HP, makers of that crappy printer you bought that never works, lays off thousands

Oh HP, what will become of you? The once mighty tech titan is putting 27,000 people out of a job between now and 2014 as part of what CEO Meg Whitman calls an effort to streamline operations. The announcement coincided with an earnings call that brought better than expected news from the company in terms of the bottom line. 

From the San Jose Mercury News:

HP also announced Wednesday that its sales for the quarter were $30.7 billion, down 3 percent from a year ago. It had a profit of $1.6 billion, down 31 percent from the same period a year ago, which amounted to 80 cents per share.
However, both sales and profits at HP easily beat analysts’ forecasts for the company, which might have been lower if there had been more time between Dell’s dour earnings announcement and HP’s. Analysts had expected profits of 73 cents a share on revenues of $29.9 billion, according to Thomson Reuters surveys.

Which I’m sure makes the soon-to-be-unemployed really happy. And of course, shares in HP climbed following all this.