HP to spin off PC business to focus on enterprise software - Page 6

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011...y.html?_r=1&hp

I think you are seeing the results of a top-level decision made a while ago -- when it became clear that the TouchPad wasn't going to sell in its current incarnation. What, likely, happened then, was that the people responsible for the TouchPad convinced top management to give them another chance: reduce the price of current product, extend resellers; payment terms, clear the inventory and accelerate work on a follow-on. However, the price discount/reduction didn't goose sales and events overtook them:
--The BestBuy issue made it all public
--The upcoming Stockholders meeting
--They wouldn't be able to hide the devices in the channel as devices sold
--The disruptive changes planned for other parts of the company

The biggest thing, IMO, is the politics -- The new CEO was tasked with turning HP around, The PSG is not his area of expertise, He followed the "experts" advice and it didn't work. Lastly, this problem was created by his predecessors -- he had to end it or own it -- easy choice.

...then there is that "public vote of confidence" followed shortly with a "public crucifixion" thing.

Some things about it are nice, but overall, it's not that great. The average person doesn't want to be bothered learning it, and it does have a steeper learning curve than iOS. That's true of Honeycomb as well.

It has its limits as has been pointed out by the reviewers. Unfortunately, a product has to be pretty good out of the starting gate these days. The standards have risen because of Apple. Good enough no longer wins the race, or even comes in the money.

I'll point out again that this wasn't HPs' fault. The product line was dead before they bought the company, and the Touchpad was developed by Rubenstein and his team from Palm. They were the ones who screwed it up. HP supplied support, money and marketing to get the interest up. But the products were flawed from the get go, and nothing any company could have done would have saved it.

That's a joke, right?

Good question. Some thinking is that it logically follows with the computer division. At one tine, all of HPs' profits were from ink sales.

Rip palm. Perhapsnrubenstein should come back to apple and help apple with a major design overhaul of iOS UI.

Ha!

You know your Gov. Moonbeam!

I never thought I'd say this but The Gov is trying, he has some reasonable ideas, and seems to be getting things done ... He's not your Earl Warren or Goodie Knight, tho

We moved to CA from Tucson (then there and back again) Every third person and politician in Tucson is named Ronstadt.

Yeah, just what we need. The guy responsible for the disaster at Palm comes back to Apple to engineer a disaster there.

As long as they don't drink tea, they're ok.

We have iOS 5 beta running on an iP4, 2 iPad 2s and an iPad 1. There have been intermittent issues, but no show-stoppers.

It really is a very nice OS -- the iP4 with iOS 5 does everything that i want a phone to do, and more.

It also does everything well on both versions of iPads -- but, I want Apple to keep pushing the envelope on the iPad, more, faster, better, smoother...

When iOS 5 and iCloud arrive this fall, I suspect that iPads will solve the computer needs for many households... no tethering needed!

The industry is a pendulum.

Blame the one writer here that always gets the blame.

Not really.

They do make some cheap crap, but they also do nice high-end business units, like Elitebooks, and consumer Envy line is not bad at all.

Elitebooks in particular are nice units, solid industrial design, metal chassis... they are not as slim as MacBooks but they are built to comply military standards regarding dust, shock, moisture... and they are really reliable. In addition, they are easy to maintain - most of their bottom is under one big removable cover so once it is open, you have access to HDD, RAM, WLAN, BT and broadband modules, even fan is exposed so it's easy to clean dust and dirt from it.

They also all come with default 3 year nbd on-site warranty, at least here in NZ.

We have couple of 14 and 15" units in our office, and even 14" i7 with dedicated grafics never gets too loud or two hot.

I believe this article is bogus, or out of context. I wouldn't be surprised if they spin-off some parts of their business (mobile hardware, Compaq...), but giving up on PCs in general? It's one of their core businesses, their bread and butter.

Rubbing sand in it...

HP forgot to cancel the TouchPad TV ad promotions, while cancelling the TouchPad, itself...

...it appears that HP doesn't know what it is doing... And, to whom!

I wish Agilent, the original part of the company, could take back the Hewlett-Packard name.

Right. So HP's strategy to capitalise on the consumers "flocking" to tablet computers is to NOT make tablet computers anymore.

WTF is wrong with large corporations? Are they so removed from consumer reality that they have no idea what's happening anymore?

I am enjoying ios5 as well. But u gotta admit the UI with stripes is 4 years old and can be refreshed a bit. I'm not saying turn it into webos, I'm saying the stripes gotta go.

This is what happens when in my opinion you hire a bunch of hacks that have more expertise in corporate mergers and spin offs than in engineering and science. hp was infamous for bleeding edge electrical engineering and technological advances. When they spun off Agilent and became just a computer company , they sold off the very core of hp that made the brand famous, the stuff that creates new products and new markets. I'm sure the quarterly earnings boost resulted in juicy over bonuses for those who crafted it, those who brokered the shares, and those who received the commissions, special cash out transactions and origination fees...... Alas like any bell curve would tell you, the PC business and by extension the wireless still borns that link their existence to the PC experience, these tablets will all eventually end up on internet auction sites or crated up and donated to some charitable cause somewhere on the planet. Doubling down on that strategy by trying to buy back intellectual property and innovation [tied to a losing paradigm] is a recipe for failure. Innovation in engineering is only grown organically, takes years to develop, and takes leadership and vision. It burns tons of cash, but what everyone loses site of, the R&D pays off in new markets and products in spades. hp would have better spent the money buying back Agilent. In my opinion the prognosis for Google and Motorola Mobile is no better. Its like watching the fate of Humpty Dumpty on the operating table.

Apple has grown organically, fosters innovation, and is smiling all the way to the top. LOL

in closing hp has been in business longer than the PC has been a paradigm. They should buy back Agilent and return to their roots.

LOL YES they are. Welcome to the Great Recession.

That would sully the Agilent name.


Media placement for ads are usually all paid up and planned long in advance. It will hilarious, you'll definitely be seeing TouchPad ads for a few more weeks or maybe even months.

It reminds me of when they used to take portraits of dead people placed in "sleeping" positions (like in The Others).


I don't know, Palm, HP, and WebOS has just been a fiasco since the best "Palm" device I owned, the HandSpring Visor line. I don't know much about Rubenstein's involvement since he left Apple but something is fishy with this guy.

Agilent is the REAL Hewlett Packard. The company currently called HP is just a hollow shell of its former self.

And people thought Carly Fiorina mismanaged HP.

Agilent wait for hp to go bankrupt. Agilent buys the hp brand in bankruptcy proceedings for 0.01 on the dollar. Agilent re badges themselves with the hp moniker and scraps the pc line. Note: not resell it to some offshore integrator. Scrap it completely.

I remember the running joke inside circles that Carly jumped Lucent after tanking her division. It wasnt long before Lucent's debacle was public. fortunately for Carly, I think the time span at hp was just long enough to insulate her in my opinion.

I'm going to saaaaaaay........... nnnnnnnnnnnnyes.

Why not Sony or Nokia? Or Nintendo?

haha, same here. i do it too i mean recommend windows and android all the time to the people who i don't like. and they do take me seriously.

It's not this article. It's what HP said. It's what the entire industry is talking about. You can go to industry sites such as Computerworld, eWeek, Infoworld and Information Week, all business sites. They are all talking about HP giving up their PC division.

HP gave some business speak today. But it was obvious that they were saying that they would sell it as a preferred option, if an offer was high enough, and if not, then they would spin it off. Other options were on the table, but what would they be? This was a major announcement. Compared to that, the killing off of the tablet and phones was a minor distraction, and HP treated it that way.

Pc's are about one third of their business, and by announcing the $10 billion purchase of a major cloud oriented software company, HP was showing everyone the direction they were taking-following IBMs' lead.

This move makes it clear that HP isn't interested in consumers. IBM isn't interested in consumers. There's nothing wrong with that. Some of the biggest, most successful companies in the world are names most people have never heard of.

HP has made a decision, as IBM did several years ago, to exit the consumer business, and concentrate on services, software, and heavy iron. Those are much more profitable, and consistent. I don't find anything wrong with HPs' move.

Getting rid of the hardware behind WebOS is just another move in that direction. It was obvious that WebOS was going nowhere. Why continue dumping hundreds of millions down that hole?

To what point? We're talking about how bad Nokia may do with WP7 which is got one heck of a better chance with MS behind it than this. Sony? What would they do with it? And Nintendo? Another question mark.

The problem is that this OS is dead, Dead, DEAD. No one bought it from the very beginning, and sales went down from there. The company was on its last legs before HP overpaid for it.

It would make no sense to use an OS that was so roundly despised by the public. Why not Symbian? Far more people used that, and it died anyway. yes, I know WebOS is a modern OS. But how are you going to convince people to buy it?

Why would a company spend hundreds of millions to produce new phones and tablets for something that failed spectacularly?

Then there is the software problem. Essentially no software now. And of it were off the market for more than a year, who would want to write software for it. The SDK sucked. Everything would have to be rewritten. Why would someone want to do all this?

Maybe some company will try, though I doubt it. But if they do, they're doomed.

Many of the posters here seem to react more emotionally to this than logically. Nice or not, webOS was not selling in huge volumes. Consumer products have razor thin margins and volume is key!
HP correctly dumped a part of its business that was going nowhere, including PCs etc.

They are re-focusing their business on low volume, high margin items like datacenter and services. If Cisco had done that earlier they'd not be in the mess they are today.

I saw WebOS death coming more than a month ago.

So the top Wintel manufacturers are now limited to Asus, Acer and Dell.
Cheap, cheaper and 'what on earth is that?' No wonder PC Sales are stagnating if thats all the wintel users have to work with.

WebOS is most likely dead, mostly because of a lack of ecosystem and with no devices out no way an ecosystem can grow.

But there are some parties which might be interested to give it a try. Intel for one (instead of software guys like Microsoft going integrated, the same can happen from the other direction, right). Sony or Sony/Ericsson or LG have a serious software problem. Nintendo might be interested to use it so it can move to the cloud. All these companies have a problem with software and are in a serious problem wrt the post-PC era.

I don't believe licensing will bring that. But one of these might turn it into a decent integrated success.

Most likely, though, this is not going to happen or if it is going to happen it will fail. So WebOS seems most likely dead.

I think the problem is that webOS wasn't even selling in SMALL volumes...

Some of the coverage in The Register for the Best Buy fiasco reports July sales figures in the UK for the TouchPad in the region of 12000.... and for the first week of August - 100.

I was always a big fan of Palm - I've owned several of their PDAs in the past - but they blew it with the original Pre, and when they went belly up HP was never the right company to try and pick up the pieces and carry on with webOS.

As sad as it is to see what is generally a pretty decent OS (albeit still incomplete and on fairly crappy hardware regards the TouchPad!), HP are right to stop throwing money at something that is never going to work and cut their losses before it's too late.

I sure hope the people who bought one kept the receipt....

You cant R&D if you have no $ for it. This is why the PC business is stats in a box with no design.

Is that steve jobs head i see underneath there!!!http://forums.appleinsider.com/images/smilies/lol.gif

I saw it as being dead the day HP announced they were buying it. HP does not know the consumer space. I cannot think of a worse company to have bought palm to try to make a success of it.

Apple, RIM, HTC (almost anyone) could have done better. IIRC, Apple's bid included an agreement to keep webOS alive and palm operating with devices distinct from Apple's iPhone line (as a counter to the possibility that BB style keyboards would retain significant market). It's too bad Apple didn't buy them, if only for the patents that will now sit in the HP dungeon. RIM could have done well with them too, by marrying the strengths of BB with the innovation from palm/webOS.

I love Apple products, but have no problem with seeing other companies/products do well. One of the ones I would have liked to succeed was palm (or at least webOS).

I would have liked to see that as well. Unfortunately, I doubt we'll see it now. HP's upper management suffers from terrifically bad myopia, and all they can see is the near term. They apparently lack the capability to think in terms of platform over product, and that's why they rushed inferior hardware into the market with TouchPad, and its why they got so shaken when that hardware failed. And now they are trying to become software centric with an OS as one of their products? They obviously cannot accept the risk, nor deliver the level of commitment required... to make a platform succeed.

When you combine this noted tendency toward myopia with the fact that they have now created at least the appearance of routinely lying to their consumers, channel partners, and developers... and it makes it almost blindingly obvious that WebOS is simply dead. HP has poisoned the well such that, even if WebOS were to be acquired by someone else, it is doubtful that many developers would want to come on board and that fact alone really seals its fate.

this is way too extreme a viewpoint. the same problems apply to any possible mobile OS other than iOS and Android right now. even Windows Phone, certainly Bada and QNX. and Symbian was abandoned because it was just too technically limited to be used for next generation products.

and no, WebOS was not "despised" by anyone, that is way over the top. actually, people who tried it liked it. but the complete package just wasn't there to support buying it.

HP is giving up because WebOS was Hurd's big initiative, and he's gone. the new guy has a very different strategic direction and no commitment to mobile or even hardware, let alone his predecessor's bright ideas. so whack! that's how corporations work.

yes, WebOS certainly needs to be filled out with the range of popular apps at least. but several big OEM's could take that on. and some will bring much more established global smartphone market presence to the effort than HP and Palm could, another reason they both flopped.

and the reason i think one or more will is because they HAVE to. not because they want to. but because depending on Google from now on is potential market suicide for all of them. even if just to retain some leverage in dealing with Google, they need to have some alternative in the works. and also just in case the whole Android edifice falls apart or is badly damaged next year as an outcome of all the litigation.

let's see who picks up WebOS from here before we jump to conclusions that it's "doomed."