It is hard to even think about what they could do to salvage their reputation at this point. The board (Whitman included) collectively falling on their swords as a mea culpa would leave HP rudderless (but that may not even be worse than the kind of shockwaves that it has undergone in the the last years).

Right now there are a number of very tough decision to be made and none of those are good. Either the former CEOs decisions will stand and then someone without that vision will have to implement them, the former CEOs decisions will be rescinded (it looks like they will stand for now) or there will be some magical third option.

For the moment the best thing about HP is that they are still selling ink, toner cartridges and enterprise gear and I wouldn't bet too long on the latter (see above).

You simply can't run a company like this, even a very big one. Employees, customers and 'the channel' want to see stability.

It's important to note that the Board that hired Apothekar is very different from the Board that's firing Apothekar

See Cringley's post for more details.

Yes, perhaps I should have front-loaded that sentence with "Despite more than ten years' worth of evidence to the contrary..."

You do realize that 8 of the 14 board members were only here since 2010, right?

So they've pretty much reshaped the board in the past year or so already... I'm not sure a 2nd "reboot/reshuffle" will do much.