HP Hires Ex-Nokia Exec, Spins Off WebOS, Reportedly Returning To Tablets 128
judgecorp writes "Hewlett-Packard is returning to tablets with a new unit that aims to make consumer devices under the leadership of former Nokia executive Alberto Torres."
This particular Ex-Nokia exec was part of the Meego division. The newly founded HP Mobility will focus on consumer tablets; 'business' tablets (presumably running Windows 8) will remain in their current division. With the recent spinning off of the webOS team into Gram this might mean new webOS hardware.
What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
I cant help but think that HP are just stumbling around in the dark doing things at random in the hope that something pays off.
Re:Apple is clearly doomed (Score:2, Insightful)
This is HP were talking about with an ex-Nokia guy
Add Windows 8 and Epic Fail is no longer adaquate to describe this train wreck.
Wait, what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps Meg Whitman's underlings told her that HP's last tablet offering "flew off the shelves at Best Buy," but neglected to tell her why. I bought one for a friend who needed a new computer but couldn't afford one at the time, and as I helped her set it up and figure out how to do the things she needed with it, I realized it was a steal for the fire sale price, but it certainly wasn't worth anything close to the retail price.
Who would develop for it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's going to develop for their new platform after what happened the last time?
For that matter, who trusts HP for anything after their behavior "Hey, we're in the tablet market, buy WebOS, it's the wave of the future!" "Oh hey, we don't want to be in the tablet market, so we're selling our entire inventory for 80% off!" "Oh yeah, and the PC market sucks, we're spinning of the division, so no more HP PC's!" "Well maybe PC's aren't so bad after all, we decided to keep selling them! So keep buying them!" "Oh you know, we were wrong about tablets, now we we're going to sell them again and we really mean it this time!"
I won't buy HP servers because I really don't know where they are going and don't want to build an HP shop, then find out in 2 years that they decided that servers are not profitable.
2 different divisions making tablets? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, two completely unrelated divisions making tablets. This is guaranteed to turn out well!
Why the hell is Apple the only large tech company that can get its shit together? A while back some pundit posted a bunch of speculation over who would have revolutionized mp3 players if Apple had not come along. Would it have been Microsoft or Sony or Creative? But the consensus of the responses was that none of the above would have stepped up and we would still be using crappy 2000's style mp3 players today and blackberries would still be the height of smartphones. Go e-mail!
Nothing was stopping any of those companies, or dozens of others, from making a better mp3 player before the iPod launched. Nothing stopped them from stepping up their game after it launched and the truth is that most of them still suck today, over a decade later. Apple's only secret sauce is that all their competitors are fundamentally incompetent.
Sony is famous for squabbling and hostile divisions. Each division tries to undercut every other division while developing competing ideas in parallel and not sharing any resources, while at the same time the media side of the company stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
Microsoft's long running managerial dysfunction has been getting a bunch of public airing lately. Their method of giving performance reviews on a scale, thus forcing out 20% of the good teams and encouraging the smart teams to keep on bad workers in order to pad their numbers. While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete.
And now HP wants to do tablets again. Right after canceling their tablet plans. What do they do? Get a few dozen of their smartest people in a room and hash it out until they have a comprehensive plan that describes the tablet goals and provides for a cohesive set of feature to scale nicely from the consumer to the corporate, allowing them to cross-sell to their best advantage?
Hell No!
They set up two different teams. They are going to make two entirely different lines of tablets. They might not even use the same operating system, let alone a scaling feature set. Probably going to be completely incompatible. Already committed to one of HP's tablet lines and looking to upgrade or replace them? I'd bet cash money that it will be an easier experience to switch to iPads than switch to the other HP line.
This announcement right here is where the board should be fired and replaced and then the new board should fire and replace the entire C level.
Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:2, Insightful)
HP's tablet was just a me-too product.
What the? There have been dozens of me-too products in the tablet space over the last several months. HP's was definitely not one of those. They had their own OS, brilliantly designed for touch computing, unique features, and a follow-up product (the 7-inch Touchpad Go) just months away from release. They had poor hardware design choices, key apps missing, and remarkably poor rollout execution; but they still had the #2 tablet within weeks of launch. And that was before they killed it all and sparked the fire sale. Their tablet not only wasn't a me-too product; it was actually a product that had a chance of making it.
If they were to choose a market to get back into, why choose tablets?
'Cause they're the world's largest computing vendor, and computing is increasingly tablet-oriented, probably.
Re:Want to see new WebOS tablet, there must be one (Score:2, Insightful)
But yes, let's abandon the desktop market, and switch to the lower revenue and less useful tablet market.
Yes let's not change, let's stick to our declining market that clearly people are starting to abandon and ignore the growing market segments! If we all get our heads in the sand everything will turn out ok!
And it's not like there isn't a giant market out there filled with people who don't mind owning a desktop.
Outside of professional users (and even then in many cases laptops are preferable) there really isn't much of a market for desktops, sure they "wouldn't mind" owning one, but you're only going to be competing on price, a laptop is far more useful and these days almost insignificantly more expensive. It's a terribly low revenue market, desktops don't have any advantage that most people care about so outside of hardcore PC gamers (and even then there are a myriad of high-powered gaming laptops) the factor is just price.
Re:2 different divisions making tablets? (Score:3, Insightful)
Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc.
I had a Creative before (and for a while after) the iPod came out. It was only good when measured against the next option, which was burning mp3s to CD and using a portable CD player that supported them. Yeah, sure, it played more formats than the iPod. Hell, it played more formats than my iPhone probably does. But once you finished reading the box it wasn't very good at actually performing it's intended function. Loading music sucked. Sorting and organizing music sucked. Browsing music sucked. It just sucked less than the competition. And then suddenly the competition got better.
The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
What reality distortion field? When the iPod came out (and for several years after) Apple was viewed about the same way RIM is right now. Dead on its feet and only valuable for the IP. The iPod was probably the most mocked product launch of its time.
Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is going on at HP? (Score:5, Insightful)
PC distribution? Yes
Obviously that one, even if you were incapable of inferring that from the original post the fact that all the other random metrics you listed don't support such a claim (and most don't even fit the definition of 'computer vendor') should tell you that the one that does (and best fits the definition of 'computer vendor') is most likely the measure in question.