Hewlett-Packard is scheduled to hold its third quarter earnings call later this afternoon, but if a report from Bloomberg is to be believed, dollars will be the least interesting topic of the call. Bloomberg reports that multiple sources are indicating that HP will spin off its PC business to focus on enterprise services. As part of that change in focus, it will be acquiring the Cambridge, UK-based data analysis company Autonomy for about $10 billion, a healthy premium over the company's current market cap.

Right now, HP has more than enough cash and short-term assets for the deal to go ahead. And Autonomy is a good fit for its increased focus on enterprise services. Among other products and services, the company sells software that analyzes documents and media files to extract information and make it available via a search function. This allows companies to identify which documents contain relevant material, even if that document happens to be a voice memo.

Although HP's shift toward a service and consulting focus has been going on for years (we joked that it already looked a bit like IBM West a year ago), the decision to spin off its PC business is a bit of a surprise. After a rocky merger with Compaq, HP had grown to dominate global PC sales, and its purchase of Palm and WebOS had indicated it was at least trying to pursue options that could help keep it relevant as sales of compact touchscreen devices soared.

Nevertheless, the margins of the PC business have remained very narrow, and most of HP's competition is either suffering or attempting to go upmarket (Dell being the primary example of the latter). For HP, the Personal Systems group (responsible for PC sales, among other things) brought in the most revenue in its last quarter (roughly $10 billion), but that only resulted in $500 million in earnings. Enterprise Services, Servers and Storage, and Imaging and Printing all brought in substantially more, even though none of them had as much starting revenue. PCs clearly aren't a drag on HP—they still make it money—but they're not where its growth is going to come from.

If its PC business is spun off, it will still be a major player, much as IBM's former hardware division has remained significant under Lenovo's guidance. But the spinoff would be a further indication that the PC business as most of us understood it—the driver of technology innovations and profits—is a thing of the past. And now that PCs are mostly commodities, there is little about them that is appealing to many of the current technology giants.