HP Shifting Resources from PCs to Tablets
HP is shifting some of its resources away from a declining PC market.
During the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said that the company is shifting resources from PCs to tablets. She said the market moved extremely fast to tablets and smartphones, and HP now needs to manage that transition.
"And it's not that HP didn't try to manage that transition -- they did with the acquisition of Palm," she said. "But as you know, under the previous [management], that took a little detour to nowhere."
HP placed all bets on the webOS operating system when it purchased Palm for $1.2 billion back in 2010. The company planed a long string of smartphones, tablets and PCs based on the platform once the first tablet, the TouchPad, wowed customers. But that never happened, and the doomed device was discontinued less than two months after it hit the market.
In August 2011, then-current Leo Apotheker announced that the company would dump its plans for webOS and throw the non-licensed components into the open-source community. He also mentioned that the company may spin off its personal computer business.
"We believe this bold action will squarely position HP in software and information to create the next-generation information platform," Apotheker said. "This is about a transformation to position HP for a new future and driving shareholder value."
Apotheker was replaced by Meg Whitman as HP's CEO a month later. "I think that what you have at work here, and which may be for the good of the company, is someone who very much has a bit between her teeth and wants to do this job and take on this challenge," Golden Gate University Dean Emeritus Terry Connelly said. "In all fairness, that's what Hewlett Packard needs."
This week during Mobile World Congress 2013, HP revealed a 7-inch Android tablet it plans to sell for $170 USD, a pricetag that's far less than Amazon's own Kindle Fire HD and Google's Nexus 7. It's even less than Apple's overpriced 7-inch tablet, the 7-inch iPad mini. It's also significantly less than what HP charges for its business-oriented Windows 8-based ElitePad 900.
That said, HP isn't bailing out of the PC industry, but merely shifting some its resources away from a declining market to invest more in a lucrative one: tablets and smartphones. "Innovation is not dead at this company," she said. "So, what I did is I increased RD spending...we have to get these products that are close to market to market fast."
Because they ended up fumbling it too badly to be profitable?
Or maybe they just didn't want competition a la Dexter.
HP made a decent computer once, and still probably do.
I just don't care how they screwed my aunt out of a 5 year warranty on her laptop because they outsourced the support staff, voided current warranties then as a "peace offering" told her they wouldn't support her laptop which was under warranty but would give her $100 off a new one. Before that she only bought HP and up until that point they had excellent customer service and repair support.
They REALLY tried hard to drive away their loyal customers, and that's pretty darn sad because they made good printers and pcs for so long.
You know nothing about the origins and history of HP if you think of them as a printer company.
Because, they had to offset the profit of selling land to Apple in fiscal year 2011 with deferred capital loss from the Palm acquisition. Besides, Palm's IP could been sold to other parties in future, in order to reverse the loss in time of lower taxable profits, i.e. like in year 2013, when projected revenue from PC will be down....
Nobody ever cared about Palm.
That was two or three CEOs ago.....
I'm sure people said the same thing when HP, the electronic instrumentation company, got into printers. Evolve or die. Applies to more than just animal species.
Gotta love how top execs get paid big bucks to effectively ruin a company.
Hmmm, about to get another spammer-stain on my banhammer...
Um, Dell is awesome. Their monitors CAN'T be beat, their servers are the absolute best and their Precision workstation grade laptops are also THE most powerful out there. Dell may not be edgy I guess (don't know what that even means) but their high end products are the very best out there.
Two words: KVM dock.
The convenience of mobility with few if any compromises.
Another option some manufacturers are exploring is 20-24" tablets that can also be used as a display for an external PC or other device.
Intel's own future plans also consider integrating the PC into displays and some PC/display manufacturers are starting to swing in that direction. We may be going back to the old Compaq/Apple all-in-one style.