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HP Hires Ex-Nokia Exec, Spins Off WebOS, Reportedly Returning To Tablets

Posted by Unknown on from the on-second-thought dept.

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.

5 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Apple is clearly doomed by alen · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is HP were talking about with an ex-Nokia guy

  2. What is going on at HP? by redback · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What is going on at HP? by oakgrove · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the tablet market, compared to HP, Samsung is executing with razor sharp focus approaching sublimity. HP didn't have the stomach to keep the Touchpad on the market for two good months. They didn't market it worth a shit and the hardware was lackluster. If WebOS had been well cared for, it could have at least made some money and been a worthy competitor to the iPad especially since Honeycomb Android tablets at the time were unadulterated garbage. HP had a chance. Now you have iOS 6, the Nexus 7 with Jellybean and Windows 8/RT with the full push of the Microsoft machine behind it. And HP is going to try to bring something else to the market? Get real. If they can make something notable with a 199 dollar or less price tag then they might have a chance. Otherwise forget it.

      --
      The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
  3. Who would develop for it? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. 2 different divisions making tablets? by Telvin_3d · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.