Product Lines 72, 3D, and 71 were the traditional maintenance services that HP had provided for buyers and users of computer systems and was primarily focused on post sales maintenance. In recent years, these businesses had experienced declining growth rate. Prices of computer products continued to drop, even ad their performance improved. This trend was especially prevalent in the hardware maintenance business. Support expenditure, typically capped at a percentage of total IT expenditure, was thus greatly affected by this trend.
Product Lines 6N and 6L were the newer businesses WCSO had set up to counter the slower growth of the traditional maintenance businesses. They required higher investment and typically had lower profitability. The selling model for these product lines were also different. requiring more direct selling, as it was not always possible to leverage support revenues off computational product sales as was more often the case in the traditional maintenance businesses.