“As the market for desktop PCs continues to fade, Hewlett-Packard has found itself in a tight spot. CEO Meg Whitman’s Sept. 10 announcement that HP’s expense-reduction plans — including showing 27,000 employees the door — would become even more aggressive was well received among investors,” Tim Brugger reports for The Motley Fool. “But as I discussed in the article posted shortly after the news, there’s a problem.”
“Unless you’ve been hiking in the outback, you’ve heard all about the craziness surrounding the unprecedented success of Apple’s iPhone 5 release. The latest and greatest gadget from Apple more than doubled pre-sales of last year’s wildly successful iPhone 4S,” Brugger reports. “So when Whitman announced plans on Sept. 14 to enter the ultra-competitive smartphone market, the sound you heard was the collective groans of HP shareholders everywhere. Industry folk will recall that HP’s been down the smartphone road before, with less than stellar results, after its 2010 purchase of Palm and its WebOS system.”
Brugger reports, “So what is HP thinking? Turns out HP’s foray into the smartphone market has little to do with Apple, Nokia, or any other retail smartphone player. No, the space Whitman plans on going after is an area once dominated by beaten-down Research In Motion — the enterprise market… HP has to do something to make itself relevant again, and the enterprise smartphone market could be it. And Whitman deserves some time; a year is hardly enough to right a meandering ship, and she seems more than capable.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s the thing, even if they go with Android (a home-brewed OS or Windows Phone are just so far behind that only Android would give them any type of springboard into the market) HP’s got an extremely tough row to how:
6 of top 10 enterprise devices using Good Technology are iOS, 97% of tablets are iPad – April 26, 2012iPad owns the market. Smart enterprises will gravitate to iPhones in order to match their iPads.
Related articles:
HP ‘Bender’ Android smartphone surfaces in online benchmarks – September 17, 2012
HP CEO Whitman: ‘We have to ultimately offer a smartphone and get it right this time’ – September 14, 2012
HP blatantly copies Apple’s iMac, Keyboard, and Magic Trackpad designs – September 10, 2012
Apple is killing Dell and Hewlett-Packard – August 6, 2012
HP ‘designer’ on HP’s MacBook Air clone: ‘Apple may like to think they own silver, but they don’t’ – May 9, 2012
