Sigh. HP, having ended development of WebOS tablets and phones, no longer needs the people who created them, reports All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski:
Sources close to HP say the company plans to lay off as many as 525 employees, and that it began carrying out that dreadful duty this week.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index rates various industries and companies for–you can probably figure this out on your own–customer satisfaction, based on a poll of 70,000 consumers. It’s released its latest numbers for the PC industry, and there are no surprises: Apple has a clear lead on everybody else that the survey has enough data about to rate.
Here are the ratings for 2011, on a scale of 100. (Unfortunately, there are some major players that it doesn’t have specific data for, such as Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba–they’re part of “All Others.”)
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 4:32 pm on Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Not too long ago, HP was laying out its vision for its then-new TouchPad tablet. It involved the company’s dedication to making the TouchPad a success, and–everyone at HP who I spoke with repeated this word until it rang in my ears–the “scale” the giant company could being to the effort. The strategy was ambitious and clear.
Then, week before last, HP abruptly responded to disappointing initial sales for the new tablet by killing it. That was depressing. But clear.
Then it decided to blow out the remaining Touchpads for $99 apiece. Poignant. And understandable, at least. I mean, it’s better than dumping them in landfill.
Is Samsung interested in buying HP’s PC business? Not according to Samsung:
The recent rumors that Samsung Electronics will be taking over Hewlett-Packard Co.’s personal computer business are not true.
We hope this clarifies any confusion that may have occurred.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 11:50 am on Monday, August 22, 2011
Weird: By flopping so badly, HP’s TouchPad tablet has become a monstrous hit. After HP CEO Léo Apotheker decided to terminate HP’s WebOS hardware business, the company slashed the entry-level TouchPad, which sold for $499 just a couple of weeks ago, to $99. The new price is causing riots at Best Buy and has made the TouchPad the #1 electronics product on Amazon.
HP is now selling TouchPads as fast as it won’t make them. It’s a poignant end to a device that once seemed full of potential.
Are the folks snapping up TouchPads making an intelligent buying decision? It depends. HP says it’s not giving up on WebOS, and will continue to operate the WebOS app store and hold developer events. I’m not sure what the status is of any software updates for the TouchPad: it could certainly use some additional bug fixes and enhancements, but I’d be startled if HP poured energy into development of anything as ambitious as an iOS 5.0 or an Android Ice Cream Sandwich, at least while the fate of WebOS is so very uncertain.
Michael Mace–who used to work at Palm–has some smart thoughts on this week’s WebOS drama:
If you believe that every smartphone company needs to own its own OS, we ought to see a mad bidding war between LG, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and maybe Samsung to buy Web OS. (The loser could get RIM as a consolation prize.) Maybe a buyout will still happen, but I think HP has probably been quietly shopping Web OS for a while, and if there were interest it would have tried to close a deal before today’s announcement.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 3:41 pm on Friday, August 19, 2011
The HP I write about is the one that makes laptops, desktops, printers, and various other consumer and small-business devices. I don’t cover its enterprise business and will never mention the enterprise-software company it’s planning to buy, Autonomy. (Whoops, I just did! Never again, I swear.)
So the news that HP wants to stop making PCs leaves me feeling melancholy. An HP that gets out of the PC business will be one that I’ll cover a lot less, even if I continue on covering the products of the spun-off company–which, I suspect, will still be sold under the HP name.
But I’m not really surprised by HP’s decision, especially since its new CEO, Léo Apotheker, is a hardcore enterprise-software guy, not a consumer-electronics type. And despite Apotheker’s suggestion that “the tablet effect“–for which read the iPad–is a factor in HP’s desire to ditch PCs, I think that HP would be doing this right now even if the iPad didn’t exist.
Instapaper creator Marco Arment says that WebOS’s reputation for being great is overblown, since it never ran all that well on any device that HP or Palm shipped it on:
HP definitely mismanaged Palm. The TouchPad’s software shouldn’t have shipped when it did. The hardware wasn’t very good. The marketing was insufficient. The retail channel was poorly managed.
But webOS, despite having some great ideas, never became competitive. Palm and webOS’ developers bear most of the responsibility for that, not just HP’s managers.
I can’t really argue his point. In fact, he quotes my TouchPad review as evidence of WebOS’s problems. But I can make a clarification: When I speak enthusiastically about WebOS, as I often have, it’s mostly over the user interface. Arment is right that WebOS as it existed on real devices always had issues. (For instance, it loaded programs way more slowly than other mobile OSes.) WebOS’s potential was always enormous; the actual product has always had its frustrations. And on the TouchPad, it had tons of frustrations. But boy, I’ll still be sorry if it’s all over.
By Ed Oswald | Posted at 1:15 pm on Friday, August 19, 2011
With all the hubbub surrounding HP’s shocking announcement of the death of of WebOS and its various devices such as the TouchPad, there’s been a whole lot of finger pointing. But the most stunning revelations may have come from TheNextWeb’s Matt Brian.
WebOS was tested on an iPad 2, Brian says. The results? It performed beautifully–more than two times as fast as the TouchPad, and running WebOS through Safari on the iPad 2 produced similar results.
If this is true it means HP’s crappy hardware killed the platform, and not the OS itself. That just floors me.
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 12:34 pm on Friday, August 19, 2011
I’m still reeling from the news that HP is getting out of the WebOS hardware business. So is the whole blogosphere. And a lot of it has written off WebOS, period. A lot of stories are talking about the OS in the past tense.
But HP hasn’t said that it’s scrapping WebOS. Its press release about its planned “transformation”–a refocusing on enterprise stuff and a move away from most consumer products, including even PCs–said only this about WebOS:
HP will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. The devices have not met internal milestones and financial targets. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.
That’s wishy-washy for sure. But it’s not saying that it’s giving up on WebOS–just that it’s giving up on its current WebOS hardware. (As far as I know, the company hasn’t said what it plans to do with the WebOS printers it’s repeatedly said that it’s working on. They might yet appear–presumably, development of the first models is far along at this point, and “Would I buy a WebOS printer?” is an utterly different question than “Would I buy a WebOS tablet?)
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 8:18 am on Friday, August 19, 2011
Companies in Silicon Valley are fond of saying that they like to “fail fast.” They mean that it’s virtuous to try lots of new things, but to give up quickly when something’s not working. But sometimes they fail fast in a manner that’s nothing to brag about. They invest millions (or hundreds of millions) of dollars in a new product and hype it to the Heavens–and then kill it after only a few months, if they ever release it at all.
From this day henceforth, HP’s TouchPad may be the poster child for bizarrely short-lived tech products. But it has lots of company–famously infamous flops such as Audrey, the G4 Cube, and Foleo. Let’s honor them, shall we?
For this list, I considered only products that were on the market for less than a year, or which never quite made it to consumers, period. Every item that made it was from a large company that should have known better. And while they all share the indignity of a short, embarrassing life, they represent multiple types of failure. (Some of them should never have left the drawing boards in the first place; others could have been great if they’d been given more time to succeed.)
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 5:33 pm on Thursday, August 18, 2011
Here’s a press release of the damned from slightly over a month ago. It was a different time…
HP to Drive Innovation, Scale and Growth of webOS
Stephen DeWitt to lead HP’s webOS global business unit; Jon Rubinstein named senior vice president of product innovation for PSG
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 11, 2011
Building on the successful launch of HP webOS 3.0, HP today announced it is accelerating the global expansion of webOS.
To support this next phase of growth, HP has appointed Stephen DeWitt as senior vice president and general manager of its webOS global business unit. Jon Rubinstein, the visionary behind webOS, will assume a product innovation role within the Personal Systems Group (PSG) at HP.
This announcement underscores HP’s strategy to provide a seamless, secure, context-aware experience across HP’s product portfolio, and to deliver innovation at unmatched scale.
“With the successful debut of our first wave of webOS-based products, we are drawing on our deep executive bench to position the right leaders in the right roles to accelerate the long-term growth of webOS,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, and member of the Executive Board, HP. “Stephen DeWitt has a proven ability to build and scale organizations into global, multibillion dollar operations, and I am confident that he will take webOS to the next level. At the same time, we continue to leverage the core strengths of Silicon Valley icon Jon Rubinstein to apply his considerable talents across the PSG portfolio.”
DeWitt, who has been leading the PSG Americas region at HP, will be responsible for all aspects of the webOS business, including engineering, research and development, sales, marketing and go-to-market support. In his new role, DeWitt will spearhead the creation of a fully integrated, global developer and independent software vendor program to deliver new consumer and business applications. DeWitt’s team also will create a dedicated mobility practice with HP’s partner community, with the goal of delivering consumer and enterprise solutions globally.
DeWitt has dramatically improved PSG’s profitability and share position in the America’s region since his arrival to HP in 2008. He is succeeded by Stephen DiFranco, head of the Solutions Partners Organization for the Americas region at HP.
“Innovation is at the core of webOS, and I look forward to working with our talented team of engineers as we strive to develop the industry’s most compelling set of products, solutions and services in markets around the world,” said DeWitt. “As part of our investment in the future of webOS, we are working in lock step with the developer community, our channel partners and the start-up community to create an application ecosystem that delivers on HP’s mobile connectivity strategy.”
Jon Rubinstein has been named senior vice president for Product Innovation in the Personal Systems Group at HP. He will continue to report to Todd Bradley in this role, helping to propel innovation across product lines. HP will leverage Rubinstein’s passion for building exceptional consumer products and his long history of driving game changing innovation, such as webOS.
“With the launch of webOS 3.0, our team has delivered a world-class platform for HP to leverage going forward, and it is now time to take things to the next level,” said Rubinstein. “With webOS under Stephen DeWitt’s proven leadership, I’m looking forward to my new role and driving further innovation for webOS and other PSG products.”
About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.
This is My Next’s Josh Topolsky says that HP still has plans for WebOS. It’s just not the least bit clear what they are.
DeWitt said that there would be staff reductions, but told the team that the company needs people “that are serious about winning” and again reiterated HP’s commitment to developing webOS as a platform. Both DeWitt and Bradley were clear that the current business model of webOS wasn’t working primarily due to lackluster hardware, arguing that HP needed to stop “trying to force non-competitive products into the market.”
By Harry McCracken | Posted at 2:29 pm on Thursday, August 18, 2011
I’ll have lots more to say about the stunning news that HP is killing the TouchPad after two months and killing WebOS phones. But for now, how about some poignant quotes?
Me, in “HP Buys Palm: The Optimist’s View” (April 2010):
HP might be able to take WebOS places that Palm couldn’t. After the Foleo fiasco, Palm quite reasonably chose to stick to its smartphone knitting. As a much larger, more prosperous company, HP might reasonably decide to put WebOS on slates or set-top boxes or other devices that Palm would likely have avoided.
A Palm without a little cloud over its head is a good thing. With the era of uncertainty over the company’s viability over, retailers may be more excited about stocking Palm products, and consumers may be more confident about buying them.
Bloomberg’s Jeffrey “No Relation” McCracken, Serena Saitto, and Aaron Ricadela are reporting that HP plans to spin off its PC business and might announce so as soon as today. Big news if it happens–but not necessarily big news that would have much of a visible impact on HP customers. (Betcha that the brand name they adopt will be…HP.)
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By Harry McCracken | Posted at 1:35 am on Tuesday, September 20, 2011
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