Consumer sales at the group's PC division have been imploding, down 17 percent year over year, the company said. Although the company posted 9 percent growth in PC sales to businesses, overall revenue was down 3 percent for the division, called the Personal Systems Group. If HP were to sell off its PC group, it would be following in the footsteps of IBM, which decided seven years ago that razor-thin PC margins weren't worth pursuing.

In an age of mobile computing, increasingly dominated by companies such as Apple and Google, HP is losing ground. Collectively, consumer sales in the group's PC and printing groups were down 15 percent year over year, HP said.

On the plus side, HP's enterprise hardware group saw revenue grow 7 percent, year over year, totalling $5.4 billion. The company's much smaller software group saw revenue rise 20 percent during the same period, to $780 million.

The shuttering of webOS will cost between $0.61 and $0.68 per share, HP said.

On Tuesday, that HP had sold a miserable 10 percent of the webOS-based TouchPad tablets it had shipped to U.S. retailer Best Buy. "The devices have not met internal milestones and financial targets," HP said in a statement. "HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward."