Slashdot Mirror
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 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'
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.
I'm enjoying my Nexus 7. I'm also one of those people that generally mocked the idea of tablets and held off for a long time.
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
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."
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.
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
Palm/HP no longer control the remains of Be. Meanwhile
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.
I see Thomas "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" Watson is alive and well and posting on Slashdot.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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.
You don't understand the roles of Apple vs HP. Apple is Henry Ford's Ford, a singular vision where you could get a Model T in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. HP is General Motors, where you could get any color you wanted from 7 or more brands ranging from low-end Chevrolet to high-end Cadillacs, not to mention GMC trucks and tractor-trailers. The press and financial analyst community views HP as a PC and printer company because that's all they ever put their hands on, but HP makes as much or more money off the infrastructure business that makes up enterprise computing, creating more private clouds than anyone else, for example. Enterprise computing is a total blind spot to most PC bloggers.
There's actually a mobility strategy that can be discerned hidden in all the noise, secrecy and speculation, based on a close reading of published press releases and other announcements and interviews.
Gram was likely spun off so that it can make deals with third parties for the fundamental smartphone patents that came with Palm, without the direct conflicts of interest of dealing with a HP as both a hardware competitor and a licensor who could turn on its customers at any time. And as a side project, Gram will be the prime sponsor of OpenWebOS and Enyo.
HP will make a commercial tablet based on Windows 8 that hopefully has all the enterprise security and managability features that have been in Windows forever, and that Apple has never been able to come close to. If Microsoft doesn't shoot itself in the foot, this will take over the void created by the demise of RIM, and squeeze Apple out of the my-company-pays-for-it iPhone and iPad markets. HP and all the Microsoft tablet OEMs are betting that enterprises are already setup with Windows apps that can port to tablets without the massive effort of recoding from C# and VB to Objective-C. They may not be cool, but the get the job done.
HP will also make a consumer tablet based on Windows 8's consumer editions, and if they're smart, will incorporate a BIOS that will boot Win8 securely but also allow competing OS's such as WebOS and even Android to be installed without the shennanigans that other vendors will make them go thru. HP could even license its own smartphone patents back from Gram (at a very nominal fee) and get back into the phone business, if the Win8 phone turns out to be anything more than the failure that the Win7 phone was.
But, knowing HP's history, they'll figure out some way to screw it up and lose money at every stage.
Taxation without representation is tyranny! Statehood for DC, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands & Pacific Territories!
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
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.