HP's Hurd hitting on every possible cylinder

Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) reported quarterly results yesterday afternoon that were a knockout punch against estimates. Among the profit makers for the world's largest tech company were ink sales and retail sales of PC laptops. With Hewlett-Packard laptops in every imaginable retail store I can think of, this makes perfect sense. They're also priced more attractively than almost all the competition.

HP is the PC manufacturer to beat these days, and it continues to trounce Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) in sales as well as retail presence. Dell is catching up, but it has a lot of catching up to do. HP CEO Mark Hurd is a formidable opponent to Dell CEO Michael Dell, so the latter will need some innovation to propel growth and rise back up to its former glory circa 2003 and 2004. Right now, HP has the mojo, while Dell is scrambling to keep pace. It's quite a role reversal from 2003, which pitted HP's Carly Fiorina against Dell's Kevin Rollins.

If there is one low-key but effective CEO in the tech business, it's Hurd. He's constantly confident in conference calls and gets his knuckles dirty in terms of making HP an operationally efficient and lean manufacturer at the same time as a marketing powerhouse and sales leader. It's not an easy feat to bypass Dell as the world's largest PC maker and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) as the world's largest tech company, but that's what Hurd has engineered in his two years at the Palo Alto company. When a $100 billion (revenue) company beats market expectations for 11 quarters in a short tenure under three years, you have to wonder what's going on. That's Hurd's magic -- he keeps on delivering, quarter after quarter.