Coincidentally, the same day that I posted the article on HP’s sense of purpose, the Interex user group suddenly closed its doors and said it was cancelling its HP World conference. HP World had long been the one place that HP users could gather and share/support/network/commiserate about common issues. Now their only option is the HP Technology Forum, an event produced and, no doubt, tightly controlled by HP itself.

Independent user groups are a dying breed, and that’s bad for the tech industry. The Common and Share groups for IBM users are dramatically smaller than they used to be. The International Oracle Users Group has feuded with Oracle, which would just as soon stamp it out. Encompass (formerly DECUS) is now working hand-in-glove with HP, presumably to insure its own continued existence. ASUG, which is the independent SAP user group, is financially healthy, but uncomfortably chummy with SAP, in my opinion.

In their heyday, independent user groups provided a needed forum for users to band together and share their common concerns with a vendor. Open-forum meetings with vendor executives could be boisterous and even rowdy affairs with users shouting down vendor reps over areas of disagreement. But much of this activism has now moved online and the industry shift to commodity platforms has lessened the “lock-in” factor that once made users so passionate about their platforms. It’s a shame that there isn’t a more active independent movement in the Windows world to represent the users who are locked in to that platform. Give Microsoft credit for never allowing an independent user group to get off the ground.

There is a need for these kinds of gatherings, even in the commoditized technology world. There are still a lot of legacy platforms out there, and newsgroup postings are no replacement for the chance to get in a vendor’s face and make one’s opinions known. Common still does a pretty good job of maintaining its independence, in my view. But most groups have aligned themselves closely with vendors in the interests of survival. Sadly, HP users now have one less place to turn when they want to make their feelings known. And it’s sad for HP, too, in a way. A strong, independent user group is a sign of a vendor’s continued relevance in the industry, and one can argue that Interex’s failure is a blow to HP’s profile as a significant industry force.

Give credit to Mark Hurd, the new CEO of HP, to act quickly and decisively in cutting 14,500 jobs, or 10% of HP’s workforce, and scrapping an account-driven sales organization that had added complexity and bureaucracy to the organization while increasing the disconnect between sales people and the products they were selling.

Hurd’s actions in many ways are a step toward returning HP to the decentralized, close-to-the-market culture that made the company so great in the first place. They’re also reminiscent of the moves Lou Gerstner made when he first joined IBM during its financial crisis in the early ’90s. Gerstner shook up the complacent IBM culture by cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs and making every project accountable to a business benefit. Painful as they were, Gerstner’s moves saved IBM.

I’m not so sure what’s going to save HP. HP is a great company with a great culture, but it’s a perennial #2 or #3 in most of the markets it serves. In fact, outside of printers I can’t think of a single product category in which HP enjoys a clear leadership position. The company has done some innovative things in the consumer market with its multimedia PCs, and its OpenView systems management suite is a top-tier product, but it’s been a long time since HP has had the kind of big bang hit that gets people buzzing. This is still basically a company that makes most of its profit selling ink.

I trace HP’s decline as an innovator to two events. The company partnerered with Intel in the late ’90s to build a family of chips that became the Pentium family. It was an unprecedented deal and HP trumpeted it mightily at the time. But there’s no evidence that the actual partnership ever amounted to much and the partnership seemed to take some of the urgency out of HP’s efforts to build a competitive processor. It was basically the first major computer to concede the chip war to Intel.

The other was HP’s decision a few years ago to play Switzerland on the Unix/Windows debate. By not lining up on one side or the other, the company essentially positioned itself as the safe choice on servers. It’s okay to be the safe choice if you’re the market leader, but HP did not enjoy such a position at the time. I think that strategy was a recipe for ambivalence. If you don’t have a side to root for in any conflict, it’s hard to get motivated about participating. HP, which had been a leader in Unix workstations and which had challenged in Intel-based servers through the late ’90s, seemed to fall into a funk after it took itself out of the operating system debate.

I don’t know how Mark Hurd is going to shake up that culture. It’s a huge challenge. I do know that playing it safe would be the wrong thing to do. Hurd has the endorsement of HP shareholders, who have seen shares drop 50% in the last five years, to take bold action. The layoffs are a start. Let’s hope he can stay true to Carly Fiorina’s advertising slogan and find a way to make HP “innovate” again.

Doug Kaye’s wonderful IT Conversations site has a couple of sparkling podcasts you’ll enjoy. Less is more by psychologist Barry Schwartz proposes that the stress in our lives is due in large part to the profusion of choices that we have. Whether or not we choose to whip out the BlackBerry or our laptop during our son’s baseball game isn’t as important as the fact that we could do those things. We’re stressed because we have so many options and we feel guilt and regret over the options we didn’t chooose.

Apple said it’s signed up over a million subscribers to the iTunes podcast service in just two days since the feature was announced. I’m trying to think of another technology trend that’s caught on this quickly. Can’t.

Linda Tucci documents the dramatic drop in college computer science enrollments on SearchCIO.com this month. The decline is as much as 70% over the last 15 years by one measure.

There’s a lot that can explain this: outsourcing has put IT folks out of work, technology budgets have shrunk since the tech bubble burst and competing fields like finance and real estate development have looked a lot more lucrative recently.

But mainly this is a cyclical trend. CS enrollments have followed a sine wave pattern for many years in a contra-pattern with IT budgets. It’s a constant imbalance: computer enrollments decline when tech spending drops off and then when spending picks up again, there are too few students to hire. So enrollments increase.

In fact, SearchCIO.com documented this trend conveniently in an article just two days after the first one, reporting that 14% of CIOs plan to hire while only 3% plan to cut staff in Q3. What’s driving the trend? A bullish business outlook and the need to deploy new technology. The sine wave continues.