HP Takes a hit on WebOS

http://t.co/4vLPLNa

Wow.  Not good (for everyone but Apple)

well the market has how many different "tablets" / "pads" now ??

and the hp one had what to stand out as better?

kind of like the MS "KIN" - come to the party to late w/o a good story and you may not go far.

They also doubled down and are looking to get out of the PC business as well. Say hello to the new IBM...

It is baffeling that they can so recently have invested so much in webOS and not seen this coming. So much time & money wasted. How much you wanna bet the CEO and the like will all get bonuses for cost cutting this year? Oh it's good to live in America...

I played with one in a store the other day, and it was full of fail. It was a demo unit, so maybe there was something wrong with it, but I'm not sure how the software could be messed up. I rebooted it, but it took so long I got bored and almost walked away. It took over a minute to come up, in an age where my full Windows machine takes 20 seconds to give me a usable desktop.

I had a good play with the TouchPad and liked it, (that said, it hasn't had the best of reviews).  Sad to see it fail so early, maybe the hardware will rise again as a Win8 device?

37 minutes ago,Ian2 wrote

I had a good play with the TouchPad and liked it, (that said, it hasn't had the best of reviews).  Sad to see it fail so early, maybe the hardware will rise again as a Win8 device?

the "$64,000 question" is this:  is the thing slow due to a hardware problem or a software problem?

if it's the hardware / firmware then i'd not want to see them try to run windows on it... might just make windows look bad.

"...HP is aiming to exit the consumer business — or at least quarantine those operations"

From the perspective of a disillusioned, once fanatically supportive, customer, it seems they executed this business unit so poorly that this was inevitable. Too bad HP blackened both their eyes before recognizing their mistake :-/

Wow! Just wow! That purchase of Palm turned out to be a huge boondoggle.

Does Microsoft purchase this WebOS white elephant now?

Is that even surprising at all? It was a fail to start. Although it is a bit too fast to pull the plug. I think the Samsung vs iPad in EU contributes a lot to their decisions. If they indeed doing well, it is expected to be sued by Apple and banned in EU, just like the Samsung case.

Whoa. I didn't expect it to do well, but this? Yikes.

On the other hand, it's refreshing to see a company betting heavily on something, setting clear goals and expectations and, if those are not met, quickly pull the plug and cut the losses.

This is what companies should do more often.

• Compaq
• 3Com
• Palm

HP sucks at M&A.

@PaoloM: Or they could just give me $1.2 billion and be none the worse for it.

Don't blame them. Nobody other than Apple has been successful with tablets thus far. I've heard analysts say there is no such thing as a tablet market. People confusing the iPad market for a tablet market.

PC margins have always been tiny as hell and it's a declining market on top of this so I can't blame them either.

I don't know if they will be able to match IBM though, since they have always been a services and software giant even when they were making PCs, getting rid of the PCs side of things didn't seem to raise as much eyebrows back then because of this. HP has a robust services and enterprise offerings but nothing like IBM, I think.

Maybe the demise of WebOS is more an indictment of HTML+Javascript + CSS as a viable platform to attract devs than anything else. As crappy as the Android experience is for the tablet, I don't see too many Android tablet device makers throwing in the towel just yet.

Another thing on my mind is, MS is to blame. OK, yes, this sounds stupid. But, the fact that HP going off buying Palm is an indication that HP wants to have a faster reaction time within the consumer devices. And the big problem is, MS is slow to react on tablet 2.0 market, which may contributes HP's decision on doing their own tablet device.

I see HP falls as an former Windows PC manufacture. The fact that it falls is because MS is unable to help them grow.

I really hope MS see what is going on to their OEM customers and provide services and solutions to these loyal suppliers.

Perhaps Sinofsky can get Windows 8 ported to the TouchPad in time for Build. It might make a nice addition to the goodie bag. I hear Best Buy is trying to find someone to fix their inventory issues.

-Josh