“I think it’s unfair not to respect a commodity,” Watkins told Newsweek in 2007. “There’s a tremendous amount of technology in this commodity.”

Yet for the most part, investors have given the hard-drive business, with its razor-thin profit margins, short shrift. A valuation debate, plus a nagging fear about the potential obsolescence of hard disks, may have been the two biggest factors in Seagate’s failure to reach a deal to go private.

Most analysts, however, believe that the deal collapsed purely over price.

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Wall Street loved his obsession with cutting costs, but employees did not. He brought even more major changes to the company’s once paternalistic culture, much like his predecessor Carly Fiorina, who pretty much killed the old HP Way.

With Hurd at the helm, HP became an even tougher place to work, with even less emphasis on innovating anything new.

Some former and current employees said that under Hurd, HP’s once collegial workplace has changed again for the worse.

“He was profane, a bully, autocratic, threatening, demeaning, vindictive, and rude,” wrote Chuck House, a veteran of HP, in his blog. House is now executive director of Media X, a Stanford University industry affiliate research program on media and technology, and co-author of a 2009 book, “The H-P Phenomenon.”

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The atmosphere last Friday night at the Crunchies, an awards show hosted by three popular and often competing tech blogs–TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm–was downright buoyant, especially compared with last year, and had hints of IPOs in the air.

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Whitman has been increasingly active in the Republican party since retiring from eBay in January. She initially spent her time helping raise money for Mitt Romney, her former boss at Bain & Co., in his failed presidential campaign. More recently, she has been helping run Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid. She was a contender for the VP slot before McCain selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

On Tuesday night, Whitman all but announced her candidacy for governor of California at the Commonwealth Club.

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Ironic because in Silicon Valley–the capital of early-technology adopters and the bleeding-edge users of all things geek–actual sightings of the device are quite rare.

Most of the digerati around here are still obsessed with Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) latest 3G iPhone, which still draws lines wrapping around the block. By contrast, the Kindle is so scarcely spotted that whenever tech analyst Rob Enderele uses his, little crowds tend to gather around him.

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At least that is what investors learned by reading the New York Times, in an odd culmination of events that started last week, after Apple (AAPL) reported its second-quarter earnings and an analyst gently asked about Jobs’s health on the conference call.

Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer’s reply that Jobs “has no plans to leave Apple” and that his “health is a private matter” did nothing to assuage investors’ fears that the legendary CEO could be ill again, based on his gaunt appearance at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June and renewed media speculation last week.

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Take the $150 billion car repair business. Auto mechanics are a bit like lawyers. They speak words the average consumer can’t understand, they work at hourly rates that can’t be accurately determined when you have your first appointment, and they charge exorbitantly for a very specialized body of knowledge.

This means that, like lawyers, mechanics are also not terribly popular. It seems as if many auto mechanics thrive on this confusion where many consumers stumble in the dark, and frequently pay too much in the process.

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As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti (pictured here) to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz (pictured here) of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

We added these two very talented voices from other publications within Dow Jones (owner of this site), because we want to bring more cogent and useful news and analysis about tech and media to our readers. Also, they rock.

In all seriousness, the tech blogging arena is one with a lot of players–some great and some not so much–so we are especially proud of the high standards, accuracy and quality that each of these writers represents.

We will be adding more writers soon, so watch this space.

Of course, we also don’t believe in only cross-promoting Dow Jones brands, and publish a half-dozen major links to other sites daily in Voices, along with our tabbed front page feeds that link directly to CNET, paidContent, GigaOm and Techmeme.

We admire the work those sites are doing and, most of all, want to give our readers as many ways as possible to access the best posts being done across the digital landscape.

Of course, BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily remain the anchor of the main rail, while the work of Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret gets its own place at the top of the main home page of ATD.

In all, we hope readers find our commitment to giving you high-quality and incisive work–from scoops to analysis to reviews–helpful and we welcome any feedback.

That is the question many are asking this week about Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder and chief executive who’s marking his first anniversary in the top job.

Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Yang has suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” since he soundly rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo at an initial 62 percent premium. He, along with the directors on the board, infuriated many shareholders with their hard stance against selling the company, and by then forging a search deal with nemesis Google that further alienated Wall Street.

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