremely innovative but notoriously reclusive mobile operating system, died Thursday, along with the associated Palm devices in a pabulum office park in Palo Alto, Calif., after a long bout with apathy and neglect from developers, various owners, and, ultimately, customers. It was 15," he writes. "Palm and WebOS is survived by Symbian and RIM."

For more:
- see Colleen Taylor's post at GigaOM
- see Galen Gruman's post at InfoWorld
- see Eric Savitz's post at Forbes
- see Fritz Nelson's post at InformationWeek

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