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HP Hires Ex-Nokia Exec, Spins Off WebOS, Reportedly Returning To Tablets
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.
This is HP were talking about with an ex-Nokia guy
I think it very interesting to hear that HP might sail to the island of misfit tablet OS's, and combine them into something potentially really good...
But I really wish they would commit fully to this, instead of also making a Windows8 tablet.
Now that Microsoft has shown it's happy to make it's own hardware, with potentially a very competitive price - it seems like HP should take a gamble on reviving it's own tablet OS flavor instead of trying to compete on margin against Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can do that for 1/10 of the money in 1/10 of the time without a bonus.
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.
They just need to ship a 41 with a tablet sized display and multi-touch.
How fast could they clock one of those puppies these days. Microcode the OS. RPN shell language.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Business tablets comprise are a few niche markets at best. Consumer tablets are doomed to failure.
The only reason the iPad has sold well is because of Apple's reality distortion field. No one made a commercially viable tablet before, and no one else will.
Microsoft has announced its own hardware/software tablet product to compete with the iPad that has Acer begging MS not to sell the Surface, and HP thinks this is a good time to throw out the tablet OS it bought (which already has an installed userbase) and start over from scratch with a brand new tablet division to compete with Microsoft? No one has even used Microsoft's product (the few who got to "touch" it had it taken away as soon as they tried to do anything with it), or even knows how much it's going to cost. All we really know is it's coming out in October and it's a rounded rectangle with a shiny front.
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'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.
Nonsense. They could surprise us all by focusing their energies on the neglected markets of desktops, by suddenly shipping full towers with extensive, user-friendly options, rekindling interest among the common folk in owning 'a Porsche for less than a Ford.' Or they could continue to follow the pack, and make some loose change.
I mean, it's not like other manufacturers aren't also slowly pulling out of the desktop market, which with the diversion in resources could allow for an upset victory. And it's not like desktop components aren't massively less expensive to manufacture than laptop or tablet components. And it's not like there isn't a giant market out there filled with people who don't mind owning a desktop.
But yes, let's abandon the desktop market, and switch to the lower revenue and less useful tablet market. Let's pay more for 16 GBs of Flash than for a 1 TB hard drive. Let's pay more for a 7" screen than for a 23" LCD screen. So that our customers can carry it around with them, and drop it, breaking the screens, and driving up warranty insurance. It's like embracing an anti-market.
I am John Hurt.
http://mynokiablog.com/2010/05/29/video-meego-qa-with-alberto-torres-nokia-evp-meego-computers-at-openmobile/
This was from the time when N900 was the example for more phones.
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.
HP are floundering and it's really sad to see a company with so many technology innovations to it's name struggling to find it's feet. Maybe people stopped asking "what would Bill and Dave do . . .?" If anyone wants a (quite extensive) peek into the way HP was, there is an excellent booklet by former employee, John Minck, available as a pdf at http://www.hpalumni.org/HPNAR110227.pdf.
"You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be lead!" - Stan Laurel
Their product offering is "in stealth mode." So, Gram, as in WaitAndSeeGram? Perhaps they're hoping Facebook will buy it for a billion dollars to complement Instagram.
He's the one who split the company in half and infested it with the usual gang of MBA idiots while the company was ironically promoting "The HP Way" to its own employees.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
In other news it was announced today that I will be producing a web tablet of my own, designed to compete head to head with all the other tablet makers. When reached for comment, I said, "Why not? Everyone else is!"
Open-source the BeOS source code
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.
HP Mobility? Motorola Mobility? Coincidence? I think not!
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
They could surprise us all by focusing their energies on the neglected markets of desktops
I'm sure in the waning days of the horse carriages there were buggy makers that decided to "focus their energies on the neglected market of the carriage" and build some really fancy buggies...
But it didn't help them turn a tide that was beyond any one company.
Tablets are just as useful as any other computer. But it's also not like desktops and laptops are going away, just marginalized... in a way it is better for us, because instead of systems mostly being built for the average consumer, more and more only the highly technical will be buying them and so we must be catered to.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Don't be dense.
Apple has the highest ROI for apps, Android has a huge volume of units to sell apps to, MS has next to nothing but they might manage to pull off an Xbox just because they're MS so they'll get apps too.
What does HP have with WebOS? Jack squat and everyone knows it. App developers will put a port to WebOS at about the same priority as a port to OS/2.
I've never seen such indecisiveness and direction-changing in a major corporation. How are they still in business after 20 years of being completely ADHD?
They must be doing pretty well selling $80000/gallon ink..
So after coming out with a reasonably good tablet (Touchpad) HP decides that a fire sale is in order. This is before allowing WebOS to get any traction whatsoever. I still think that WebOS is the best tablet OS around. The problem is that they didn't have any apps - or not enough of them. The hardware was a bit crippled but it could have been jazzed up a bit. Now they're back in the game. Who is going to buy one of them? Who is going to go out and pay $499 only to see them slashed down to $99 a few weeks later?
The problem with HP is that they don't have any vision, any direction. They don't know what they want to be when they grow up. It's just a giant printer company trying to figure out what else to do. If I were an HP stockholder I would be furious at the idiots running this once proud company into the ground. The reason that Apple is kicking everyone's ass is that they know who they are. They know what they do and they do it well. They don't try to get into markets that they don't have a reasonable expectation of dominating. Not following, dominating. A lot of people on here don't like Apple but they execute - and execute extremely well.
HP needs to figure out what it wants to do. Get a solid vision of where they want to go and then hire the best engineers they can find and give them the budget to execute.
that HP has no idea what the hell it's doing.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Laptop HPDv4 for me . I like HP very good.
http://www.cameraphuthai.com.vn
With HP's track record as of late with crappy laptops and bailing suddenly on their last tablet, there is no way in hell our departments will touch anything they make.
Precisely. And why would any business prefer a Windows 8 tablet to an Android or even iPad?
Active Directory, MS Office to name a couple. Perhaps you meant Windows RT instead? Well, it's still got Office... but I don't see it being popular with businesses.
What does HP have with WebOS? Jack squat and everyone knows it. App developers will put a port to WebOS at about the same priority as a port to OS/2.
This is not really true. I know an interesting cross-section of app developers, both Android and iOS that all like WebOS quite a bit.
If a real attempt to push WebOS would arrive, I would spend some effort porting software to it, just to help prop up competition that I like.
MS will get apps because they are paying handsomely to have the most popular apps ported. Nothing wrong with that approach.
There's a lot of if around WebOS really coming back though, I'll believe it when I see it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet. And even then, the thin client had better be much cheaper than the existing no-brand PC they currently use, or they'll continue to use XP on them.
See, there is an opportunity for Linux on the desktop, its just that it's going to be as a PC replacement in the form of a thin terminal running webapps, not a PC clone.
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea - an office reader is fine, but there are loads of them that read office documents already. The familiarity factor n olonger applies anyway as Office will look and feel different to normal PC version.
MS has shown that it thinks tablets are the only way now, hence no desktop in the Windows 8 RT version. I agree, I can't see it being popular with businesses either.
Active Directory and Exchange... hasn't stopped Apple from being really popular with businesses, why would they bother with Windows 8 tablets if they already have a load of iPads.
I bought a "fire sale" touchpad last year and I am impressed with the hardware.
WebOS was a slick OS - swipe gestures are intuitive too.
WebOS was then open-sourced - components were released in a timely manner and then the punchline - "Not compatible with existing devices!!!".
I installed cyanogen ICS (Andoird 4) tenderloin and never looked back - the only hardware that doesn't work is the camera - no big deal.
It even has accelerated GPU - I can quite happily play Minecraft PE.
Current score:
0 HP
1 Cyanogen Developers
On the strength of the ICS experience I now own a shiny new quad-core Samsung S3 - my Nokia N900 is now facing imminent retirement - again great hardware & OS (Maemo) but again, retarded company decisions killed the product!
Office on a tablet? Everyone talks about how tablets are great consuming data devices, not content creation ones, so Office on your tablet is a silly idea.
There is used to be a time, not long ago where the following (listed in reverse chronological order) were considered "silly ideas"
1. tablets,
2. phones with cameras,
3. e-commerce,
4. personal computers
Sooner or later (probably sooner than you think), technology will catch up to make such an idea (a content-producing tablet) a realistic alternative. These silly ideas have merit, and would fit a future need. I don't really care any other way, but to call it "silly", well, that's silly.
> Active Directory and Exchange... hasn't stopped Apple from being really popular with businesses
Not just that, no. The list of things that have stopped Apple being really popular with businesses is a lot longer.
I'm sure tablets (or "consumer computing devices" to say what they really are) have a huge market ready for the taking, once you can compete with the iPad, but that doesn't mean the desktop market is ready for exploitation too - its not just professionals who need a super-powered desktop machine for development or graphic design or whatnot, but all those call-centre workers who have an underpowered PC humming under their desks. There are millions of 'ordinary' workers who have/need one.
^^ This. A million times this.
Now, I'm sure the cloud will come along and tell everyone they need a thin-client instead, but we're not there yet
Chances are we will never get there, for a multitude of logistic problems. We will have network-centric applications, but the idea of returning back to the thin-client paradigm, cloudy or not, I don't see that happening now or in the near/mid future.
Active Directory, MS Office to name a couple. Perhaps you meant Windows RT instead? Well, it's still got Office... but I don't see it being popular with businesses.
I did mean Windows RT. It wouldn't be such a bad idea if HP based their business tablets on Fusion or Medfield, thereby enabling them to at least run Windows 7 apps. But even there, I don't see Windows 8 tablet on that platform seizing back the market from iPad or Androids - they have enough established software by now, and if they simply don't break application compatibility while upgrading the OS, they'll be just fine.
WebOS could try including a compatibility layer that enables it to run Android apps.
Speaking of which, how much of innovation is left in a calculator? I can imagine making a tablet-like calculator, which in addition to one's usual numberic, Scientific, Boolean, statistical (factorials, combinations, permutations, probability) and mathematical functions, supports functionality like complex numbers, graphs out algebraic, trigonometric and exponential/logarithmic and complex equations, and so on. Maybe have a mini Mathcad/Matlab/Mathematica functionality embedded in those. Essentially, a mathematical counterpart to the Kindle. Is that what you now do?
I have an iPod Touch. I use it for a number of things - except Music . I used to use an iPod Nano for music, where all I was going to do was listen. But if I have something w/ a screen on it, I'd prefer to watch music videos, not just listen to music audios (for which the Nano was adequate). But guess what - there is no way I can transfer downloaded videos in any format - be it MP4, FLV, MOV, 3GP et al to the iPod, and have them play when I select videos. I either have to enable the internet and play YouTube, or go to Safari and then to a website that has it.
Normally, I use this toy if I am somewhere other than home waiting for something, such as waiting for a meal in a restaurant, waiting for my car to get fixed, waiting in the waiting room of a clinic, et al, where it's a good way to kill time. I'm not likely to have internet access at any of these places, plus the danger of malware would also be there. As a result, on this thing, if I'm offline, I play one of the many games I have - just like I would have had I had an iPad. For a couple of weeks, my monitor was out before I got a replacement, and during that time, I used this to do some limited internet access. It's also handy as a calculator, and I also occasionally check the weather, the stocks, the map, the time in another country, Had I been in the habit, I might even have used the Notes to plan things, like shopping lists and so on.
But as a music device, never! For that, I downloaded my favorite music videos from YouTube onto a micro SD, convert it into 3GP format using Format Factory, put that in my phone (which is not an iPhone), and play it there. It works great. I have no idea whether I could have done that had I had an iPhone.
P.S. Why is the above modded Flamebait, at the time of this writing?
The Asus Transformer may be an interesting idea for some businesses.
I imagine the profit margin would be very small. Maybe HP needs to do what is nearly impossible compete with an entrenched Apple and Amazon here *and* develop a near zero price tablet for for new consumers in developing markets.
All of this while there is no way to capture a second high mark up revenue stream. iTunes, Shopping, etc.
Where would you take HP if you were the CEO?
15TW = 15,000 Nuclear Reactors. (Approx. one accident a month.)
I'd take HP into the world of servers (where they already are well known) and bring the thin client back, a lot of ideas were tried before their time - dumb terminals were great back in the day, then they were tried by the likes of Sun (but were so expensive compared to a PC), the time might be right for them to appear for real. A thin linuxy PC running either a browser OS (can't think which one - there will be several to choose from soon) that connects seamlessly to HP servers and . you have the needs of a huge number of companies sorted. Then you can add a line of expensive powerful 'not-so-thin' PCs to the mix that allow more local (ie cached) work to be done that still fits into the same infrastructure.
Of course, their tablets can then be added in to the mix and you have an integrated whole, companies like that.
I'm not sure if its worth bothering about the consumer side of things, everyone else seems to be dedicating all their efforts towards that - it'd be nice to see something business-oriented instead.
I can that happening already - everyone and their dog is going for web apps, web stuff is the new thinclient computing paradigm. It'd be nice to get more performance and local cached storage, but companies like Microsoft and Google see dollar signs everytime they think of Amazon's subscription server models. That's one reason the cloud stuff is growing now.
He put Lew Platt into place, who was an MBAer. They (he and Bill Hewlett) did that after John Young (an EE) messed up. Apparently Young did not manage to keep the decisionmaking processes lean enough.
Lew Platt clearly was a first rate idiot, but he manage to coast the corporation on all the technology jewels (PA RISC, MPE, HPUX, AllbaseSQL, Test and Measurement, Medical, Chemical analysis) put in place by others. As an HP employee I read a Lew piece in "Measure" (was that the name) and he told us that "inventory must be reduced to improve profitability". WTF ?? I expect and HP CEO to talk about product strategy, quality, meaningful innovation/research, R&D processes and so on.
Look for yourself; to me it appears that HP got dumbed down in the 90s:
http://www.hparchive.com/measure.htm