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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.
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
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."
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.
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. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition.
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.
There's a rumor that a Microsoft license prevents HP from having the same people working on Windows and non-Windows tablets. They may have to do it this way because that's the only way to hedge their bets against the possibility that Microsoft will score overwhelming success with their Surface, at the expense of OEMs.
They might not even use the same operating system ...
They probably won't use the same OS. HP owns webOS, remember, and started work on the Touchpad as an Android tablet before buying Palm.
'Cause they're the world's largest computing vendor, and computing is increasingly tablet-oriented, probably.
By what measure is HP the "world's largest computer vendor"?
HP is rather tiny now, especially in market capitalization terms (under $40B). For perspective, even Facebook, which has been battered, has a higher market capitalization. HP really needs to choose its battles wisely.