[lbo-talk] TouchPad

[// ravi]

On Aug 22, 2011, at 8:30 AM, Mike Beggs wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> Are these things any good?
>> 
>> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/hp-touchpad-mania-touchpads-selling-out-in-us-at-99.html
>> 
>> Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad is finally enjoying a sales boom. All it took to
>> move the previously slow-selling tablet was a $99 price point.
> 
> What happened, by the way? These things were only just released here,
> like a week ago, and there are still billboards all over the train
> system advertising them for $600 or so, but they were marked down to
> $99 and have all sold out.
> 

And as someone already mentioned, there aren’t any more coming. HP is killing the product and getting out of the PC business. Why? Because they are only the #1 PC maker! :-) There are two reasons for this turn of events:

1. These schmucks don’t know how to compete with Apple. With computers they could always use the old excuse that Macs cost more, so buy our cheaper piece of shit. But with the iPhone and iPad they actually cannot even match Apple on price.

2. As John Gruber (Daring Fireball) wrote, they got this guy, Apothekar, to run HP, after kicking Hurd out. Apothekar used to run SAP before he took this job. He is not a computer hardware guy (and HP was never really a computer company - they never did well with their own stuff e.g: HP/UX). He figures he has a better chance turning HP into printers+IBM+SAP than to compete against Apple on the high end and the Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean guys on the low end. He is probably right - when the vast majority of consumers can tell the difference between an iOS system and an HP/RIM/Motorola/Dell imitation better than you can, and you are the CEO of one of these things, you are better building other things.

	—ravi