The most obvious change she's made since taking over is to squash the idea that HP should spin off its core PC business, which has been badly left behind in the move to mobile computing.
She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, rejoined Summers as part of the Clinton administration, and was recruited by Google's Schmidt to join Google in 2001, when the company was just takingoff -- a process she drove by improving the reach of AdWords and AdSense, two of Google's major moneymakers.