Hewlett-Packard replaced chief executive Leo Apotheker with Meg Whitman, asking the former head of  e-commerce company Ebay to turn around a computer maker plagued by slowing growth and management missteps.

Mr Apotheker, CEO for less than 11 months, was ousted after cutting sales forecasts three times and making strategy shifts that blindsided investors.

California-based HP also said chairman Ray Lane will become executive chairman. Both changes are effective today.

Ms Whitman's challenge will be boosting revenue while assuaging investors, whose dismay fuelled a 47 percent plunge in HP stock under Mr Apotheker. Her experience at consumer-oriented companies such as Ebay, Procter and Gamble and Hasbro may leave her ill-equipped to run HP's business-computing divisions, said Shaw Wu, an
analyst at Sterne, Agee and Leach in San Francisco.

"She's going to be heavily scrutinised," said Wu, who has a "neutral" rating on the shares. "She doesn't have the background to turn around HP."

An estimated 25 per cent of Hewlett-Packard's sales come from consumers, Wu said. "What about the other 75 per cent?"

Ms Whitman, in her first interview as CEO, said her appointment doesn't signal a shift in strategy. The
company remains "firmly behind" the decision, announced under Mr Apotheker, to purchase Autonomy, and it will continue to evaluate a proposal to spin off the personal-computer division.

In the same interview, Mr Lane lauded Ms Whitman's ability to communicate company strategy.

Mr Lane, who considered becoming the CEO himself, said HP executives weren't working well under Mr Apotheker. To explain why the board picked an outsider, Mr Lane said on a conference call that internal managers "were not ready" to become chief executive.

The stock jumped 6.7 per cent yesterday after Bloomberg reported that Mr Apotheker would be ousted, evidence that shareholders were relieved to see his tenure end. Investors pared those gains today amid a stock-market rout. H

Ms Whitman (55) is credited with helping build Ebay into the world's largest internet auctioneer, with a market value of about $40 billion. She took the company public and pioneered e- commerce for small businesses. Yet in her final years at Ebay, she couldn't reverse a slowdown in sales growth and overpaid for Skype Technologies after a bidding war with Google and Yahoo. Ebay later wrote down Skype's value.

She joined Hewlett-Packard's board in January after a failed bid to become California's governor last year. Before Ebay, Ms Whitman worked as an executive at the toy company Hasbro, the floral service FTD Inc, footwear maker Stride Rite and Walt Disney.

"It's not clear to me that someone who spent 30 years in the consumer space is the right person for an enterprise technology company," said Dana Stalder, a partner at venture-capital firm Matrix Partners in Palo Alto and who worked under Ms Whitman for seven years at Ebay.

"HP is increasingly becoming an enterprise company, given the focus on enterprise software and services."

Ms Whitman also hasn't run a company of Hewlett-Packard's size. It had revenue of more than $126 billion in the past fiscal year, almost 14 times the size of Ebay's sales.

"She's on the board and is a logical interim CEO, but not a logical long-term CEO," said Jayson Noland, an analyst at Robert W Baird and Co. in San Francisco. He has a "neutral" rating on the stock. "She doesn't have enterprise experience."

Bloomberg