With its TouchPad tablet, Hewlett Packard has pulled the ultimate trick: it ripped off Apple’s competing iPad tablet so thoroughly from a hardware design standpoint that it was a lock for an assured, if drawn out, legal victory on the part of Apple’s lawyers. But in a clever move, HP has saddled it with the dead-end webOS operating system it scraped off the carcass of its Palm acquisition and made it a sufficiently undesirable product that it’s set to die off before Apple legal can even manage to get its legal ducks in a row. This week HP cut the price of the Touchpad, again, this time with a “please take this off our hands before we have to landfill it” bent which suggests that the product will be discontinued before long. And if you think we’re kidding about HP’s top brass wanting things to play out this way, think again.The management at Hewlett Packard has changed since the days of Carly Fiorina’s reign of error, but the philosophy at the company appears to be intact: HP is a printer company. Everything else is a hand-wave intended to comfort shareholders into believing that the company can become something bigger, something more meaningful. But that’s just not the path HP has taken in this generation. Its PC foray consists of generic Windows-based computers where Microsoft does all the work. When its PC marketshare wasn’t high enough to please shareholders, it bought Compaq, whose computers were essentially identical. The move temporarily boosted HP’s PC marketshare to number one, and while the move had no chance of keeping it there long term, it accomplished the company’s short term goals. So the short-lived TouchPad, in which HP relied on Palm to handle the operating system and Apple to (unwittingly) handle the hardware design, was no surprise…
In fact the groundwork was laid for it last decade when, instead of launching its own MP3 player, Fiorina struck a deal with Apple and then ultimately released an “HP iPod” which was literally nothing more than Apple’s own iPod with the HP logo etched on the back of it. Suddenly, HP had the iPod and it didn’t have to lift a finger. Nevermind that the deal took shape even as Apple was reading iTunes for Windows so that it could sell its own in-house iPod to PC users, making the “HP iPod” wholly irrelevant. Nevermind that the HP iPod bombed. It sounded good to shareholders at the time, and created the illusion that Hewlett Packard was something more than a printer company.
The TouchPad was trickier. HP acquired the webOS touchscreen operating system (along with former Apple honcho Jon Rubinstein) when it bought dying Palm, but while that came with some existing Palm Pre phone designs, there was no tablet blueprint. Unwilling or unable to strike another iPod-like deal with Apple, HP went ahead and made its own HP-branded iPad instead, but running its own webOS. In the face of the iPad’s overwhelming tablet dominance, and Android being the position to lap up the minority of tablet buyers who trick themselves into buying something other than an iPad, there never was room in the market for the TouchPad. But its impending failure doesn’t matter in HP’s eyes; it launched a foray into the tablet market, expanded upon its webOS investment, and brought it to a close before the lawyers could get involved. It might not count as a victory for any other company out there. But when your company’s mission statement is written on mirrors using smoke, suffice it to say that HP is probably calling this a good day.
Posts
