HP dumps Pre 3, Touchpad and WebOS

[Hands0n]

The various blogs and news sites are absolutely buzzing with the news this evening. HP have made an official statement that they are dropping the Pre 3 and Touchpad, with a view to selling off their Personal Systems group. They are also looking to get out of the PC business altogether also.

The future for WebOS is bizarrely not where you might expect. HP say they are looking to implement WebOS in other devices, like refrigerators, or perhaps selling it off completely.

So one has to question why HP even bothered buying up Palm and all of its interests for some $1Bln last year.



Hewlett Packard confirmed today that it will discontinue all current operations related to webOS devices via a press release. The announcement comes less than two months after HP launched its first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, and less than three years after developers first started making apps for the platform.

HP, which is holding its third quarter earnings call today at which it is expected to confirm its exit from the PC manufacturing business as well, specifically called out the TouchPad and "webOS phones" as devices that would be taken out of commission. This includes the HP Pre 3, a webOS phone that was due for launch any day now in the US and had just been released in Europe.

The company says that it will "continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward." This could be interpreted in a range of ways, from putting webOS on less competitive platforms (the company has indicated in the past its desire to put the OS in items like refrigerators), or even selling it to a competitor.

The sudden move puts developers for the platform in flux. Ed Finkler, developer of the webOS microblogging client Spaz, told Ars he likes developing for webOS, and doesn't suspect the OS will be fully killed off. "Whether or not it is a viable platform commercially in the consumer electronics field is another question," Finkler said.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/hp-washing-its-hands-of-webos-discontinues-tablets-pre-phones.ars

[DBMandrake]

Still reeling in surprise from this.

One year after paying $1.2 billion for palm, and a mere 49 days after releasing the HP Touch pad they basically give up and pull all WebOS devices from the market ? (Bettering the Microsoft Kin by one day, which was cancelled 48 days after release :D )

Did they expect it to be an overnight success with little or no effort ? Where was the tenacity and commitment to make a go of it ? New platforms don't just take off overnight, particularly in a nascent market like tablets.

Apple did well with the iPad partly because they were the first to introduce a "new generation" tablet (as opposed to the stylus based tablets of 5-10 years ago running Windows) and were able to do so on the back of the success of the iPhone both in terms of direct app compatibility and developer commitment. (The fact that the iPad is actually a pretty decent tablet helped too of course, it wasn't just that they got there first, as some might claim...)

To be fair, there was just recently the story of how Best Buy had pre-ordered 272,000 Touchpads and had sold less than 25,000 including those that were later returned, and were asking HP to buy back the stock. That must have been embarrassing to HP, but to then turn around and say "oh well, we give up, this is too hard" must surely be even more embarrassing.

I guess I was expecting to eventually see Three major players in the Smartphone/Tablet space, those being iOS, Android and WebOS, but it now looks like Windows Phone 7 seems destined to take a rather distant third place, (after Blackberry falls into irrelevance) with iOS and Android duking it out for 1st and 2nd place. Perhaps there is just not room in this space for more than two big platforms ?

The fact that HP has at the same time given up on their PC business when they're currently the single biggest PC maker is also astounding. Sure, their margins are razor thin, as are those of every other PC maker except Apple, but that's the price of doing business in the PC space, and all the PC vendors brought it on themselves by producing beige boxes at the lowest possible price using the cheapest possible components, which triggered a race to the bottom in both margins and quality that they have never been able to reverse. This is now coming back to bite them all in a serious way.

It really seems that HP is another one of the huge and well respected companies of the last century who have completely lost their way. The HP of a couple of decades ago, the HP that I remember who made top notch electronic test equipment that was second to none is no more - having spun that part of the business off as Agilent about 12 years ago, the part of the business that WAS HP from the 1940's through to at least the 1980's when they decided to become a computer and printer company. Now they want to get rid of their PC business as well ?

Well, bye then HP...it was nice knowing you...

[miffed]

Have to say I am gutted ! I was hoping to get a Pre 3 and a Touchpad at some point .

[Ben]

I saw a few rumblings about this last night on Twitter and, well, completely disregarded it as nonsense! That's how surprised I am that this is true!

The TouchPad is barely out the door... and it's dead? I just don't get it. Why did they even bother releasing it in the first place? Have they changed their minds overnight?

It seems that there's a massive and sudden change underway at HP for it to be thinking of offloading the PC business also. Is the PC, as we know it, dead? Just a commodity? Like, perhaps, what Android hardware is or will become?

Are Apple the only company that can resist the commoditisation of computing hardware, both mobile and on the desktop?

HP is also getting slapped for spending $11bn on the UKs biggest software company Autonomy today, with shareholders up in arms that they've massively overvalued it. Have they lost the plot completely?

*confused*