Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

I go back and forth on HP-gate. One day I'll dismiss it as utterly irrelevant to the things that concern me as a consumer and a marketing dweeb. The next day, like today when I read that ex-board honchette Patricia Dunn is due for papers ( Former Leader of H.P. Is Indicted), my PR-side starts screaming in my ear that this will slime the company in perpetuity. Still, I dunno. The company fundamentals are rock solid, it has one of the best CEOs around in Mark Hurd, and I get no impression that anyone's going to boycott their gear. Insofar as its gilded reputation, I've never bought into the media-fueled mythology about any commercial enterprise. I don't care who it is -- HPQ, AAPL GOOG, SBUX, et. al. In the final analysis, everything and anything a company -- any company -- does is all about business (read: ownership interests), not humanitarianism. This is as it should be. I guess the observation that transcends all my other takes on the morality and integrity, or lack thereof, of spying on people in and out of your company, is is this: would the media, themselves professional snoopers, have gone as nuclear as they have on this thing had they not been one of the snoopees? I mean, if Cnet hadn't been targeted in the first place, would the rest of the media have heard this tree fall in the forest? You gotta wonder.