David Cahill does not like HP’s stategic announcements last week. In a new Professional Alert posted Friday on Wikibon he picks the announcements apart and provides what he maintains are better choices.

First he predicts that in the present market HP will get little return on the sale of its PCM division. Apple, he argues, is eating up the PC desktop and laptop market, making PCM by itself an unattractive proposition. He suggests the HP bundle its PCI printer division in to sweeten the deal.

He also considers HP’s decision to kill its webOS-based tablets and smartphones unfortunate. He argues that it made this decision due to a negative reaction on Wall Street to the amount of investment HP would have to make to turn these into a success, when every need innovation requires that kind of investment.

However, he saves his main criticism for HP’s announced plan to purchase European software vendor Autonomy. He argues first that this is an old line company, with 67% of its business in traditional, on-premise licenses, while the future of software is clearly in the cloud. But more important, he argues, HP is an infrastructure provider, and its sales staff is focused on that market. They do not understand the business application market and therefore are unlikely to support Autonomy’s products, particularly since the company and its base of users is located in Europr, far from HP’s California base.

A much wiser purchase, he suggests, would be Citrix. This would move HP up the infrastructure stack and give it back a major presence on corporate desktops in the form of desktop virtualization. And because this is still infrastructure, it is inside the comfort zone of the HP sales force.

So is HP making a wrong turn with its August announcements? Certainly several of Cahill’s conclusions are controversial. HP customers, and those with HP on their short lists or other connections to the vendor, might want to read this analysis and decide for themselves.