HP's board of directors has been swinging and missing at the business plate for many years. But many of the whiffs were covered by profitable HP Services business and the thrum of PC's meager profits off massive sales. There was a deep count -- lots of foul balls to prolong the outcome, in baseball terms. But eventually that thin-profit cavalcade of PC consumer business is heading back to the bench. HP's PCs are already so desperate for acceptance they're rolling out as knockoffs of Apple's Macs.

Now HP has spent each of the last two quarters writing down massive companies which it purchased. In a flurry of ill-advised and shortsighted moves, the years from 2000 to 2011 were spent shucking off product lines where HP owned everything, including legacy sales, in order to step into areas where billions were peeled off to buy competitors (Compaq), businesses built on a model totally different from HP (EDS, which never tried to sell its own systems at the same time it did outsource work, but needed almost 150,000 people to do it) or software companies whose hopeful rise or valuation turned out to be fever dreams or worse (Mercury Interactive, Autonomy, and other).

There have been some things HP has done from its heart -- R&D -- and done well. Enterprise servers starting with the HP 3000, and then because the 3000 was a winner, enterprise Unix. Its Labs cooked up innovations in printing which remain a revenue firewall against HP's torched-up trials like Autonomy. When you go back to what made HP into a $130 billion computing powerhouse, the most potent return on starter money came from anything which Hewlett-Packard built itself. (Unless you count NewWave software or the HP Touchscreen, efforts that surely didn't cost even 1 billion dollars to fail in the 1980s.)

With the latest news, it's doubtful HP's got any other course going forward but to build. To run the baseball analogy into the ground, it's become a company that can only go out to its minor league farm system: brilliant wizards who cost less than $10 billion pseudo-stars. Purchasing free-agent players like Autonomy is beyond HP's budget, and nobody knows who's smart enough on the board to approve a winning deal anyway. Unless the markets recant, the forthcoming Q1 of 2013 could determine how hard HP's got to run to avoid being chased down in an acquisition.

All of this might not end up affecting the future of those migration platforms. Analysts are saying HP's headed for a split of the company, a spinoff that might right the listing ship to give the vendor time to focus on its own technology and its enterprise legacy. A migrated customer is usually watching cost of ownership or a tech roadmap while making a futures plan.

But the company's Project Odyssey, announced just one year ago this week, is a costly venture designed to preserve that migrated business -- at least the part that went to HP's Unix. There's a limit to how much HP will have on hand to pay for R&D in the coming year. Something like Odyssey might stanch the flow of enterprise business away to commodity Linux computing. Odyssey represents the most likely future for the migrator who wants to stick with HP's technology and heritage.

The former is the most tangible asset HP seems to muster, along with the hundreds of thousands of IT customers who will be hearing the alleged shenanigans and red-ink news. That latter heritage looks worn down this morning. The companies who left HP behind -- even to homestead on its shunned 3000 -- could be forgiven for feeling a bit vindicated on the woeful news. The migrators will supply hope of better management, plus a cheery outlook from Wall Street in the months to come