I saw personally some of these happening; while not working for HP, I was working with HP and GE and around the same time my employer divested part of the busin

I saw personally some of these happening; while not working for HP, I was working with HP and GE and around the same time my employer divested part of the business. The reason, in all cases? the companies had very different business divisions that had almost nothing in common, there were no synergies or economies of scale and even sharing some stuff like HR made no sense when they tent to treat people in mass, in a way that works for most, but can hurt really bad some (I am one of these cases, well known in my company). If the HP printer division has nothing to do with the enterprise service division, keeping it together brings nothing. The GE aviation has nothing to do with medical or manufacturing. Moving people from one division to another is rare because the skills are not easy to transfer, there are major differences in standards and processes, legal constraints and specifications. In our case the 2 divisions that were divested are more successful now; our management tried to treat them like the rest of the business and this hurt a lot, they were different. The management of each division was not good enough (expertise, trust, etc) to operate independently, but under our umbrella was worse than alone. We sold them to other companies that are specialized in these areas, everyone is happier.