HP - Really?
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 2:33PM 
Everyone has probably heard about HP abandoning the HP TouchPad and Pre hardware line, as well as looking to divest itself of WebOS and it's entire PC business.
Wow!
I'm both surprised and saddened by the news.
Surprised, because I thought that they would eventually come up with a worthy competitor to the iPad, even if the first generation HP TouchPad plainly wasn't it.
Saddened because I really believe Apple needs some competition in this space. They certainly haven't any at the moment.
Rather than spend my time writing a detailed blog post, Patrick Rhone over at Minimal Mac has done a great piece and I'd recommend it as a good read, echoing my thoughts exactly (well almost, exactly - I just thought the Google para was funny!).
"It is time to stop looking and, like HP, face a simple truth – you can’t win playing the iPad game. Because it is not the tablet game. It is the iPad game. And you can’t make those. You can’t even manage to make something as good as those, at least not at that price. Apple has the channel locked up price wise. Tim Cook saw to that. You will never be able to build at the same cost they do and produce anything even close. And let’s just skip the whole integrated end-to-end platform discussion because you guys are just not built that way.
Oh, Google, sit down and shut the eff up because I’m talking to you too. You are the company that names your beta builds after candy, ice cream, and sugared cereals. Apple names their betas after things that will eat your things along with the tasty human wrapper that eats that crap. Do you honestly think anyone can take you seriously?"
(Via Minimal Mac.)
Reader Comments (7)
You know, I think it takes much Huzpah to claim the iPad can't be matched or beat. You used to hear the same rumblings from people about the iPhone. Well, Android devices out sell iPhone by quite a wide margin. As he points out, Apple took many years working on the iPad and also the gen1 device wasn't perfect when it was released... remember no multi-tasking, no camera, etc, etc.
HP seem like the spoiled child at school, who doesn't get instant attention. "OK then, I'm taking my ball and going home".
iPad has found a market that no other company tried to find and right now it has huge momentum. But there are alternatives and they are selling - not as well as the iPad, but ok.
If HP had been smart enough to set their sales targets realistically, they'd do ok. Instead they seem to have wanted to take over top spot, and after just weeks they give up. Who ever would risk buying something new from HP now?
A year from now, Android tablets might be worth buying and they'll probably get half the tablet market. This is great for Apple owners, as Apple will need to move iPad forward (iOS 5 for example, finally giving cable free updates).
Loved his post as well, particularly "Apple names their betas after things that will eat your things..."
I too was a little surprised I had hoped that this, together with the announcement that HP was spinning off its PC group, would bring to an end to the 'market share is everything' mantra. Looks like I was wrong.....
@Ian - I have to disagree. This was not a decision taken lightly. The CEO is trying to build shareholder value. He evaluated the market, the ROI he expects and didn't see that it was viable.
As far as the PC business... while it is a bit surprising they did it so soon but not 100% unexpected. A growing percentage of a shrinking market is not way to grow your business long term.
The computer market is moving towards mobile devices and servers. The desktop market is shrinking every day. I think more and more even homes are going to move to a home "server" with diskless clients and as I said, mobile devices.
I think this gives Dell a great opportunity to be "the" company that provides home servers, machines that you put in the closet to serve media, host remote clients via VMs, etc. Also, the "cloud" still needs servers. Business still need servers. The "PC" of today is becoming the mainframe of yesterday.
BOb
"The CEO ... evaluated the market, the ROI he expects and didn't see that it was viable" - this is a process that should be done *before* a year and $$$ is spent, developing and launching the product. Doing it just weeks after launch is the sign of a spoiled HP "ego".
Got this today from HP webOS developer team, make of it what you will but this really is no way to treat your independent developers. Kill the golden goose then dangle a carrot of something happening. Do they not realise that developers make a living out of this and to kill off the hardware platform kills of the development particularly if you do not announce any plans to transfer the OS or hardware development elsewhere.
"Dear HP webOS Developer
We have opened the next chapter for webOS, and we understand that you must have many questions. Yesterday we announced that we will focus on the future of webOS as a software platform but we will no longer be producing webOS devices. While this was a difficult decision, it's one that will strengthen our ability to focus on further innovating with webOS as we forge our path forward. Throughout this journey, our developers will continue to be a vital part of the future of webOS. "