Friday, August 19, 2011

What the hell HP?

Today HP made two announcements, the first was that they were discontinuing their 2 month old tablet line, and selling off WebOS. Seems they were not satisfied with the sales of the much hyped product that launched late in the dads and grads season and has been pulled before back to school has really even kicked off. And so now rather than stick with their investment they are pulling the device before they really have a chance to see how it will preform in the market. To be fair HP was the late comer to the tablet market, the market was already saturated with IPads, Android Tablets, and even a few windows Tablets. However WebOS is still a valuable piece of Intellectual Property and would be worth holding onto. Add to that the fact that the industry seemed to love the HP tablet, the OS was good, the hardware was good. this to me seems a little like cutting of your nose to spite your face.

The other announcement that HP Made today was that they are planning to spin off their Personal Computer division. In other words the part of HP that sells Desktop and laptop PCs to consumers. the division will continue to operate as its own company but it seems to me that HP is planning to sell this part off as well.  Why HP would sell the division that sells more PCs than any other  I cannot understand, though I suspect this is a profit driven choice.

It looks to me like HP is doing continuing on the path they have been on for some time, and moving to compete more with IBM and less with Dell. There have been no announcements about HP's Business line, Server, or Network Hardware divisions, it appears HP wants to focus more on enterprise products, and withdrawing from the consumer market. Then again I may be very wrong.

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