HP slashes iPad-competing TouchPad price to $399 1 month after release - Page 4

I must have hit my spam reporting quota...

I agree with you.

A price reduction from the manufacturer tells me that they are trying to find the perceived value of the Touchpad... and it could be zero.

A further price reduction from the retailer tells me that the item isn't selling... at all.

Time to take a bath on the Touchpad, HP.

Which, if you stop to think about it rationally is precisely why HP have offered this as a temporary discount. A temporary discount doesn't permanently affect pricing power the way that a drastically reduced RRP would. Surely you can see that just from your own experience shopping for groceries?

Does HP have the best product in the market? Certainly not. But their retail strategy is entirely reasonable given what they do have. Will it succeed in establishing the Touchpad? Probably not, but that's not the fault of the retail marketeers, that's the fault of the product developers.

Why? Because the OS has little to do with a devices success when in a competitive market. Under those conditions apps are what makes a platform stale or not. As long as you get fresh useful apps the platform is not stale.


While I agree that WebOS has it's good points it won't compete with iOS anytime soon. Again the issue is apps.

I resist Android simply because of it's association with Google. However it is a mess and I really don't think anybody at Google can see beyond the platform as a advertising and spying mechanism. Even if Android got it's act together I couldn't recommend it to anybody.

People calling iOS stale just don't get it.

Frankly my initiation into iOS devices was on an iPhone 3G which was frankly underpowered. IPhone 4 and my iPad are completely different experiences. Especially when you take into consideration the new iOS versions and the endless apps.


It is also going to be very difficult for Apple to address and keep their security model. Frankly I'd rather that they keep iOS secure.

Exactly. People need to reread the above again and again to they get it. IPad or iOS success is all about apps.

I agree that HP can only sell what they have in the wagon... or nothing.

I suspect they have a backlog of product that isn't selling. I do not think that reducing the price will goose the sales enough to solve their backlog problem.

I checked and the TouchPad went on sale July 1 -- a few days over 1 month ago.

This link shows that HP has contracted 400,000-450,000 per month.

HP to ship 3 Million TouchPads the first year; 7-Inch Tablet coming in August

If that is correct, then, HP and its resellers are, likely, sitting on somewhere around 350,000-400,000 unsold units (given the long time HP took to bring the TouchPad to market). And, there's another 400,000 coming...

When the iPad 2 was announced, like Sammy, HP should have gone back to the drawing board -- to, at the very least, bring their hardware into competition.

The big problem, as I see it, is lack of apps and developers! Without them, who will buy a TouchPad? Why?

What they could have done (and still could do):

1) cancel manufacturing of the current model -- pay whatever contract penalties necessary.

2) cancel/postpone the 7-inch model -- pay whatever contract penalties necessary.

3) begin work on a follow-on with the same form factor -- based on assumptions of what iPads will be when the follow-on is ready.

4) contract (pay) major developers to commit to write programs for the TouchPad and its follow-on

5) seed these developers with as many current TouchPads as they need and whatever assistance they need.

6) get the developers to announce their apps which are coming to the TouchPad and when

7) reduce the price of the TouchPad $100 plus $100 worth of free apps/content as they become available

8) announce publicly that HP is in this game for the long haul -- and that they are taking these steps to assure their position in the marketplace.

9) build a follow-on replacement that is as hardware-competitive with the iPad as possible -- even if they must accept low profits until they get a foothold in the market

The TouchPad should be easier to develop for than Android because of a single form factor and no fragmentation or fear of litigation.


That's what i"d do -- and be damned quick about it!

That includes a bit of extensive travel for winter vacation. I think android users are just to embarrassed to use them in public.

That seems to be the last hope of the non Apple tablet world.

That's not entirely true.

A temporary discount can most certainly lead to permanent reduction in pricing power - particularly if the discount is followed by other discounts. OR if it's an item that is not typically purchased on the spur of the moment.

For example, auto pricing was at one time fairly close to list. Then car dealers started with one promotion after another to the point where even though most rebates and discounts are temporary, consumers have learned that there will ALWAYS be a discount and no one pays list price for cars any more (other than a few rare or super high demand models). Basically, the auto industry has educated consumers to believe that anyone paying list price is a chump.

Another example? Cell phones. Only a tiny percentage of people pay list for cell phones because they've learned that even though the temporary discounts are going to end, there will be another one after that.

Or look at clothing. Particularly stores like Kohls have one sale after another. I can't remember the last time I bought clothes that weren't on sale - because there's ALWAYS something on sale.

There's a book called "how to sell at prices higher than your competition" which is a great read for anyone interested in understanding how to create and maintain pricing power.

True, though since tablets are a very new category there is as yet no expectation of discount or assumption amongst the average consumer that discounts will be recurring. At any rate I'm sure you'll accept that it's far less likely to result in permanent pricing erosion than HP launching the product at the reduced price to begin with. Eventually consumers adapt to sales patterns and retailers or brand owners have to change them or accept them as a permanent part of the retail landscape, but a single swallow does not make a summer.

I want to say 'No, there is another', but there actually isn't

Is there one? We've certainly had a lot recently...

Well, maybe there's one more...

Have a look at this:

Building "Windows 8" - Video #1

And here's an article that discusses hybrid OSes in the near future:

Rise of the planet of the tablets

By the time WIndows 8 rocks around the tablet market will be fully formed, with over 100 million devices being sold per year. Worse Apple will be on their 3rd or 4th generation of tablet OS, even HP and Google will be on their 2nd or 3rd.

That's even assuming that MS is able to deliver a version of Windows that can support such a hybrid mode without either gimping battery life horribly or gimping 'full apps' support.

Frankly I think the playbook has more of a chance than Windows 8 for tablet.

I would tend to agree with this!

Except MS has an ace in the hole -- its Office Suite. They could rewrite Office for Windows 8 with a hybrid UI that would only run on Windows 8.

That would make a lot of legacy content (especially for businesses) available only on tablets running Windows 8.

If they don't rewrite the Office UI, there is little advantage, IMO -- as the apps will be unusable on a tablet.

I have always felt that MS should write a version of Office for the iPad to get experience with a tablet UI for these apps. Maybe they have done that but are waiting to publish Office for Windows 8 Tablets only!

... that's all I've got!

But they'd need to rewrite more than just the UI, they'd need to completely rewrite the Suite - probably to a thin-client that offloaded the heavy work to either an enterprise App server or a MS owned cloud server. Is it possible? Sure, but it seems a heck of a lot to deliver with the very first windows 8 tablets.

Office is an ace in the hole, but there is a hole in the ace.

I know I've said it a few times already but once more won't hurt... don't count MS out of this game. None of the other tablets other than the iPad have really found their stride and won't even if you give them another year.

Enter MS with a fully formed business tablet running Win 8 with Office (as you've pointed out) and, voila!, a product in which businesses can sink their teeth.

Time will tell. Anyone saying otherwise... please send me the lottery numbers for the next couple of months... I could use the cash.

apple is doomed

I am not current with Office -- haven't used any Win software for 5 years... so my knowledge is, likely, out of date.

When we were heavily promoting Word/Excel in the computer stores it was the built-in functions and macro flexibility that set office apart. Users could almost write custom Word or Excel apps to create reports, mailing lists, budgets, forecasts, etc.

These relied on capabilities only available in Word or Excel, and therefore locked the users into the base apps. Also, MS-Access... don't even know if that is still around.

Anyway these apps and the custom expansions ran fine on the computers of 5-10 years ago. So, I suspect that a company with some Word reports and Excel forecasts could easily run the equivalent on something with the power of today's iPad.

For the real heavy lifting, they could offer cloud servers... as you describe above. My understanding is that MS is well along in implementing this capability -- so they could possibly offer it along with Windows 8 on any hardware -- kind of a double-whammy for a MS Tablet intro.

Sure, 10, even 15 years ago you could run excel and word on 486s and early pentiums but those were very different beasts compared to the modern versions of the software. Since then the scripting system has changed, and you can't neglect the importance of COM based embedded sub-documents.

Mostly though the problem is that if you want/need Office on your tablet it's so you can access all your corporation's Office documents, and the important ones are invariably fricking huge. Because the person creating the document is sat on a big grown up PC they will happily slap it full of embedded graphics, excel charts and whatnot - resulting in a huge memory footprint. That's before you even get into the corporate spreadsheets that are pure bloat - or the horror of an old document that has the amendment tracking thingy turned on.

I've worked in plenty of places that are heavily tied into Excel as I work in finance, and none of them could plausibly port their excel based solutions onto a tablet that had less than the power of a modern laptop - the few places that could do it are the ones that already switched from excel to web-based tools.

As to whether MS is already preparing such thin-client offerings, I've yet to see any indication that this is their vision of cloud computing. Instead they go more for either web based documents, which don't provide full office, or they go for full virtualization - at which point your tablet is just a dumb terminal onto a full blown windows box somewhere else. One way or another it's going to be clunky.

You can't ever count MS out because they're willing to keep pouring money into these things for years, but at this point there's little reason to suspect a huge windows 8 tablet market, even in the enterprise.

I have to yield to your more recent experience... it is sad though, really, as MS greatest strength -- its legacy support -- will be its ultimate undoing.

Funny enough, I actually have been. One thing I found quite odd: their computer prices were quite good. They didn't seem as jacked up as some other retailers. Maybe that's why they are still chugging.

It really is amazing how MS Office has dominated modern business. Sure, there's Oracle and SAP but the go to is Word and Excel for everything. Literally. I reckon 20% (some would say more) of MS Office use could be just sent as a plain text email. PowerPoint is de facto. Hideously so.

In fact, this is why the iPad is so successful in penetrating large corporations especially at executive levels. An exec where I'm on a short contract one day was "hiding out" in a meeting room on a different floor with just his iPad. He said he got more work done that day. Just focusing on emails, calendar, web browsing and PDF and Office document viewing. That and he wasn't being continuously interrupted in his regular office. And when you're on the go, nobody would want to lug their laptop around, just an iPad could suffice if you're not a heavy Office document *editor* or *creator*.

We really are looking at a situation where just like PCs "took over" mainframes, iPad will "take over" PCs in time. The sticking point is Office. But increasingly more and more stuff will be done through web interfaces, stock apps and custom apps. The other thing favouring the iPad is the decentralisation of IT and just how ridiculously bogged down work PC laptops become, once all the "work-related" gunk is installed. Sometimes you just need to grab your iPad and focus on specific tasks rather than fighting with your bloated, laggy, grinding laptop.

I think there's still huge scope for companies to move away from Office for every single task. There's huge Market opportunity still, I reckon, if you can target a range of business functions and most importantly enabling companies to easily use such software without having to go through lengthy systems analysis and systems integration. And it has to be cheaper than the "big boy" enterprise software (though that will still be needed).