Several readers seem to have remembered my 28th Apr 10 post – HP to buy Palm. But why?. Well worth a reread as I pretty comprehensively damned the acquisition and forecast that it was well and truly doomed. Given HP’s long association with Microsoft and its strong corporate bias, they should have continued the Microsoft alliance.
Then a few months back, HP launched its webOS powered TouchPad tablet. We weren’t impressed with that either. Indeed, HP suggested our love affair with Apple’s iPad was mistaken and we needed ‘to be educated’. Indeed the classroom session to do just that is in the diary for a few weeks time. I wonder if it will go ahead?
Clearly the market agreed. HP dropped the price of the TouchPad. But there were many stories of huge unsold stock in the channel with distributors demanding that HP bought the stock back.
The releases from HP last night argued about not really wanting to be in the consumer market. HP wants to be an enterprise organisation. However, as HotViews readers know only too well with our BYOT campaign, the world (powered by the cloud) is moving away from the enterprise choosing devices like smartphones, laptops and tablets towards these being an employee choice. And in this argument do not forget the 4m self employed and the 6m businesses run from people’s home (that’s in the UK alone) Enterprise companies don’t go near them. Already in the UK (according to IDC’s latest research) the consumer PC market is bigger than the enterprise market if you include tablets.
Having said that, just like I applauded IBM's decision to quit the low margin PC business (and, indeed, suggested that others follow that route) I don't question the logic of HP's move to spinoff their PC operations. I do question 1) the logic of why they got into in the first place with their 2002 acquisition of Compaq 2) why they waited so long 3) the wisdom of pre-announcing this. Just look what happened to Nokia in similar situation.