HP left neither bloodied nor bowed

OK, so we know we've been like a bear with a sore head and a dog with a bone on HP's scandal over its casting a gimlet eye on leaky board members and reporters covering the HP beat.

Now that the old garage startup has come clean and purged Ms Dunn and another member of the board, a visitor from Mars might think that its stock could assume a slow rise back to erstwhile heights. The truth is that HP's value has hardly wobbled throughout the entire mulligatawny of men who came in from the cold, perfect spies and other tales of espionage derring-do.

As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, HP's stock has neither risen nor fallen, much, on the nasty-sounding headlines.

Listen up to some of these quotes:

"If you start seeing board members being indicted, that could lead to a depression in the stock a little."

"Now that Mark Hurd is there, Patricia Dunn has done her job. She brought Mark Hurd in -- she's not needed."

"Sales productivity could be impacted if clients want to talk about it, so some business could slip into the following quarter,"

And to think they say that journalists are the ones that think ethics is a county east of London. µ