Major bombshell, and sorry, but this certainly requires a breaking tag as well: HP has announced it is discontinuing operations for webOS devices – effective immediately. Just like that… The TouchPad and Pre 3 are dead. Eh. Raise your hands if this brings back those painful memories of that infamous ‘Focus Shift’. In addition, the company also announced its intention to sell its personal computer business.
Palm only just released the TouchPad, and the Pre 3 is going on sale around the world shortly. But, today, alongside the quarterly figures, HP dropped the bomb. “HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones,” the press release states, “HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”
What all this means is uncertain – I honestly have no idea what “exploring options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward”really means – it could just as well mean using Palm’s extensive patent portfolio to sue the crap out of everyone, or it could simply opt to sell that portfolio. Or, it could mean restricting the webOS to printers. Or, open sourcing it. Or… Well, it could just be PR speak for ‘add this to the list BeOS is on’.
HP also announced its intention to sell its PC business. “HP also reported that it plans to announce that its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group,” the press release reads, “HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction.”
What the hell.
I don’t understand why they finished the HP Pre 3 and put it up for pre-order and then announce they are going to drop it. How will that clear the inventory?
Same for the Touchpad, Best Buy wants to sent them back, HP tells them to wait, releases a better version and now this.
Things can change drastically when the quarterly figures come out and even more so at fiscal end when everyone is jockying for best “I’m pro-active; keep me” demonstration before the restructuring. Wheeee.. big business..
If they end up abandoning WebOS, I hope they release it to see what the nerds do with it.
Doubt it, as they specifically said they want to stop with the hardware and still make money on the webos-software.
So they won’t release it as open source, unless it turns out after a couple of years no-one would buy it
Edited 2011-08-18 23:36 UTC
The BOSS must have been really pissed by now.
Not only that… but a WHITE TouchPad just went up on HP’s US site the day after they announced they’d cease producing hardware! WTF!
Edited 2011-08-19 20:52 UTC
Maybe their expectations were too high, but most likely WebOS’ potentential market share is way too small for a company like HP to be maintainable.
Edited 2011-08-18 19:44 UTC
I’m just going to curl up in a fetal position and cry.
I wouldn’t go that far, but this certainly leaves a hole in my heart.
Palm is cool, period.
Palm was cool (until HP gobbled them up like Compaq).
I for one am happy to see HP spinning off their PC business, wish they could do the same for Palm.
HP should have just stuck to laser printers, not ink jets, not computers, not servers, just great LaserJet printers.
I feel pretty much the same, however they should still make servers along with laser printers. HP to me is synonymous with pretty good enterprise class hardware and shitty consumer goods. If they drop the consumer arm and focus solely on mid-to-large business they will likely do better than they are right now.
HP is more known for its inkjet printer technologies than its laser printing technology. Nobody uses HP laser printers or even PCL-only devices in a production environment. HP inkjet technology on the other hand is used in various production applications from poster printing to postal metering to high volume envelope addressing.
You can always start collecting old RPN based HP calculators, I know I do.
I’m with you. As an old Amiga and BeOS fan, this is an all-too-familiar feeling. :^(
…the same feeling as an OS/2 user
Karma sometimes hurts
i think ill join you, this has to be the worst news ive heard for a while. Im surprised HP didn’t give the tablet and webos a little more time, its only been a month, yeah sales have been a little slow but surely if they persist they would start making inroads.
Webos has/had so much potential, i think what would make me a sadder panda would be for webos to disappear, please Open source it HP, don’t let it be merged in with Apple/Google/Microsoft’s divisions.
Ill admit im a big apple fan and love using my iPad, but i was considering getting a WebOS tablet to try out when they had stabilised the software a little. Out of all of the iOS competitors i was convinced that WebOS was the only one to offer a real challenge, how wrong i was….
There are a lot of comments asking HP to open source webOS. My question is…. What for? There is not actually hardware able to run it (ok, you can argue saying that a lot of enthusiastic homebrew users can install it in their jailbroken ipads/galaxy phones/PCs, etc., but, sadly, the mobile OSes need a backing corporation able to create hardware to ship the OS into it; and as I said in other comment in this thread, no more open phones like the N900 in the current arena.
Do you really think HP cares about it? They are just taking care on their pockets (ok, any company would do that).
Edited 2011-08-19 05:02 UTC
First Maemo, after Meego, after webOS, what is next?
Everything point to a world with iOS, Android and probably WP7… no place for something like my n900 right there
too sad!
Blackberry QNX variant?
Oh… Yeah right .. ;D
But it could had been!
QT-built WebOS interface on QNX .. .;/
Why? If the OS cannot compete, then it should be dropped. As simple as that. We already have Android, Apple’s crap, Windows Phone, Meego etc. Why the hell do people need YET ANOTHER useless OS?
You are right, they don’t need another “useless” one, but a good one or great one (like iOS) would be OK. The more the merrier I say. I remember the days when most PC’s you bought had different OS’s on them, C64, Apple 2, Trash-80’s, Amiga, BBC etc… As long as we can share data, who cares…
I don’t recall being able to share data among any of those systems. Even the ones that were based on the same processor had entirely different environments, file structures, etc. It was fun trying to re-implement programs from school at home though.
For reference, my first computer (and initiation to BASIC programming via TI-BASIC) was on a TI-99/4a at five years old; I asked for a computer in lieu of a bicycle and other toys that Christmas and that’s what I got. In the following years I also used Apples and Macs at school and a Commodore VIC-20, Atari 400 (god I still hate that keyboard) and TRS-80 CoCo 2 at home.
The only retro machines I have left are another VIC-20 (thanks to my girlfriend; she never got rid of hers) and a Mac Performa 460 from the early 90s that is fully functional. It’s the last Mac I’ll ever own, sadly.
Why is the last?
After Apple’s misuse of European patent law to try to gain an unfair monopoly there, they have joined Sony on my list of companies to boycott. I still love their OSes and hardware but I’m beginning to hate them as a company. I won’t give them any more money, even indirectly.
But are you surprised? HP and Dell started this ‘race to the bottom’ over a decade ago and this is where it has ended up – computer assembly companies on their knees to cater for Joe Sixpack wanting their $200 computer and not wanting to pay a cent more. Sorry but when you push down the price that low something is going to give out – your call centre is going to be pushed out to Timbuktu, corners cut and even those corners are eventually cut, and any sort of innovative idea will be cut the moment they don’t sell 100million units in the quarter because they don’t have enough profits generated from other divisions to carry a developing division into maturity.
I’ve been saying this the moment I arrived at osnews.com – and I am told that I’ve got it all wrong, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well twinkle toes it has all come home to roost and once again we have the race to the bottom mentality destroy an otherwise good idea. Side note though, I think the whole fiasco can be viewed in much the same way the US economy has developed where manufacturing and ‘real work’ has been pushed off to China with the BS being said that ‘services are the future’ – yeah, I’m sure the Americans are now enjoying that 9.2% unemployment and don’t wish for those ‘real jobs’ to return to the US (OMG! I might get my hands dirty and chip a nail! OMG!)
Edited 2011-08-21 00:47 UTC
Kaiwai No shock to anyone who worked in SV for 20-30 years. This isnt new to us. We saw the same happen to the semiconductor business back in the 80s. It happened in a short period where we stopped making DRAM chips in the valley. That whole business was gone overnight.
Only those who came to SV in the past 10 years, never saw or could imagine such events happening.
Hey, we used to make everything from Semi, Harddrive, Sun workstations, to Apple macs in Santa Clara County.
If anything it was certainly the Netbooks under $500 coming out of Taiwan which killed off the HP PC business.
…Alpha 3 will be available for download in 10 years….:-)
Bummer, but you could see this decision coming from a mile away.
What would it be worth, you know the price will drop.
I like buying gizmos cheap if I can find any use for them. Can I telnet or ssh with it or any command line stuff to access other OS’s?
Somethings not right here. You don’t invest heavily in a new technology just to turn around and abandon it first moment some difficulties show up. They had to know this would be a hard sell and would take a year or two to penetrate the market. I mean they had to know this, right? According to this report, it basically means they gave up after less than two months!!!
Are the people running this business complete morons? Now they are going to spin off the PC business too?
Printers won’t save them. Don’t they know that the tablet is going to kill the printer? I see only one future for HP now. Watch that stock drop like a rock. They are selling out. Bye-bye HP.
P.S. I am so angry about you giving up on WebOS I could spit nails and will never buy another product of yours ever again and I will do my damndest to see no else does either. FUHP.
Apparently so, as I saw this one coming a mile away. I knew the Touchpad was doomed before it ever launched. Same with the Playbook.
So, let this be a lesson, kids… doesn’t matter how slick the OS is. You need those high-profile apps to go along with it.
There was a different CEO in place when Palm was purchased. Mark Hurd was a great CEO but got forced out on petty issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/technology/10hewlett.html
Hurd was NOT a great CEO! It only appears that way, but once you dig up the facts and talk to the people involved with HP, you’ll quickly realize he’s made major mistakes. I admit, not as horrible as Fiorina, but still, his decisions were not so favorable for the company. His relentless cost-cutting measures, for the most part, really did the most damage, especially to the R&D division. If a company won’t spend on R&D, it might as well be dead, as it’s only prolonging an inevitable failure.
I’m not saying I necessarily agree with Apotheker’s decisions, but so far he seems to give good reasoning behind his actions and it appears the board members also agree with the direction he’s taking with the company.
They pretty much said they want out of the consumer hardware business. Supposedly PC sales are way down.
I guess printer sales are still alright (for now ?)
HP has a history of doing this to consumer technologies, so this was written on the wall before the ink on the contract was dry.
HP is crap on the consumer side. Their stuff has been under engineered and overpriced for years. Their business tech is pretty good, but not the consumer stuff.
WebOS would have been a contender if they would have been bought by a company that said, “Build cool stuff. Hardware releases every six months, software releases every three, go” they might have had a shot, but HP goes cheap.
Yes they are, and the PC arm has been bleeding for years. Only the profits from EDS and ProCurve were keeping HP in the black.
Services and enterprise equipment is what’s going to save HP. Seriously, look no further then IBM for an example, and HP has a better hardware stack then IBM does. Let’s look at an example between a tablet and a server.
Tablet: $500 + HP official cover = $550 or so.
Server: $10,000 + Multi-year support/services contract + ProCurve switches + HP storage = the cost of the tablet being a rounding error.
Let Apple or whoever have the consumer market. Lock down the production side of things, and don’t care how they access the servers.
Edited 2011-08-18 22:09 UTC
I agree with Flatland,
Silicon Valley was built on enterprise class products, Servers, Semi, Software, and Storage. This is REALLY what powered all the global infrusture in the background.
You know, given the board collusion in a industry with basically just 4 players, I wouldn’t be surprised if the CEO of HP was given orders by Google’s board to pack it in, in exchange for perhaps job security or new opportunities that will pop up with just 3 players in the market.
Board collusion between companies is business as usual now in the USA and Europe. Monopoly laws are not enforced unless the company can’t make the payments to the forces who decide whether or not there indeed _is_ a monopoly in a particular market.
-Hack
Digitimes, a Taiwanese tech site, has been saying for months that HP is looking to sell off its PC business. I think they cited Samsung as a possible buyer. So really this is not as surprising as it looks.
IBM sold it’s PC business to Lenova. HP will sell to some other Asian company. Pretty soon there won’t be any US owned PC brands. It’s only natural that things go this way because PC components have been manufactured in Asia for decades now.
My sentiments exactly (all of it). I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Yeah, the loss of sales from you as a singular entity will surely sink HP. Oh Noes!!!
I haven’t even made the first payment on my Touchpad yet.
If you bought it at BestBuy (USA) then you can give it back inside a 30 day period.
Normally you have to pay a restocking fee of 10% but if a product is discontinued there should be none.
But I would rather pay 10% instead of keeping a dead product…
Fuck.
Now, now, drink some tea. We^aEURTMll have no rioting here.
too late…Kroc was the one with the three ipads running like a bat out of hell:-)
HP struck out twice this year with the Veer and TP. After dismal responses, they called their launches “soft-launces” after the fact. Over on precentral, threads against HP quickly get consolidated and eventually put out to pasture so you go there and think there are a lot of happy users, but that is not the case. The WebOS loyal were all being stressed out but the lies by HP kept us at bay.
I think the real issue here is the rapidly accelerating use of the Breaking: tag. Sure, this is in lowercase, but in 14 years OSAlert has only used it three times: once in 2010 and now twice in the last week. Before you know it, every article will be BREAKING.
Maybe I’ll look around for a TouchPad and hope someone puts Meego or Android on it…
Maybe because of the bad economic climate combined with how news travels faster on the internet these days.
A heared from someone, who had a reletive die in not-so-normal-circumstantes it was on the internet news sites even before they were notified.
So maybe news really does travel fast these days.
I fear where technology in the style of predictive typing or search – data mining in general and advanced prediction of trends – might eventually lead us, when it comes to “timely reports” of such circumstances
yesterday they bought compaq and killed off alpha
today they bought palm and killed off webos
tomorow they kill off their pc-business
and the day after tomorrow intel kills off itanium and hp is royaly fucked
and somehow i have the feeling hp deserves it
That is a good summary, and as an former Tru64 Admin, former PalmOS user, and current WebOS user, I wish HP the worst.
LMAO…sucks to be you. Maybe you should look at a different company that doesn’t abandon its customers as quickly as that one.
Edited 2011-08-19 02:43 UTC
This is a leadership failure, not a product failure.
Maybe they should bring old CEO Mark Hurd back. and Spin current CEO off with the iPaq line.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/technology/10hewlett.html
I wonder if there is enough WebOS love and money within management that could lead to a management buyout of the WebOS unit?
Why not license out webOS to Samsung or HTC and have them make the hardware. It is such an awesome OS.
I second that. Or at least open source it!!!
Maybe I am a little biased but my first smart phone was a pre. I then went to Android, then went to iOS, and then back to Android. Apps aside, WebOS to me has been by far the best OS. Multitasking, notifications, synergy, and just type are all things that I want and miss the heck out of a mobile OS. The lack of apps hurts a lot, don’t get me wrong, but I still think WebOS is superior.
I am in just total disbelief. I knew WebOS products weren’t going to kill iOS marketshare, but dang I didn’t think it would die so quickly.
Isn’t webOS already open source ?
Just have a look at this : http://opensource.palm.com/packages.html
Under the hood is open source, however I believe that Luna is closed source.
Only the bits that were borrowed, and already under an open source license. The bulk of those packages are also in your GNU/Linux distro of choice. There’s a lot of code in the production release of WebOS that is locked down by copyright and patents, that would prevent the community from making a full fork.
That said, I’d love to see it happen! What little I’ve seen of the interface alone is stunning, and the only reason I never went WebOS was because my carrier (T-Mobile) didn’t. There was some talk about it last year, but it never came to fruition.
They would need to find a company that would be content with a steady revenue stream from loyal delighted customers rather than world domination.
Think Opera. They keep plugging away with their (excellent, or so I’m told) desktop browser, with little chance they’ll ever surpass Firefox, Chrome or IE in installed base. But their customers are loyal, and AFAICT they make a nice profit on their specialty browsers.
+1 for them. We need more stable companies like *that* and fewer erratic mega-corps like HP. IMHO, of course.
The economy is so bad, Sarah Palin is only shooting moose for food, not for fun.
The economy is so bad, I saw four CEOs playing miniature golf.
The economy’s so bad, Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.
The economy is so bad, Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America.
the american economy is so bad Bill Gates has to switch to dial up.
…the american economy is so bad HP is selling it’s pc business.
Stolen! Thanks, that made me feel better.
With such a good President and Congress in charge just think how bad it could have been with Libertarians or Republicans in charge.
Mark my words: HP is selling a massive patent portfolio. They own Palm, there’re goodies there, and they have their own vault too.
Someone like Apple, Google, or MS is going to step up and clear out those mobile patents. Sadly, that’s the world as it exists today.
There’s NO way they develop the incredible Touchpad, Pre, and WebOS 3 and then walk away in mere weeks. Something’s afoot.
Edited 2011-08-18 20:31 UTC
It could very well be that Apple or Google or Microsoft is going to buy Palm’s entire patent portfolio. Remember: the TouchPad and Pre 3 were already in development long before HP bought the company – HP has done ZERO to make new products for Palm.
This could all have been an elaborate ploy to sell off Palm’s IP assets ate huge markups one of these weeks.
“(…) The webOS may have been off to a rocky start in the marketplace, but thanks to HP’s infusion of lots of money and developers, it’ll be around for a long time to come. (…)”
22 Nov 2010, posted by Thom
If you say so…
Next: RIM, QNX and the unicorns.
What, so I was wrong?
I’m not a fanboy of anything, so I’ll happily admit that. If it makes you feel any better: I WAS WRONG ABOUT HP AND WEBOS.
Still sure about your tablet market share prediction? :-p
Yes.
Android will command AT LEAST 30% of the tablet market in 12 months.
Bookmark it.
Hey now you’re changing the game. You said it would be the same as with the iPhone and Android will “dominate” That to me means that Android tablets will have a greater share than the iPad. 30% is nothing if the iPad has 65% (Windows maybe 5%?). That’s not much of a prediction or even a big leap from today.
Uhm, it took Android 3 years to dominate the smartphone market and reach the 50% it’s at now. The ‘new’ tablet market is about one year old now. In another year, Android on tablets will be where Android on phones was one year ago – about 30%.
So yeah.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/17/verizons_android_shar…
Some explanation missing maybe? You know, that 10% was the unexpected drop, because many pundits and fanbois said that it would drop a lot more. I can’t even say if iPhone makes up 20% of Verizon’s phone sales now from that chart…
Why am I surprised that after clicking the link, I found the title to be completely misleading?
You said: “Let me assure you – the same will happen to tablet. You’ll be surprised to see what the tablet landscape looks like 12 months from now.”
Android tablets have about 20% share right now (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/report-android-steals-20-of-tablet-ma…).
So your prediction is that that will increase to 30% in one year? Fine, I agree, but that doesn’t fit in with your earlier prediction that the tablet landscape will look significantly different in a year.
Right now the iPad dominates, and in a year it will still dominate, but by a lesser degree. How exactly will we be surprised at that change?
He probably means proper tablets, not that crap that has been out for 12 months now…
That 20% share is in units SHIPPED not Sold. By Google’s own figures there are only about 1.4M Android 3.x tablets in active use.
Edited 2011-08-19 20:52 UTC
With one phone (iPhone compared to over 48 different models of Android) taking over 66% of all smartphone profits, you have a strange definition of dominating. Apple is the #1 smartphone manufacturer in sales. And the reason you keep limiting it to smartphones is that iOS beats Android in total installations. (phones, tablets, and mp3 players)
And, of course you will be honest when your 30% doesn’t come true because I know you wouldn’t count “sales-in-channel” as actual sales to consumers.
Edited 2011-08-18 22:23 UTC
All of what you say may be true, but here’s a couple of quotes worth thinking about:
“[The] Android operating system . . . is currently on about half of the smartphones in the U.S.”[1]
“Mr. LEVY: Well, Apple has been worried, because Android phones are outselling iPhones now. Apple makes more money per phone because the Apple system enables them to get money from the hardware and from the software. Google makes money on the back end.”[2]
Both from NPR, a reputable news source.
I don’t really have a dog in this race—I do have an Android phone, but only because it happened to be the smart phone my provider offered—I just thought this discussion needed some citations.
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/08/15/139639049/with-plann…
[2] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/17/139696567/mobile-landscape-changes-wi…
I don’t know. First android phones weren’t so throughly rejected compared to the tablets. By all accounts producers that have flopped badly one time will be wary to go back into the business even if all the indicators look right again.
Also as much as I hate to admit, next year also Microsoft will enter the arena with their massive 3rd party sw ecosystem expertise. They are willfully disabling native developement for WP7 to make all the apps relevant for upcoming Windows 8 release on Intel based tablets (that by the time should become close enough to arm ones in battery life). And they will have win32 apps, the feat that android doesn’t have.
With webos demise mobile linux has encountered another severe hit. That seems to somehow validate Elop Nokia strategy as both webos and meego seem to have similar market conditions (with meego having notably better sdk).
Anyway if huge patent portofolios are required to even compete with a product (as US is basically imposing its rules to the rest of the world) then OSS is irrelevant anyway.
I ain’t bakin’ you a cake if you’re wrong.
If RIM doesn’t get QNX to enterprises or something like that, it’s dead. WP7 can hardly compete in the embedded consumer OS, getting beat even by Bada… QNX has no chance…
Unexpected “bombshell” announcements most likely reflect internal boardroom battles. Only twenty years later, when someone writes his memoirs but nobody cares any more, do we ordinary joes get to find out what happened.
Next item on the agenda: watch the sharks circling as HP auctions off the patents held by former acquisitions Compaq and Palm. In fact, the BeOS source code should be in a drawer somewhere. I bid $10 for that, just for sentimental reasons.
I’ll throw in with your bid, but only if you agree to open source it. Let’s see how quickly Haiku R1 can come about!
I always liked the WebOS architecture. We never really built anything for it because there was no market but it’s sad to see it go.
I hope they open source it. It would give it a second life.
If not, I think Windows 8 and Metro might be the spiritual successor to WebOS.
]{
Gag.
Sorry, while Metro isn’t a bad interface from what I’ve seen, Microsoft’s bully tactics make it a non-starter for me. I’d rather use a niche platform (as I do today with my N900) than encourage Microsoft to continue their legal antics.
WebOS was one possibility for my next device; unless another company picks it up or MeeGo gets some market traction (not much sign of that yet), I’m probably left with Android.
*sigh*
I’m in the same boat. However I would rather go back to a dumb-phone then ever use that crap they call android.
A dumb-phone + netbook will at least provide me with the same functionality my N900 has.
Otherwise when I hit the jackpot between now and then, I might think about selling my soul to Steve for a dumb/i-phone with a small mac-book-air.
Let’s get COMPAQ back
“Lets get COMPAQ back”
Eeewwwwww, why? They were the most proprietary pieces of crap in the pc world..
Edited 2011-08-18 20:56 UTC
But they were 100% IBM compatible.
I don’t know the exact specifics, but once I got an old Compaq pc, and once I tried to install Linux on it (when booting the cd/booting for the first time, I don’t remember) I got a BIOS error saying I should contact Compaq in order to run UNIX on the system.
God, why? Compaq always sucked ass.
i have a brand new compaq presario laptop
Screw Compaq, bring back DEC.
Who’ll buy it?
i’ll put five on Huawei
I second that
With Android and iOS devices already dominating, and RIM trying to hold on, and MS WinPn7 trying to stake a foothold, what must have HP brass been smoking to think yet another Mobile platform stood anything more than a snowball’s chance of succeeding.
I do seem them auctioning off the IP portfolio of Palm, and at least get some ROI. That will be a real bonanza.
http://www.hp.com/investor/2011q3webcast
It atleast has all the slides with the sales numbers and so on.
Edited 2011-08-18 21:50 UTC
…maybe now HTC will buy webOS.
After all, Google’s a direct competitor now, and they have no special allegiance to Microsoft…
Both HTC, LG and SE need to differentiate through software quickly. Putting a custom skin on Android won’t cut it. It will still be Android, not LG or HTC experience. Samsung is already on the save bay with decent Bada market share. They have differeniated through battery life and HW price. HTC and LG will have to find some other distinct perks. (WebOS fate shows that better UI is not enough). They are feeling the breath of the Chineese tigers on their necks.
As for WP7 it looks that LG and HTC have been taken advantage of by MS forcing an immature platform to the market to stay relevant at their cost. Actually it would be fair if MS paid them for wasting production resources on such a stripped OS, not the other way around. On the other hand the number of ecosystem walled gardens is constrained by developers will to rewrite the same stuff over and over.
The irony is that so far apps have been the biggest honeypot but the real money are elsewhere.
Good riddance.
HP might be selling their PC business but there’s no proof that they are going to stop making corporate desktops or servers, both of which would be their most profitable segments. HP ditching Compaq makes a lot of sense. Since it’s a lot of overhead cost without too much gain. The entire home user market is so low price dog-eat-dog that it makes little sense to invest in it. Corporate desktops/servers are where the money is at right now. Laptops will be a future growth segment and there’s no sign that they are abandoning that area.
They aren’t dumping their server line, but they’re dumping corporate desktops and laptops. There is no money in them.
At one time, when companies were shelling out $1500-$2000+ for desktops, they rarely hesitated attaching a service contract to them. That’s where HP made their money.
Nowadays, companies use $399 throw-away desktops where if something breaks, they pull a spare out of the closet and fire it up. There’s no more money in it for HP to sell on-site maintenance contracts.
As for the laptops, it is growing, mostly at the expense of the desktop market, but that doesn’t mean there is money in it. Dell, HP, Lenovo et al. have their laptops manufactured by the same pool of Asian mega-manufacturers, there’s really little to differentiate in any sort of profitable way.
The PC space is their only division that has low single digit margins and is declining.
Cisco came to a similar realization that the consumer market was simply not worth the investment to compete in. They dumped the flip line despite the investment they made, rather than continuing to throw resources at it. There’s talk that they’re looking to dump Linksys as well, and with their entry into the enterprise server space, they’re aiming squarely at HP’s core business. Add to that Oracle leveraging their Sun acquisition to target HP, and the fact that IBM has already put their loss-leading PC business behind them and successfully re-invented themselves as a enterprise services-oriented organization, and the writing is on the wall.
There’s absolutely no way this was a quick decision. I suspect it was part of the conversation when the board started interviewing him for the job and that he was hired to do precisely what he has just announced.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Touchpad was released simply to try and increase the value of Palm as an asset to sell, but realizing that it was tanking, they simply pulled the plug to reduce their loss rather than throwing more resources to keep it alive.
Lenovo is an Asian mega-manufacturer; apparently doing decently & growing.
Ah, it would be cute, in a historical sense, if they would grab the remnants of HP PC business – including Compaq, the implementer of pretty much first IBM PC clones. Just a few years after they also grabbed IBM PC business
(but yeah, I don’t see any reason why they would want the ballast of HP PC division which by now most likely outsources most everything anyway)
I don’t think the “breaking” tag was necessary. Anyone with two brain cells rubbing together could have seen this coming.
Another indication of why HP fails.
Perhaps they may be talking to Samsung, LG et al to sell the Web OS and the patent portfolio. The PC business can be purchased by some Asian buyers from China, Taiwan, India, et al.
They want to get out of businesses they don’t think they can make money in. The problem with that thinking is that IBM is better at that game than HP is.
The real tragedy here is that Palm wasn’t going to work unless the buyer fixed the execution problems. HP really dropped the ball there. They let Palm go about essentially business as usual and the resulting time-to-market killed the viability of the devices in the marketplace. They were about a year late on all their devices, starting with Pre.
A pretty healthy attitude for a company.
It should be
They are going to get out of any business they can’t make their overflated target profits in.
The PC biz is low margin BUT as part of a big consultancy deal it was seen as a key component in sealing the deal for lots of Services and Managed Contracts which are much higher margin. I could name quite a few $20M+ deals that included say 500K of PC’s.
The BOD & Key bean counters don’t see that view of the world. I saw it first hand when Compaq took over DEC. My friends saw it when HP took over Compaq and the very few that remain, are now going to be out of a job.
Sad.
If the WebOS platform cease to be developed, I hope HP will have the decency to open the bootloaders of their devices and provide open source drivers. I am confident the smartphone dev community will take care of porting Android or whatnot on it to extend the life of the devices.
What does decency have to do with it? If you bought a WebOS device, you got exactly what you paid for, closed software and all. Unless you have a contract that contains on-going updates and support, HP has fulfilled all of its obligations to you.
It would of course be useful for them to open source those things. They just have no moral (Dr. Stallman and the FSF would disagree of course, but if you agree with them, why buy a TouchPad in the first place?), legal, or ethical obligation to do so.
Edited 2011-08-19 17:04 UTC
apple owns the tablet market. there is no competition or will there be in the near future. They made the market and they own the market. Shitty android devices will always be doing catch up and about 2 years behind. Google has never been good at doing much.
>In addition, the company also announced its intention to sell its personal computer business.
This should have been the headline, and the WebOS thing should have been the “in addition”, considering HP/Compaq are one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computers, don’t you think?!
No I don’t, since this is OSAlert, not PCnews.
Still. The decision wasn’t so much about webOS devices than about HP deciding to be an enterprise service company and focus on that. Therefore, they’re exploring how to spin off their PC business, to which webOS currently belongs (the PSG business unit). In this context, investing heavily in webOS doesn’t make any sense, and since webOS isn’t successful, HP has decided to cut the losses right now.
The press release and the decision is all about HP’s “focus shift” to being exclusively an enterprise service company. WebOS is just an annoying detail in that picture. Read HP original press release, and you’ll see that the webOS announcement is really a BTW and nowhere close to what HP really wanted to talk about.
No matter how much more some of us care about webOS than HP, this was all about where HP’s board want to take HP, and not about webOS.
lolz @ Palm. Karma’s a bitch. RIP BeOS. Almost 10 years to the day. <3
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2391460,00.asp
I decided to pick up a few touchpads as gifts for the family. $99 dollar touchpads are a steal. Viva la webos!
I wanted to buy those cheap ones too, but I don’t know why here in Finland all the TouchPads are still the original price and there is no price drop announced anywhere. I’m pretty sad, I would’ve loved to give a TouchPad as a gift :<
I suspect that HP is actually dumping the TouchPad as a loss-leader to build interest in the platform and get an install base for developers to target. Interestingly, it seems to be working – 16 GiB TouchPads are going for $200-250 on eBay, and there are places that never dropped them from $399 that are reporting that they’re sold out.
I actually picked a 32 GiB one from Best Buy this morning (they were out of 16 GiB ones), partially because I want to see webOS succeed as a platform – it’s my favorite mobile OS, and just needs good hardware and apps, IMO, to succeed.
Now, the question is… Will HP “re-evaluate” their hardware, and continue making it, or will this benefit a potential webOS licensee? Either way, we might just win as alternative OS fans, if I’m right.
Here’s a blog post I did on the subject, but it’s pretty much the same stuff in this post: http://my.opera.com/bhtooefr/blog/2011/08/21/whats-going-on-with-th…
Oh, and this post written on my touchpad. Really need to convert a Model M to bluetooth…
I don’t think HP is that smart; look at the fight they just had with Best Buy. That said, according to my local Radio Shack (which didn’t have any in stock), HP is not discontinuing webOS devices; in fact, he said he was going to a workshop in a week or two to be trained on the next webOS tablet. Take it for what it’s worth…
I dunno, HP isn’t stupid either
They likely saw the writing on the wall: “nobody is gonna buy these things at full price, maybe give them away and see what happens”
I’m willing to bet it was their “Plan B” strategy for getting WebOS out there and users/developers excited about it. I wouldn’t have discounted it quite so deeply at first though, maybe a gradual decrease to offset the losses in manufacturing would have been a little more intelligent.
HP wont re-evaluate anything unless the current CEO loser-Leo is ousted in the next 2 weeks or something. HP wants to drop all their consumer hardware (except printers, I guess) including their entire PSG group (of which WebOS devices are under).
Spent two days trying to get a touchpad. Never could get the web page to load and every touchpad was sold out in 500 miles by noon.
Some people think it was well worth the price to do that.
Yup. Me too. Local staples said they sold out within 5 minutes of opening their doors, not to mention a brutal fight trying to get through the HP website only to find out the hard way they were already gone.
Harvey Norman sold 4800 of these today for AUD98 after discussions with HP.
Brandon Watson just announced on his tweet that Microsoft will support, free of charge, the transition to Windows Phone 7 for existing WebOS developers with published applications:
http://twitter.com/#!/BrandonWatson/status/104681012000337920
Why only on the US ?
In Europe the price is still 399
I want one for 99