It’s like a baseball team that’s stuck with a bunch of bad contracts. Highly paid players who can’t bat their weight. Some are out of shape sluggers past their prime, some are highly paid rookies who just can’t handle the competition of the big leagues. So the GM, in this case HP CEO Leo Apotheker, blows it all up, cuts players, ditches contracts, trades, and rebuilds with a new philosophy.

In this case: enterprise. As Ina Fried from All Things D said on our show this morning, HP wants to be IBM and not Dell. It wants to build within businesses and get out of the cut throat game of personal devices where it has been getting its butt kicked – hard and rhythmically- for some time.

So Apotheker kills the poor-selling TouchPad, kills the Pre phone, kills the Veer phone. Looks like the purchase of business search software company Autonomy for 10.2 billion dollars lights the way to that shift.

HP stocks are being bludgeoned this morning (fans hate rebuilding years) but only time will tell if HP can get back into contention.