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HP and Apple Separate; Apple gets Custody
Kasracer writes "Yesterday, The Register reported that HP separated from Apple's iPod selling agreement. 'Doing its best to erase Carly Fiorina's mistakes, HP has culled an iPod reselling agreement in place with Apple since January of 2004.' It is unclear whether or not HP will create an mp3 player or partner with another computer to fill the void."
or did I miss the point of the partnership in the first place?
[optikshell.com] My weblog / gathering of neat (read geek) stuff.
Out of the $1.2billion from iPod sales made by Apple, HP contributed $15million.
That's not much in the scheme of things, and even less when you consider the size of most of HP's other markets.
The iPod line was changing quicker than HP was getting updated models, currently a sub-generation behind with just getting the 30GB Photo in and Apple cut it from their own line, I think that's about a three or so month delay.
As the Register article points out, it points out that HP really wasn't about "invent", despite their logo.
"Partner with another computer to fill the void?"
Does nobody edit these submissions?
What HP really needed to make this deal a winner was an "HP Store". They could have employees dress all trendy and sell HP products and accessories for their iPod, as well as explain this whole deal to the public.
...It's an HP iPod!"
"So, this is an iPod, right?"
"No way, man. It's an HP iPod"
"But it looks like an iPod"
(pause) "Righteous! But it's totally an HP iPod. See this logo on the back?"
"But I wanted to get one of those iPods my friends have. I thought this was one."
(longer pause)
http://www.walkingtaco.com
The day they quit making calculators is the day everybody knew HP's strategy was going to become utterly wrong. Whatever venture they decided to pursue after that can be safely regarded as not-very-sensible. The wording of their PR statement after the iPod settlement simply confirms that they still don't have a clue what to do next.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How did such an agreement ever make sense from HP's point of view? When people buy an iPod they're often buying into the ethos as well as the functionality. They want the brand. HP re-marketing iPods is just brand dilution. And there was nothing special about 'their' model anyway.
I can totally understand HP's position on this. Selling the iPod doesn't fit into their current corporate strategy of offering products that absolutely nobody wants.
As far as I know, their contract stated that HP has to wait until 2006 before they can release their own MP3 player.
Unlike what the article says, at least for a while (a year I think), HP cannot make its own MP3 player or sell another one, because of a Non-Competition agreement they made with Apple at the beginning of their iPod selling. I mean, it is possible that they decided this period of time without an MP3 player for sale was worth it for what they would do after, but who knows what will happen at that point.
All of the iPods HP ever sold were compatible with both platforms out of the box. I don't even think they sold the 3G ones, but I can't remember for sure. You have to use iTunes to set it up initially anyway and you can always reformat it to use the other platform later.
I can see a salesperson saying something stupid like that. After all, mauve databases have the most RAM.
I'm not surprised at this. Apple weren't really all that bothered with this, it would only generate so many sales. Apple are all ready selling iPods in almost every shop imaginable, so it won't harm then, and HP aren't gonna make much money, since who want's an HP iPod when you can get a real one straight from Apple. Frankly I'm surprised it lasted this long. I doubt HP will bother trying to develop something. After all, Apple already have like 85% of the market wrapped up, and what they don't, Creative and iRiver can haggle over. By the way, just once could we please have some actual reporting from Slashdot, not reposts from The Register or BoingBoing.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
No wireless. Same size as an Apple iPod. Lame.
I never got why HP did this. It looked nothing more than what it probably was--a desperate attempt to try to cash in on a popular name. Was there any reason to buy an HP iPod instead of an Apple one? Same price, same warranty, same everything, right? Didn't even have an HP logo on it, IIRC. I always thought the only people who would buy one were people who bought one at the same time they were buying a machine. Is it worth it to advertise, track inventory, etc., for what must have been only a handful of sales? (Evidently not.) No sense mentioning that carrying a competitor's product always seemed pretty dumb.
I hate to sound like one of those people who say "Apple is perfect and everyone should copy them" but one of the good things Apple has done recently is simplify and standardize their line and ComHPaq should really follow. PowerMac and PowerBook have been around for ages, and even if people might not know the name "powermac" (thinking instead of it as just "a Macintosh") there are just as many people who think *any* notebook is "a powerbook." iMac and iBook have both been around for over 5 years. Those items, plus the iPod, are the core of their line and just about everyone knows them. Those items, plus the Mac mini, eMac, and displays, are pretty much Apple's *entire line*, so it's easy to figure out what's going on, there is very little overlap and, even more importantly, clear distinctions as to *why* you should buy one over another--not just categories for categories' sake. (The only fuzziness comes from the 12" PowerBook. Lots of people ask me about that versus the iBooks, especially now that the iBooks have G4s. Otherwise, everything else is clear as day. People pretty much look at the line and figure out what they want in a few minutes.)
OTOH, only a few people even recognize the names 'Presario' and 'Pavilion' (nothing like carrying two lines that totally overlap; I see no difference today compared to how the lines were when HP & CPQ were two companies) and beond the general product names, look at the items--d4100y, d4100e, a1050y, a1010y, a1030e, a1000y, SR1020T, SR1010Z, SR1020V. (Yes, the mix of upper- and lower-case letters is just as ComHPaq describes them.) What the fuck is all that?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I think Godwin needs to come up with another law, the one that says at some point in a discussion, someone will find a way to point the finger of blame at Microsoft.
Wouldn't this be a perfect opportunity to engage their creative forces and reinforce their "Invent" slogan?
Just look at their line of PC's. They are just branded and assembled from off the shelf parts and motherboards leaving really nothing to distinguish them from the hundreds other PC assemblers. They don't even have unique software to offer as it all comes from another company (MSFT) now. HP Invent? Sure, if the definition of Invention is it take some product and slap on a sticker.
Their whole business model, outside of printers, is to resell other companies products as their own brand.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
For an iPod out of the box. They are all HFS+, but if you install the PC software before connecting the iPod it will prompt you to restore it to be FAT32. If you connect the iPod before installing the software, things get all confused, the OS will prompt you to reformat it, and it'll cease to play music until you restore it.
There used to be FAT32 iPods and HFS+ iPods from the factory, but not any more.
iPods don't journal their HFS+. I'm honestly not quite sure what good journalling HFS+ is anyway, I've seen many friends have their drive go corrupt even with journalling on, and it does slow things down a skosh too.
Same price, same warranty, same everything, right? Didn't even have an HP logo on it
;-)
Quick correction.......
Same price, different warranty, different accessories, and yes, an HP logo. But nice try! Go work for CNN or Fox.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Don't make me laugh. Sony pre-announced the VAIO Pocket over one year ago. In that time, Apple has sold, what, something like 18 million plus iPods?
3Q2005 iPod sales ~= 6.2 million units
2Q2005 iPod sales ~= 5.3 million units
1Q2005 iPod sales ~= 4.5 million units
4Q2004 iPod sales ~= 2.0 million units
3Q2004 iPod sales ~= 0.86 million units
Do Mr. Robinson and The Register seriously think that the VAIO Pocket is going to "kill" a product line which has sold nearly 20 million units just in the time since Sony pre-announced the VAIO Pocket? Never mind what the rest of the world has already said concerning the viability of the VAIO Pocket...
Apple isn't stitting in Cupertino on their hands, I'm certain.
Its all about selling iPods in Wal-Mart. HP could get them on Wal-Mart shelves fast - so Apple "partnered".
Do you see any Apple powerbooks or ibooks in Wal-Mart? No - and soon you won't see iPods anymore. So the bulk of joe blow americans who buy all their crap and wally world will soon only have the choice of non-iPods mp3 players. Like creative's zen. Which supports wma (i.e. joe blow can use it with yahoo music and not have spend money buy iTunes songs). Which leads us back to Microsoft waging a DRM war.
Carly Fiorina was their mistake. I hate that woman. She ruined one of the most respectable companies in engineering. It's not just the calculators. HP used to be synonymous with quality in instrumentation. That's what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started doing in their garage fer cryin' out loud! Now that's been spun off (how can you buy an instrument named "Agilent" with a straight face), the Australian Calculator Division is closed, THEY MERGED WITH FRIGGIN' COMPAQ, MAKERS OF THE CRAPPIEST COMPUTERS SINCE PACKARD BELL, and the HP brand means nothing more than "Mediocre PCs." Honestly, does she go and piss on their graves every week too? Is she sleeping with Satan? What's up with that woman?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
No, Microsoft currently doesn't have anything to compete against the iPod.
Microsoft is not concerned about the physical player per se, but every iPod that's sold means there's one more person who won't be buying music from an online store that uses Windows Media format. So Microsoft does have something to lose.
Just the fact that Apple and MS are market rivals doesn't mean that MS would try to threaten a company like HP from promoting Apple products.
What are you talking about? They've already done that! Years ago, when PC makers started trying to bundle Netscape Navigator, Microsoft pressured them to stop with threats like increasing the price they paid for Windows, or revoking their Windows distribution license entirely.
It's not really likely that MS threatened HP in this case, but MS is certainly no stranger to such behavior (Read from paragraph 230 in the above link).
~Philly
Carly just wanted to hang out with Steve Jobs and see if some of the coolness would rub off.
It didn't.
I bought two HP iPods for my daughters at Costco for Christmas last year. They were 20 bucks cheaper each than other places, and they worked fine with an iMac and an eMac. I discovered the hidden benefit to buying them at Costoc when one got dropped and the screen cracked. It was unusable and unrepairable. It looked like I was out of luck until I called Costco. No problem, they said. Return anytime up to a year. No questions asked. So I did, and they did. I bought another iPod, same style, same Costco.
I drop several hundred bucks each month at Costco just on food. Now I look there first for all other items on my wish list.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
At the time that HP began to sell the IPod, it was a brilliant move on the part of Apple, because their distribution network was not as robust as HP's at the time. It was only during the deal that Apple began letting anyone that wanted to sell Ipods, and not just their approved retails like CompUSA or the Apple Store. HP was able to sell them at places like Fry's and Circuit City. I know that only reason that I have an HP Ipod is that when my father went looking to buy me one last christmas, there seemed to be a large number of HP ipods from various retailers.
College Humor at it's best
Not so. In 1998, they purchased $150 million worth of non-voting stock in Apple as part of a larger agreement between the two companies. They've since sold it, and don't currently own any substantial stock in Apple, I believe.
Journaling is 100% purely a way to repair the filesystem quicker than doing an fsck. It does not prevent any corruption on a drive ever, and it does not identify or correct problems when they occur. The journal is just a log, and instead of an fsck you replay the operations in the log file to ensure that every operation that was supposed to happen actually finished happening.
In 1997 Microsoft bought $150 million of special, non-voting Apple stock. $150 million bucks might sound like a lot of money, but remember that at the time Apple had over a billion dollars of cash on hand and a market cap in the 8 billion dollar range.
Microsoft's holdings in Apple today don't even make the top ten institutional holders. You are completely wrong, in other words.
No, no, no! We'll call it ThePatrioticFuck's Law.
It sounds so much better.
Carly Fiorina, and the thousands like her, will ultimately destroy our economy. Unskilled, unintelligent, they use their lack of morals and moronic execu-speak BS to slither to the top, where they inevitably fail, costing the economy millions.
Personally, I think such people shouldn't be fired or allowed to quit. They should be publically executed on the show American Executive Survivor. Something for the family.
I mean there has to be some rational reason for this
I've worked for 2 fortune 500 companies, and no, there often is no logic to these deals. My suspicion is that most of them get done in the club house after a round or two of golf and some cocktails.
It was so bad that when we had ideas to make things run smoother the catch phrase was 'That would make sense'. Meaning, good idea, it would probably work and save the company a ton of money but either management will refuse to consider it or if they try to implement it they will screw it up so bad your name will be mud and your career at the company essentially would be over.
See Dilbert for more insights...
HTH
HAND
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+