Back in May 2010, Tom’s Guide’s Devin Connors gave the world the following gift:
8 Reasons Why Apple Should Fear HP/Palm:
1. HP is Great with Acquisitions
2. The HP Brand Name
3. HP’s Money
4. WebOS: Beyond the Smartphone (there is no doubt that the OS will branch out to slate PCs and netbooks)
5. HP Means a Better App Catalog
6. An Immediate Connection to the Business World
7. Beating Apple in the Hardware Arena
8. HP, Palm and Content Delivery (with a company like HP pulling the strings behind the scenes, Palm could be positioned as the number one paid content provider in the smartphone world.)
Read more prescient genius in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If this retrospective helps to constipate similar pieces in the future, so be it.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Hewlett-Packard’s abdication: What hath Apple wrought? – August 19, 2011
When HP loaded webOS onto Apple’s iPad, it ran over twice as fast as the TouchPad – August 19, 2011
More blood on Apple iPhone’s and iPad’s touchscreens: HP discontinues webOS phones, tablets – August 18, 2011
If HP were still HP, what he wrote might have come true. But HP hasn’t been HP for a long time.
oops!!
Hi everyone, this is Devin Connors, Senior Editor over at Tom’s Guide.
To start, I’ll re post what I just put in the comments section of my original article, which can be found here:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/165-HP-Palm-Smartphones.html
“How did I lose all credibility by writing this article?
This article was written while Mark Hurd was the CEO of HP. He was behind the acquisition, and he believed in Palm and WebOS. He resigned about two months after the acquisition, well after this article was written.
A new CEO means new ideas, and it also means spurning ideas of old. If I had known somehow that HP would be under new management after the Palm acquisition, this article probably wouldn’t have happened. But, and here’s the shocker, nobody knew that a CEO change was coming because it had very little to do with HP’s business and was more about internal politics (and the whole sexual harassment probe). If Hurd has stayed on as CEO, I have the utmost confidence that the fate of WebOS would be different than what played out over the last week.”
Now, obviously you all are irked at the fact that I went against Apple, the holiest of holy’s.
I stand by the article that I wrote, not because I was right (clearly the last week has shown otherwise), but because the fate of Palm was determined by an HP executive team whose leader was in no way connected to the acquisition of the company and IP in question.
How many of you think that WebOS and the TouchPad actually got a fair shake? Based on the feedback I’ve seen, most tech journalists, pundits and analysts think WebOS is getting the shaft. The TouchPad was axed less than two months after hitting store shelves, and HP is making a knee-jerk reaction to it’s lackluster sales.
Oh, and for the record, I own an iPad 2, and I love it. Additionally, I bought a TouchPad for $99 through Amazon. It should be on my desk within a week.
-Devin
Boom! Headshot.
Apotheker had grandiose plans for WebOS just few months ago. He claimed HP will ship 100 million WebOS deviced next year. He signed pre-sales production of significant number of TouchPads prior start of sales. He sanctioned wide advertisement. So WebOS platform failure is not related to Hurd-Apotheker change.
However, WebOS was still failure under the hood (as AnandTech tested), and the hardware was last year’s aspiration to become iPad 1.
This was already second failure for both John Rubinstein personally (who was never able to be ambitious designed without Steven Jobs’ governance) and for WebOS.
Many saw that despite HP’s might, there is no room for WebOS success last year, but you predicted otherwise and wrongly in a big way.
This does not mean, however, that you lost “all” of your credibility. This just means that this was a major misprediction.
it was more like a wishlist from Ballmer’s mouth than anything else.