back to article HP chief bows to Jobsian cult

Why is HP killing its webOS tablet and hoping to spin-off its PC business? Apple. During HP's quarterly earnings call with reporters and analysts on Thursday afternoon, company CEO Leo Apotheker explained the company's unexpected about-face with an admission that may seem paradoxical on the surface, but ultimately makes …

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  1. Chris Comley

    Too soon?

    I'm a little baffled that this is happening less than a month after the Touchpad launched. Were they expecting to out-perform Ipad sales in the first two weeks? World domination by tuesday lunchtime?

    I bought a touchpad early. The hardware is brilliant. WebOs is pretty good. The supplied apps are not bad though I had assumed they would be amenable to feedback and tweaking. They clearly needed to get more apps on board, I assumed this would happen and sat back to wait...

    This feels like they've put their shirt on a horse in the 2:30 at Epsom, then torn up the ticket in disgust before the horses are even out of the stalls...

    The only good news is, I've had my touchpad such a short time I shall surely have no trouble returning it for a full refund.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fiorina in 'not worst boss of HP ever' shock?

    HP really have made a fist of this acquisition which let's face it means the end of WebOS. If the company who own it have no faith in its ability to shift boxes there's no chance another company is going to license WebOS for their own devices. So it looks like Palm is reduced to a nice set of patents to beat other tech companies about with.

    And the other thing is the astonishing rate of consolidation we're seeing right now - Nokia, Motorola and now HP all being rendered more or less irrelevant in mapping the future of mobile devices. And this news must surely lengthen the odds on RIM remaining independent for much longer.

  3. I understand now
    Thumb Down

    Did they really try hard enough?

    I can't recall any HP tablet adverts. As for lack of traction, I've heard plenty of "software is great, hardware is okay, but HP/Palm are neglecting it" from reviewers.

    I wonder who will fill the void.

  4. Miek

    Um, the real reason is ..

    .. probably, WebOS. I know it's not that bad, but no-one has been hyping it and (PCW frequenting) customers don't know anything about it. The market is all a-buzz with Android this and IOS that.

  5. Patrick R
    Facepalm

    ... People want iPads.

    Remember at the time the iPad came out, not that long ago ? Everybody laughed wondering "yeah, nice but what can you do with it ?". From there the conclusion that only iFans would buy it, of course the one and only iThing from the very iMaker! Why does everybody suddenly think they can make and sell their own ?

  6. jason 7
    Unhappy

    Real shame.

    I bought a Palm Pre 2 a few weeks ago really cheap and its the best phone I've ever had. The OS is superb. Really easy to use and setup. Hasnt crashed or locked up once. Its brilliant.

    Maybe I'll pick up a really cheap Pre 3 in a few weeks time then?

    As mentioned earlier this is what happens to companies when their exec get made up totally of accountants rather than the original people who thought up and worked in the business in the first place.

    When I left the company I put 20 years into it was actually seen as a negative against you if you had actually worked in the real part of the business and knew how it worked. Basically because the few of us who had, could pick holes in the muppets who had never met a customer but were making all the decisions and taking us away from our core business.

  7. jeremyjh

    Oh dear

    Apple fans were always going to go wild for the iPad. It's an aspirational product and they know how to use it already. But Apple fans buy expensive hardware and want the newest, shiniest thing. It's not the 'cult of Jobs' aspect that drives huge sales - it's Apple's power with the people who have the money in their wallets to buy the kit.

    For everyone else, I don't think it's just that other tablets are in Apple's huge shadow that causes the problem. I think that at the root of this, there's also something to be said for the fact that replacing computers is, for the home user, becoming more optional.

    I've been replacing my laptops every three years - an Evesham (I know), then a Dell (again), and most recently one of those shiny new MacBook Pro 13" jobs. The first one I replaced because it was single-core and low on RAM, and it wasn't keeping up with everything I wanted to do with it. But the Dell was still perfectly fast and looked the part after three years of moderate use and despite running Vista. I replaced it only because the case was starting to fail - and now it will be reused as a backup and media streaming device - after all, it runs quietly.

    I haven't bought an iPad. And I won't be buying any sort of tablet. This isn't because I don't want one. I can afford one too. But there's no compelling use case for which one of my existing devices won't do a very good job. And that would be the same if I hadn't bought a MacBook.

    Recession or no recession, people don't want to spend the thick end of £500 on something that doesn't make their life that much easier, unless they only care about the shiny. And if you care about the shiny, then Apple's the brand for it. HP aren't cool like Apple are, despite the loveliness of WebOS.

  8. bamalam
    FAIL

    A poor short term decision

    HP will regret this and as others have pointed out they could learn from Apple who have retained control over their own destiny hardware and software wise after a real difficult period in the mid-90's.

    A great shame.

  9. A Butler

    The board: fire Apotheker over the weekend - reverse these changes.

    Leo Apotheker has obviously had a mental breakdown.

    HP the largest PC vendor and most efficient spinning off the business.

    WebOS a great OS, the Touchpad while a bit bulky is brilliant (hand up I have one) however to kill the product less than 2 months after the US launch especially with the christmas market on the way and a lot of leverage on the price left, looney move.

    Can the remaining board members of HP club together over the weekend and get rid of Apotheker, reverse these changes and heavily discount the touchpad. They want to kill off a division they can start with Itanium.

    1. BitDr

      Board needs dicipline too...

      I think h/p is making a huge mistake, the CEO should be fired and the board taken out behind the wood-shed and have some sense knocked into them (they had to approve the plan). Hewlett Packard is acting like a Hyper-active-attention-deficit-disordered individual. The product is on the market for what, 5 or 6 weeks and they scuttle it, it's brethren, and the WEB O/S, writing off all the investments as a loss because their baby did not catch on like wild-fire in the first month or two?

      Until a few days ago I would have characterized h/p as a strong company with good direction and products that people purchased because they (for the most part) work well with broad platform support. I would now characterize them as a company that has lost the confidence of its shareholders (stock price dropped like a stone), lost its' customer base (well, dumped its' customer base is more like it), and is about to sail straight into an iceberg.

  10. bahamut
    Mushroom

    the age of mac

    oh I can see "the age of mac" coming. You don't know exactly what hardware is in your system, know nothing about it`s performance. You can choose from 2-3 configs to customize your machine, but only by the manufacturer, you can't buy computer parts on the market, only full configs. The only thing you know is that it's shinee. And if somebody wants to buy a strong machine, have to pay in the category of servers.

    1. bygjohn

      Hate to break the news to you...

      ... But this is actually what most non-techy people do already. Which is why Apple are making money hand over fist. Sorry, ordinary people increasingly just want something that does what they want, with minimal hassle. They don't generally mess about changing bits of the thing's innards.

  11. Trevor Zettler

    Perhaps he's confused the meaning of the word secular

    Perhaps Mr. Apotheker has got the meaning completely backward. He may mean to say that the tablet consumer market is driven by cult like worshipping (akin to religion) rather than by specifications. In such a market, HP (without fanbois) will be hard pressed to compete regardless of the quality of the product that they may produce.

  12. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Obviously it's some kind of state sponsored industrial sabotage

    To destroy technology companies from the inside by getting idiot CEOs appointed who can't think beyond the next quarter (Nokia anyone?).

    Ye Gods, they actually think they're going to out-IBM IBM yet who'd touch their in-house software after seeing how much their printer drivers weigh in at and Integrity servers which can't even compile floating point constants if the locale is set up to be different to "C".

    Yet with WebOS they actually had something decent and their laptops do have a reputation for reliability. Obviously this state of affairs must not be allowed to continue.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    It's only a matter of time...

    Until someone at the Department of Justice starts bringing up the M-Word in conjunction with Apple.

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