It's a nice concept, but falls down badly on actually being readable and recognisable as a company logo, not a random modern art installation.
It's likely the most abstract and simple logo I've seen a company of this size try using, so I admire this move on their part because it's risky and interesting. I do question the 13° thing, though. It may be crossing the line of simplicity and non-description if they intend to move on to just a forward-slash in a decade. I don't know if such a simple shape can do the job of a logo.
edit: Regardless, almost any logo can be a good logo if it's stamped on good products.
If they have to do it, it's already a failure. Unless you are very familiar with their current logo, the odds of you guessing what the new one is are vanishingly small. They'd have to spend a ton of money to maintain its recognizability.
That's not true, no logo is recognizable when it's first designed. The whole point is you build an association to your company by putting it on your products, and ads (which will probably be crucial in this transition). If you start seeing this logo and hearing the letters "HP" along with it you'll start to recognize it really quick.
They'd have to spend a ton of money to maintain its recognizability.
Like I said, the way you maintain a logo's recognizability is by simply using it. What I meant to say is if they use a specific design aesthetic/context, through repetition the logo will become recognizable. HP is a big company and their usage of it will be heavy enough to make that happen. It just might be more challenging since they're pushing the limits of abstraction in logo design, which is what I find interesting.
I am surrounded by logos anyone with even the most a tenuous grasp of written language would be able to interpret correctly in less than 5 seconds. IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Philips, HP (the current one), iG (the company I work for). The ones that would require more work would be the Microsoft flag, Apple's bitten apple (which is obviously an apple) and Ubuntu's circle of friends. I understand your point of continuously using the logo in order to build context, but this one is not like Cisco's bridge - it's a very generic set of four parallel lines. When someone tells you it's HP's logo, you say "ah! of course!" but, until then, people will scratch their heads for a while.