Is Meg Whitman the Right Name to Lead HP?

News hit

that Hewlett-Packard

was reportedly considering outing CEO Leo Apotheker as the head of the company, and potentially naming Meg Whitman as the new CEO. Now this

AllThingsD reporter Kara Swisher announced that Whitman is very likely going to get the job, perhaps as soon as the stock market closes today at 4 p.m. Swisher reported that a Whitman appointment would not be temporary either. She has been looking to get back to taking over a company as large as HP since she left eBay

, and unsuccessfully ran for governor of California last year. She is a member of the HP board, (which has notoriously been beaten up as being incredibly incompetent), and also a part-time consultant at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Apotheker's eleven month tenure at HP has been

He has seen nothing but a wave of negative headlines during his time at HP, but that does not mean that Whitman is any better suited for the company. HP (supposedly) was trying to position itself to be the next IBM

, and focus more on software, as oppose to consumer hardware. That is why the board brought Apotheker on in the first place, despite the very important fact of not meeting him. Whitman, despite her solid tenure at eBay, has never run a company like HP. HP is still largely a hardware company, despite its movement into software. It also still has major corporate clients. EBay is a consumer company, and that is a much different company to run then HP. Perhaps Whitman should be advised on who to bring in to run HP, as opposed to doing the job herself. Names like Todd Bradley, who is the Executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group would be a better choice. He has been ingrained in the corporate culture at HP, and already runs the largest portion of HP. Since Apotheker took over for Mark Hurd (now at Oracle

), shares have fallen 43%, while Oracle is up 3%. Apotheker's tenure has clearly been tumultuous and definitely misguided, as HP does not know what it wants to be. That doesn't mean that Meg Whitman can help turn the company around either.