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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 cant help but think that HP are just stumbling around in the dark doing things at random in the hope that something pays off.
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.
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."