Hewlett-Packard Co’s director of HP Labs, Joel Birnbaum, also the company’s senior vice president for research and development, has announced plans to retire on February 2nd. HP says he will take up a new consulting role as HP’s chief scientist, where he will continue to help the company shape its technology strategy and will play a leading role in communicating that strategy to the marketplace. Birnbaum who is 61, will report directly to HP’s chairman, president and CEO, Lew Platt. The announcement took HP enough by surprise that it hadn’t got a replacement ready. Dick Lampman, current director of the IT Center at HP Labs, and Edward Karrer, director of the Microelectronics and Measurements Center, will jointly manage the Palo Alto, California-based Labs until the company names a new director. Birnbaum’s role will be a hard one to fill. An 18-year veteran at HP, he was the founding director of the Computer Research Center at HP Labs in 1980, where he began working on the basis for HP’s PA-RISC architecture. Between 1986 and 1988 he led the 2,000-strong team working on the PA-RISC architecture and product family, the basis for the unification of three incompatible computer product lines at HP. He took up his present position in 1991, where latterly he was controlling a staff of 1,300 people and an annual budget of $280m. He has been attributed with advances in computer architectures which are at the core of HP’s collaboration with Intel Corp on the IA-64 architecture, and has also contributed to technologies relating to inkjet printing, information appliances, blue lasers and LEDs, the OpenView network management product line and HP’s JetSend software.
