The directors of Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) are considering whether to kick out CEO Leo Apotheker after less than a year on the job and replace him with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher reported Wednesday. 

Whitman, who joined the HP board in January, is not known for expertise in the enterprise hardware space, having worked primarily in the consumer market, Swisher noted. Still, there is not an over-abundance of chief executives in the tech industry who have Whitman's level of expertise in running very large organizations, so her possible candidacy is not completely unexpected.

HP has been in a bit of turmoil lately following Apotheker's announcement in August that he was closing down the company's webOS hardware division. At the same time, Apotheker announced the $10 billion purchase of software firm Autonomy and plans to spin off the PC business.

Wall Street did not react well to these announced moves. As Chris Nerney at ITworld points out, ditching the webOS hardware business less than two months after the TouchPad rolled out "blows right by failure to fiasco." While the HP board may have good reasons to be considering a change of CEOs, Whitman may not be the ideal candidate, Nerney writes.

Whitman "has no background in HP's lines of business or target markets. Look how that worked out for [Carol] Bartz, who went from successfully running an engineering design software company (Autodesk) to unsuccessfully running an Internet company in search of a modern identity," he writes.

HP has had a rough go of it lately with chief executives, notably with the resignation of former CEO Mark Hurd a little more than a year ago in the midst of inquiries into an expense report controversy and a sexual harassment claim. Hurd had replaced Carly Fiorina, whose tenure at HP was characterized by its own set of controversies.

For more:
- see Kara Swisher's article at The Wall Street Journal
- see Chris Nerney's post at ITworld

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