Once again, HP proves that the collective vision of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is so long-dead that the tombstone has crumbled to dust.
I'm gutted. Genuinely.
When I was younger, before Fiorina stepped up to be the first to rape the corpses of the founders, I was a massive fan of HP. My first graphing calculator was an HP48G, which taught me the joys of Lisp... well, Psil, because it came with Reverse Polish Lisp.
WebOS could have been the resurrection of that culture -- fully JavaScript development environment, app development across multiple mobile and tablet platforms with a single environment... just genius. It's sad to see that vision evaporate, along with some of the novel telephony and interactive features that made WebOS a joy to work with.
I can't help but think of MS in this situation. It reminds me of MS breaking into the video game console market and fighting really hard to stay in it. Even after a major hardware snafu that cost them an estimated 3 billion dollars they kept fighting. After six years of work, it's finally doing well.
WebOS was worth fighting for and it was in better shape than the 1st and 2nd Xbox IMO. What a waste.
Was it worth it for Microsoft, though? Their entertainment unit made 32 million dollars in profit last quarter – a quarter which they considered an immense success. With that kind of income, the project will never break even, never mind turn an overall profit. Even if you consider intangibles like strengthening the Windows platform, it's hard for me to believe that those billions were best invested into Xbox.
Actually, what you describe is illegal in most developed countries. Microsoft knows this better than anyone. They've been strung up for "bundling" and "predatory pricing" many times. Also, their position in their "monopoly" markets are weakening by the day.
Enyo let you write HTML5 apps in Chrome, Firefox or whatever, and essentially (to simplify) add a few WebOS hints and you have a fully functional native app. More than anything else, I hope Enyo becomes completely open source so we can write html5 cross-os apps that are as snappy as those on WebOS with a framework that lets you create reuseable parts.
I was just on a Virgin America flight where they were lending out Chromebooks to try and part of me thought why aren't they lending out tablets on a plane instead?
And porting some of those chromeOS apps would've been pretty easy...
After developing for iPhone/iPad I was excited to port apps to WebOS. Trying out my officemate's TouchPad was a great experience. I bet Apple is letting out a sigh of relief... the HP TouchPad was imo on par with the iPad.
So, why wasn't it as appealing to the broader base of consumers?
I played with one for a bit at Best Buy, but it felt clunky and didn't look as good as the ipad. OTOH I didn't buy an iPad either, as tablets just don't work for me.
The OS is on par with the iPad but the hardware is not. An iPad is thinner and lighter and made of glass and metal (as opposed to plastic) but they both cost $500. If you can't match Apple's aesthetics then you shouldn't charge the same price. Either take the loss for market share or figure out how to produce something that feels higher quality or go home.
I won't deny it it was. Like android they had the capability to have the GUI hardware accelerated but never implemented it. Where it did excel was the multitasking. I would normally start 3-4 processes (for example, mail, twitter, music player, browser) let them spool up. By the time you got to the last one task the first would be ready to go.
WebOS 3.0 finally implemented GUI HW acceleration because if it was bad on the smartphone it would be unusable at tablet resolutions.
When people say that android is slow this what they mean, the interface doesn't flow it jerks.
Why is this answer so downvoted? People around me constantly rationalize how they made the best phone/tablet purchases, where in reality it's just fanboyism without admitting the product's faults.
An article that hit the home a few days back explains it: many consider this observation as a personal attack. It's not that prople who buy iPads are fashion victims - it really is great product. It's just not the perfect product for everyone. That and what we perceive as rational choices usually aren't. Our brains contain a whole lot of mammal under its thin layer of Homo Sapiens.
HP was really stupid launching the "Ouchpad" at prices similar to the iPad because the sum of iOS and its application support make it a better product. With a lower price, it could win some market share. WebOS deserved better management.
It's a facile dismissal - exactly the kind of fanboy behaviour you're accusing others of engaging in. "Oh, it's just the brand" claims imply that the speaker a) either doesn't understand or is ignoring the relationship between correlation and causation and b) appears to think complex decisions are binary.
> a) either doesn't understand or is ignoring the relationship between correlation and causation
I do understand. The iPod is an excellent product and is priced very competitively. It's not, however, the best choice for everyone and you cannot neglect brand plays an important role in how consumers pick products. I would love to use a Macbook (and I could - a nice, shiny one has always been one intranet form away from me) but then I would have to struggle like my fellow colleagues do to tailor it to my rather specific tastes. For me, it's just not worth it. That's not to say I wouldn't love to have one - my heart wants it. My brain denies it to me because it's not the best choice.
And therefore, being unable to run iTunes (unless under a VM running Windows or a hackintosh) an iPad as useful to me as a brick.
> b) appears to think complex decisions are binary.
Have you ever seen a teen shopping for clothes? Why do you think shopping for a tablet is any different? Why do you think most people (who don't understand the differences between tablets) turn this into a complex decision? iPads are cool, Touchpads aren't (and they really lack appealing applications) and Androids are clunky (they really are, but they have other things to offer)
I think you just proved my point: your specific reasons for not buying Apple products aren't universal. Other people who don't have your particular software requirements (probably 90% of people in the web-centric era) aren't going to weigh those downsides so highly when comparing price, battery life, hardware quality, available software, etc. - all areas where Android, et al. are struggling to keep up.
Saying "it's about the brand" is too simple because it could mean "Buzz / clinging to past glory" (i.e. the Sony strategy) or "well earned reputation for producing products people like" and heavily papering over the reasons in the latter case.
> Other people who don't have your particular software requirements (probably 90% of people in the web-centric era) aren't going to weigh those downsides so highly
If you think 90% of people really weight pros and cons of a mostly technical decision, you are an optimist. I am not sure most people who buy iPads know every other tablet available (and that includes things like the Nook) can browse the web, use e-mail, watch videos, run Flash thingies and play Angry Birds. Apple enjoys a powerful reputation and it's often a good enough decision to go with an iPad when you are confused by a lot of slightly different offerings.
The Touchpad appears to have been rushed out before it was ready and its software has a great deal of problems, but I am quite sure those problems would have been fixed relatively soon. It's been on the market for only 45 days, after all.
Time for Nintendo to buy WebOS and start up their iPhone competitor devices. Such could be a real serious competitor to Apple and Nintendo is losing market share.
They know how to do hardware and know how to market hand held IP devices. Why shouldn't they jump head first and give Apple/Android significant competition?
Nintendo has disregarded non-gaming software, especially software aimed at connectivity, or at software as a service, pretty consistently. The WiiU and the 3DS don't seem to have made any advances in that department. While the WiiU won't use the insane friend code system, 2010's 3DS still does. Ever since the Wii debuted with an integrated (but simple) OS, I have hoped that Nintendo will get on board with that stuff.
Microsoft really pushed having an integrated console dashboard and operating system, and Sony has slowly caught up with the big pieces over the life of the PlayStation 3, but whenever it's mentioned to Nitnendo, they seem to take pity on the questioner for seeing any importance in it, giving online, connectivity, and software as service a grimace-ridden "that's nice, dear," before going back to putting more gyroscopes and polarized displays in their disconnected, single player peripherals.
I just don't think it's in their culture, and they don't seem ready to make a shift.
That's a great vision, but I think it's highly unlikely to happen.
A scenario I can see developing itself would be one where Samsung, LG, or HTC buys WebOS. Either, to have an edge in this patent mess, and/or in response to Motorola acquisition by Google.
Nintendo is the closest company to Apple. It would be interesting to see what they do if both 3DS and Wii U fail. Who knows maybe it is time for them to do another major transition like they did around the 70s.
Nintendo will have to have a string of spectacular failures before it starts share cropping. Remember n64? Remember GameCube? Both were pretty lackluster compared to Super NES. VirtualBoy? Disaster.
The Wii U and 3DS might be disappointing, but Nintendo is a survivor. It has the internal support to last through dry spells on the strength of first party titles alone.
It would be very difficult for a company as resilient and conservative as Nintendo to sink itself in such a short time frame. Remember, too, this company also started off making playing cards 100 years ago.
The only bad end I could see in Nintendo's immediate future would be an aggressive if not hostile takeover. I believe its market cap is only $20 billion, and supposedly half of that is in cash. If Apple or Microsoft wanted to pay a premium for the ultimate maker of killer apps this is the time to make a move. In another cycle it will be too late: the mobile wars will be decided and/or Nintendo will likely have recovered. Who knows how well the company would survive a takeover though.
I think the Wii, in retrospect, is the writing on the wall for Nintendo's hardware. They couldn't keep up on graphics or CPU, so they went sideways into new controller technologies. The problem with that, as demonstrated by Kinect, is that it's easier to add a new controller technology to an existing console than it is to improve the horsepower of a weak console with a novel controller scheme.
I disagree pretty strongly. All of the major game consoles are an IBM PowerPC CPU with nVidia/ATI graphics. Everything is off the shelf. The Xbox 360, GameCube, Wii, and Playstation 3 are pretty much all based on those same designs (although the PS3's CPU has crazy after-market modifications which really didn't work out so well).
The same can be said about phones and portable video game systems. It's all ARM CPUs with Imagine GPUs. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, webOS, Nintendo GBA/DS/3DS, Sony Vita all use the exact same chips from the same design firms.
The big hardware differentiator is what cost/performance balance you want to strike. Newer architectures with newer manufacturing processes cost more plain and simple. And there is a spectrum of other off the shelf components to round out the package.
There can be some play in getting more out of a design with engineering tricks or getting better components at the same cost with economies of scale. Or you can corner the market by buying out the entire manufacturing capacity of the best components to deny your competitors (or vice versa). But it's pretty much you get what you pay for.
Nintendo builds hardware two to three generations behind to save a lot on costs. Not because it doesn't know how to get something faster and better. The upcoming Wii U is basically an older PowerPC CPU with an older ATI GPU. If Nintendo wanted, it could create a crazy powerful console with a $1000 CPU and dual $600 GPUs that nobody would buy. All it needed to do was tell IBM and ATI what it wanted. It wasn't a matter of engineering that steered them away, but a matter of economics. Which if you remember right worked great in the short term for the Wii. But as everyone already knew wasn't a long term play. Hence the earlier-than-everyone-else release of the Wii U.
It also ignores what Nintendo is. Nintendo is vertically integrated. It makes game machines, games, and game characters (i.e. Mario). It doesn't make money by making a better FPS machine. It makes money by making a cheap machine with some wacky creative edge (i.e. a new type of controller). Then its game division creates the best games, with their internal know-how. Then they leverage the Mario brand, and sell they can sell the whole package (along with the sequels they crank out) with a massive margin.
If it flops, who cares? They didn't spend huge amounts on loss-leading hardware, and they didn't need to make a huge investment in a cutting edge FPS only to be told it's not as good as Halo.
Apple (along with the Angry Birds developers) stole their lunch, with another cheap game machine, with an even cooler new control system. Eventually, that market will start to mature, and you will need 100 developers to make a good iOS game. And Nintendo won't want to touch that market with a barge pole, because it becomes a winner-takes-all bloodbath with huge entry costs.
The question is, is iOS an existential threat to the gaming market as a whole? If so, Nintendo will lose. If not, Nintendo will come up with some other wacky control system, and build a few fun (but simple) games staring Mario. People will buy it, because they want a bit of a change from their familiar, mature, and eventually boring touch games. Apple won't hurt them this cycle, because they are busy consolidating their monopoly on tables. Apple doesn't want to take over the gaming market - the 3DS was just a piece of collateral damage. Apple wants to sell a boring mature platform (with simple updates to performance, but no fundamental changes), not novelties that will need to be redesigned every 5 years. But the iPad just happens to be new enough to still be a novelty, and thus devastate Nintendo.
> They couldn't keep up on graphics or CPU, so they went sideways into new controller technologies.
It's not about ability, it's a cogent choice to step back and not play into the arms race. They did the exact same thing with the DS, and outsold the (very significantly) more powerful PSP almost 3:1. And a few years earlier, the GameBoy brutalized the Game Gear.
In terms of raw power, the GC was the most powerful console of its generation (or tied with the Xbox). So was the N64. Neither panned out (though neither lost N money either), so Nintendo went into a different direction. And — at least for a time — struck gold.
I'm not saying Nintendo is going out of business, I'm saying gaming consoles are about to become the 201x's version of the mp3 player: a huge product category that gets eaten by converged devices.
You could argue that Nintendo will sell that converged home device but Wii U sure ain't it. No it will probably be the big app platforms (Windows, iOS/OS X, Android/linux) that win the home.
Nintendo harbors great will with consumers like Apple. WebOS seems to be a great mobile operating system.
To witness some true, fierce competition, Nintendo should mix their branding/games into WebOS & then allow developers to create games for their platform. WebOS already has 1,000s of apps created for it now.
Everyone currently in the market (RIM & Windows) are stale brands and do not harbor excitement amongst many demographics. Nintendo's brand loyalty stretches many demographics. From 16 to 24, 24 to 35 to 35 to 50.
How many iOS and Android users have searched for a mario game for their devices? HOw many people own Wii just so they can play these games?
I wonder if one of those nervous Android licensees will pick up the WebOS assets as a hedge.
It's a shame Nokia didn't have the balls/foresight to buy Palm, they could have been shipping gorgeous Nokia crafted WebOS phones for the last couple quarters instead of getting slaughtered by Android et al.
HP is not developing hardware for WebOS. They will probably try and license the software. Spinning off the PC division might actually allow their consumer products to get the right focus and agility to compete against Apple on something other than price. Trying to fight Apple and IBM (and Cisco, and Dell, etc.) as one giant company is bad for HP's shareholders and HP's customers.
HP spent $1.2B to acquire Palm a little over a year ago. According to Google Patents, Palm is the assignee in 12,000 patents. If HP can sell off the Palm patents for the same $/patent as Google is paying in their Motorola acquisition, they would net $8.8B.
It's a sad day for innovation when patents are worth more than the product they back. Why wouldn't HP kill off webOS? How long would it have taken them to make $7B in profits off of webOS?
The patent portfolio of Palm is maybe not much worth. The WebOS was introduced 2009 and postdates the iPhone.
And Palm did in 2003 spun off their operating system (think of the Treo PDA/Smartphones), which was then bought by a japanese company (Access ltd). Microsoft did license last year a few dozen "Palm" patents from them. I guess any valuable patents date from that time frame but are not owned by Palm anymore.
They paid 1.2B to acquire those patents and Palm itself. It seems obvious that the market values those patents at somewhere < 1.2 billion.
Even if they've appreciated of late, their selling price last year is probably a lot more instructive as to their value than "$/patent" in the Motorola deal.
$1.2B for the acquisition, sure, but what about the money put into the development of the TouchPad, Pre 3, etc, in addition to the costs of distribution and marketing?
Regardless, it does seem like they could still make a hefty profit off of selling the patents (and if there's one thing we all need more of, it's patent talk...)
Which is exactly my point: they would be in an even better position had they not even developed those new devices and enhancements to the OS. At least we got a year's worth of innovation before they realized it made more sense to sell the patents rather than the product.
what i think lawyers and justice departments want patent war to go on as it will profit them, and this people are very powerful they know the laws inside out. Lawmakers or the congress will not pass any legislation to curb this problem as it profit many people its a money making pot. so the patent war will go on as usual and google or any other company will have to take concrete steps to shield themself.
I think we are quickly approaching a point of patent detente. Google needs to get a few more patents and indemnify Android OEMs and maybe lob a few lawsuits at Bing etc. and MS will quickly cross license. Same against Apple.
And one sign of a "mature market" is that barriers to entry rise. So for the big players the game of patent poker is the price they pay to keep the innovations down to a dull roar and to "manage the competitive environment", for actual innovators It just means that the slope is steeper, and if they are at all successful they will attract predators like Lodsys/IV.
And while a few more entrepreneurs getting ground into hamburger by lawyers isn't that big of a concern in the larger scheme of things; it does mean that innovation in the tech sector is tamed and that we lose out on great products that never get a chance to compete in the marketplace.
Glad we told them we weren't interested in developing apps when they contacted us on April 15. I eventually had a phone call with the fellow who emailed us, and I explained to him HP was doomed. He told me they were sure they could be a strong third!
Here was the original email:
Hello,
I am part of Hewlett-Packard’s Business Development team that focuses on engaging one-on-one in strategic relationships with leading partners for webOS app opportunities.
I wanted to touch base with you to see how things were going with your "APP NAME REDACTED", and also discuss with you our plans for HP’s upcoming webOS tablet launch.
If you have some time, it would be great to connect to share where we are headed, and also hear more about your mobile strategy.
Let me know when you’d be available and I can schedule a call- I hope to speak with you soon.
At least they reached out to you. I kept trying and trying to reach someone at HP regarding an issue with an app I was working on for a company I assume they would have wanted on board, but to this day, TO THIS DAY, I got nowhere with HP.
HP sent me a TouchPad a couple weeks ago and after the first 2 days I haven't touched it. It just didn't seem like a finished product. I got errors and buggy UI interactions regularly. It lacked mature apps for basic usage like reading ebooks. Also, the screen rotation sensor is really sensitive so it almost always needs to have the orientation locked.
A couple things I did like about the TouchPad over the iPad: shift key on the keyboard to access special chars easier and downloading apps without being thrown out of the App Store.
As one of the few people that's actually used WebOS on a phone, when I try the TouchPad I'm baffled at how slow and clunky it is. The UI is smooth on even the Palm Pixi but on the TouchPad I get plenty of lag and glitches.
“I went out for dinner with someone new, but my date was late to pick me up, the car was uncomfortable, the place I was taken had terrible service, and I had the runs after eating the food there.”
“Yeah, but your date has learned a lot from taking people on dates like that and most of that stuff has been fixed. How about another date?”
Not making fun of your factually correct statement, obviously, just pointing out that in many cases you do not get a second chance to make a first impression.
I disagree. Consider people's first impressions of the iPhone when the iPhone 2G launched, or of Android when the G1 launched, or how almost every Blackberry device has launched with buggy firmware requiring users to update the OS only a couple of weeks after launch.
You're picking and choosing a specific example when, if you recall everyone else, it was pretty much the same thing. Buggy software was the sole reason why the TouchPad or even WebOS failed.
I feel like the prevailing sentiment in 2007 was that most everything Apple chose to include in the iPhone, they executed well. It wasn't all that buggy at launch. However, there was a lot of very valid criticism of it--mostly that it had many glaring omissions -- 3G, copy/paste, ability to turn off autocomplete so you can type in other languages, etc.
This has gone on to be the core of the Apple mobile strategy--they don't worry about being first to market with every feature, rather the biggest concern is not to ship buggy/unreliable stuff that doesn't deliver on its promises. If at all possible.
This is also the major disadvantage for anyone new coming into this space.
Apple got to launch their incomplete-but-solid product and then spend a year or two refining it and incrementally adding features. That's the advantage of redefining/creating the market you launch in though, it doesn't extend to anyone else.
For anyone trying to compete with them now, they have to hit the ground running with a comparable-or-better feature set (which I assume is why Android vendors make so much fuss about Flash) _and_ comparable polish.
Same here. I had the original 2G iPHone and its was absolutely amazing. It's hard to remember the state of cell phones back then anymore, but it was revolutionary imo and worked great from day one.
"Sole reason" I can't agree with, but WebOS has bugs that's for sure. I bought an HP Veer around Week 1. Last month I went back to my iPhone4 and I wouldn't go back (even before this announcement).
The Veer lags sometimes, for no obvious reason. Touches often register with the droplet effect, but fail to actually trigger the button you clearly hit. The Palm account had no way to update it online (better not forget to update your CC# before a purchase or you've effectively bricked the app-market). Mail was laggy, and seemed to rarely update properly. I couldn't have both my Work GoogleApps Mail, and my regular GMail on the phone as GMail accounts. I had to setup my personal account as an Exchange account.
None of these were instant deal-breakers, but with no updates, no fixes, and no communication I got tired of waiting for a fix that may never come.
Of course the app-store/market/whatever kinda sucked too.
My biggest peeve was copy & paste. Mentioned in another reply, but before the 2G iPhone I never had a real need for copy & paste since there weren't really worthwhile apps to copy & paste between on the feature-phones back then.
The WebOS copy/paste however absolutely sucks. It's tricky, I never remembered if it's Option+C or gesture-area+C no matter how many times I did it.
Oh, and the Veer screen was OK for most stuff, but waaay too small for web-browsing without Android's ability to re-flow text on zoom.
Along with patches, it is quite smooth indeed. Of course, the argument can and should be made that it should have shipped this way.
It is possible to set up Google Apps and personal Gmail on the same phone. Simply select GMail and enter email addresses with full domain i.e. you@work.com and you@gmail.com
I've done this (GMail setup). Didn't work for me. It appears to be a common problem.
I also installed a number of patches from Preware, but nothing to my knowledge really addresses any of these concerns.
The "laggy" effects are software, not CPU. Even another 50% CPU isn't going to help a 3-second pause every time you send an SMS. It isn't going to prevent clearly software related bugs in the Mail app. It's also not going to make the buggy software decide to start triggering events on buttons it's clearly already registering (due to the droplet indicator on taps).
It's not going to make copy/paste as smooth as a double-tap, drag a point to highlight selection, tap "Copy" and done. Honestly I never did figure out the way to highlight the selection I wanted consistently. I'm pretty sure text-selections are not an OS-wide feature.
Even if in the past 30 days community patches came out to address all these issues (I seriously doubt it), who wants to depend on the grace of others for a product you just paid $250 for a couple months ago when the company that sold you the product is more interested in releasing and patching/updating a tablet?
Add to that no Pre3, the 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 fragmentation, and it was clear that without some major, visible effort on HP's part the Veer was already dead.
Plus the damn phone doesn't provide an option to keep the screen off on the Touchstone charger without a community patch. That issue has been around since my old Pre Minus! Seriously WebOS? 9 out of 10 smartphone owners I know use their phone as their alarm clock. I don't want a damn flashlight to turn on 12" from my head on my nightstand at 3AM because I got an automated email. If it's not a SMS or Phone Call, turn off and stay off when I push the Lock button.
The one redeeming application on the app-store was the Remix music player. First non-iPhone music player I could get behind (I used to own a Nexus S, never found anything on Android that seemed to focus on the simple act of browsing your music library quickly and just playing). HP should've bought the app and replaced their ugly WinAmp3/Win95 era junk with it. :-) Too late now...
It is amazing to me that of everyone who has made tablets, only Apple seems to be successful at it. Maybe it is just like someone said recently: there is no tablet market; just an iPad market.
I don't think that's the case, but there definitely isn't a market for tablets that fail to compete on features or price.
The brilliance of what Apple has done with their mobile products is hard to overstate. They put all this effort into designing mobile chips and a mobile OS for the iPhone and iPod Touch. They took the fruits of those efforts and stuck them into a tablet format, and bam, you've got an iPad. They took them and stuck them into a set-top box, and bam, you've got the Apple TV 2G.
They get to spread the development costs of their silicon and OS over these four product lines. Talk about efficient reuse of your development investment. I own three separate devices powered by an A4 CPU and iOS operating system.
Main reason being they can't even compete on price without those fat carrier subsidies that it took to get Android for phones off the ground. They're pretty much at price parity with the market leader with a fraction of the useful apps, and surprised why they're not selling that well.
Anyone who thinks Android would be the leading smartphone OS if their devices were sold at price parity with iPhones is deluding themselves.
Similarly, if Apple wanted to overtake Windows PC markethsare with Macs (they don't) they would be foolish not to compete on price. When you are asking the user to try something new (or new to them) and non-mainstream, "pay more for this risky new thing" isn't a very attractive proposition.
I would like to see where that number is coming from. I've seen a lot of number's based on units shipped, but none on "actual" units sold. Curious what the 20% is actually based on.
It's even more efficient when you just relabel a standard chip you bought from Samsung and just tell everyone that you've put lots of effort into designing it. Works much better than I'd have imagined anyway.
Intrinsity does not "create customized ARM chips", they optimize existing designs. There's been nothing impressive so far in Apple's chips, they're pretty standard design though thought to have been optimized by Intrinsity's folks.
Innovative custom designs were expected from the PA Semi acquisition. Apparently did not pan out, since it's been three years and there isn't much to show for it.
The iPad 2 has a smaller, lower resolution display than the other tablets in those charts. Once you compensate for that it still has an advantage, but barely. It hardly leaves the other tablets "in the dust".
You appear to be claiming that this is a demonstration of how much better Apple's custom ARM chips are, when it's just a better GPU in the core, just like Samsung's Hummingbirds in the Galaxy and Nexus S used the next GPU up compared with the iPhone 4. They're all PowerVRs. It's about as technically impressive as us both buying a laptop from Dell and me buying a laptop with a better GPU than yours.
I suppose you could give Apple 10% credit seeing how they bought that much of the company that makes them (again, after starting to use their products) but then Intel should get even more credit, because they've owned more, for longer.
There's two sides to this argument and you appear to have missed the important half. Anyone can slap a better GPU on and get better framerates. Not just anyone can slap on "the next GPU up" and still beat you in battery life.
Everything I've ever read about Apple's supposed optimizations is that they have to do with power efficiency.
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
SAMSUNG and Intrinsity Jointly Develop the World's Fastest ARM® Cortex™-A8 Processor Based Mobile Core
"Seoul, Korea, Austin, Texas - July 27, 2009 : Samsung and Intrinsity today jointly announced the industry's fastest mobile processor core implementation of the dual-issue ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor architecture in 45 nanometer (nm) Low Power (LP), low leakage process technology. This Cortex-A8 implementation, code-named Hummingbird, delivers 2000DMIPS at 1GHz. The Hummingbird comes with 32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension. Performance and power consumption of the Hummingbird have been validated in silicon. Samsung is currently developing standard mobile SoC products using this new core."
At least for the A4/Hummingbird, Intrinsity optimised the existing Cortex-A8 design for Samsung and before Apple bought them, so you disagree based on faulty facts.
Your going to have tell me what you think is wrong, because I can't read minds. I can't see any problem, but I'll rephrase to see if it's just the sentence structure that's confusing you:
Samsung worked with a company called Intrinsity.
They took the Cortex-A8 design, and Intrinsity made it a bit more power efficient.
Samsung sells these chips, and uses them in their devices.
They also sell them to Apple.
Apple gets Samsung to put Apple logos on them, and refers to them as the A4.
Apple bought the company called Intrinsity after all the work on the A4 was finished, nothing they've done in the pay of Apple has any impact on the A4 or Hummingbird core.
I responded to someone claiming that Intrinsity customised the chips for Apple. This isn't true. I linked to a press release that shows this.
Asus claims to be selling 400,000 Eee tablets a month. I own one, and when I went to pick up a cover sleeve at Central Computers* lately they said the things are flying off the shelves.
I love Central Computer! It has the selection of Fry's, but the employees actually speak english and the merchandise is well lit and organized... and for that you do pay quite a premium over Fry's, but it's worth it.
edit: Care to explain the down votes? It's too early to make such proclamations. It took a while for the cellphone market to catch up with Apple, why should we expect the tablet market to be any different?
True, but the tablet market is in one important aspect different from the phone market, in that the distribution channels are vastly different. Many who buy a new phone just take what the carriers are shoving in their sales channel.
In the best case scenario the iPad could play out more like the iPod: year after year there were prominent iPod-killers like the Zune and cheap knockoffs and year after year Apple dominated the market.
iPhone didn't immediately command a large percentage of the market, the iPad does. This is much closer to the iPod situation where many companies tried to match it but failed.
For one thing it was Apple's exclusivity with AT&T that opened the door for Verizon to push Android which played a vital role in its success. Things are a bit different with the iPad being that it's offered in both CDMA and GSM and the wifi-only model is, by far, the most popular.
It's also important to note there's really only one successful competitor to the iPhone -- Android. WebOS is dead, RIM is on the ropes, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, LG, etc didn't catch up as much as they let Google catch-up and they rode their success. (my point being we can't under estimate the difficulty in trying to compete toe-to-toe with iOS as only one company has done it successfully to date)
Yes, it is really just a matter of time... and of Android tablet manufacturers finding the sweet spot between features and pricing (which ASUS has with the Transformer but other manufacturers have been iffy with thus far)... but that too is just another thing time is already sorting out.
There is no way Android represents 20% of the tablets sold this year. Seriously, I doubt it's 5%.
It's incredible that anyone can make that claim when it's patently obvious from simple observation that there are hardly any Android tablets in the wild. If they're going to pull numbers out of their ass to create the perception that Android is succeeding on tablets, they should at least make up numbers that are marginally plausible.
I'm not clear as to if you were trying for irony with that statement so I'll call you on it:
Seriously, I doubt it's 5%
...they should at least make up numbers that are marginally ...
If your going to mock someone for "making up" numbers try not to make up numbers of your own in the same post. The op provided data, you did not. Unless you were going for irony; in that case, well never mind.
I don't think it's incredible to make that claim at all. The iPad has been around for quite a bit longer so you would expect to see a lot more of them in the wild despite only outselling android tablets by approximately a 4 to one margin at the moment.
Despite this, I still routinely see android tablets in airports. I saw a galaxy tab 7" tonight (along with 3 people using ipads in first class). I've also seen a few galaxy tab 10.1s and a couple of HTC Flyers.
To be clear, I also wonder if the actual ratio is 4 to one. I just don't think the number is completely outside the realm of possibility.
It depends what you mean by successful. The Android tablets are selling reasonably well - ASUS is claiming ~1 million sales (to consumers) and forecasting 1m more by the end of the year. It ain't iPad level but it's a strong showing and it's just one tablet out of half a dozen.
Moreover, ASUS is following the Transformer up with the eee Pad Slider in September and a second-generation Transformer using Tegra 3 Kal-El (though the release-date rumors for this vary). In other words, ASUS isn't just talking the talk, they're walking the walk.
Also, two of those Xooms are gathering dust here at work. We got them intending to write Android versions of the iOS apps we were making... The iPads were fought over, but one of the Xooms ended up in a file cabinet for a few months, and the other has barely been touched either. I feel sorry for those things. The only thing a Xoom is really good for is disappointing your kids on Christmas morning.
Companies seem to give in too quickly, though. The tablet thing has only just started. Most non-ipad tablets simply sucked. Instead of giving in, they should create better tablets.
I agree. It's going to take some time for manufacturers to pull their heads out of there asses on tablets. If you want to compete with Apple, your tablet has to be cheaper. Otherwise, why would anyone buy it? And, it has to not completely suck.
We will have more data points on that 'observation' when Windows 8 launches
Sorry, but I just find this statement hard to agree with. Microsoft is forever shipping some "game changer" "pretty soon now", but they haven't managed to change any games in a very long time now.
If Microsoft, or anyone else, has some revolutionary thing, it will be interesting to see it when it happens. But I am certainly not anticipating any such event in the next year.
> "I'm beggining to wonder if MS are actually scared of being innovative."
This might actually be a pretty good summary of MSFT's corporate culture.
The impression I always get from the inside is that it's a company dominated by middle managers. They've got so many PMs in so many layers that you'd wonder if it's just PMs all the way down.
The combination of mature, gigantic company, lack of strong leadership, and extremely generous benefits has combined to create a population of people who are there for the stability and extremely afraid of rocking the boat or killing the golden goose.
Instead, they are slowly bleeding the goose dry. Granted, the golden goose is still pretty fat and could sustain them for decades without doing anything significant. As it is though, Microsoft is pretty low in the innovation front. I don't think anybody has been "wowed" by any of their products since maybe Windows XP.
If you haven't read this, this is a short article on what Apple does so differently than almost all of its competitors - never announce something before it is shippable (e.g. production-qualified and vetted, supply chain and all)
Yeah yeah, but "Tablet PC" is not the same device as we mean today when we say tablet. And also, I guess by "successfully making tablets" you mean "being the only mfg who bothers with the incredibly tiny niche of Tablet PC buyers consisting of warehouse operations, hospitals, and about 20 really nerdy college students." And even then, much of that niche may in the future go to "real tablets" that run mobile OSs instead of Windows XP/7. For one thing, "real tablets" in the modern sense cost about a third of those huge pen-based Windows things.
Correct, no true Scotsman has three heads and an integrated espresso machine. Likewise, the Fujitsu tablets have nothing in common with current iOS/Android devices.
Wow. That was incompetent. Talk about ignoring your OODA loop. Who is the new guy running HP these days?
Had HP been smart they would have stayed in the tablet business and aggressively integrated it with their software stack. Letting customers buy HP from end to end, sort of like Apple.
They've just handed Apple a much easier path into the enterprise market - which they don't seem to be wasting.
Apotheker is the CEO, and he strikes me as the wrong CEO for this company. This decision is bad, and I am not surprised it is being made during his tenure. He is a guy who is good with cost savings, but lacks in vision.
I think he agrees with you. The solution he has come up with is to turn HP into a company he is the right CEO for. No hardware, more ERP type software. Shades of SAP which is where he was before HP.
Not a great business plan if you ask me. You see it a lot in sports: change all of the players to match the new coach's plan rather than adapting the plan to fit the players you have. Usually they stumble around for a few years during the "turnaround" and then repeat the cycle with the next coach.
Another CEO did the same thing. Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple. Jobs brought in his own team and basically just kept the Apple name. Seems to be working so far.
yeah, that seems to be the common analysis of the move: the founder's vision was abandoned a while ago, they're just setting fire to the remnants junking the yard.
The difference is when Jobs started NeXT it was a new iteration of the Apple idea, so when he brought that team in it was a new heart for the old body, with the same DNA. There's literally no available comparison to that situation, and nothing remotely to do with HPs situation today.
He's awful. He got quietly shuffled out of SAP after 18 months as CEO. If you're trying to innovate in a technology company, he's definitely not the person to do so.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who works for SAP and apparently he has a very established network of large enterprise companies who would buy his ERP software if he told them to buy it. This is how enterprise software works by the way - its not by value but by the shake of a hand. The question is what software do they have to sell? Sure they bought Autonomy, but that's only a small piece of the pie.
I'm developing software for a health organization in Canada, and you should see the reactions I get from users when they realize that I listened to their concerns and tailored the software to them. I feel like Santa at Christmas.
Apotheker has a vision. His specialty is to steer companies away from the consumer market and to make them enterprise oriented. I have to believe that this was the game plan when he was hired.
This sounds reasonable, and I also think it is better for HP to just sell their hardware to enterprises and add software to create complete appliances, instead of competing with Apple in the consumer market. However, was this really the best exit he could get for Palm in the span of one year? Also, why did they buy Palm? To compete in the enterprise mobile market (which surely will be large) But then, why not sell the Touchpad to enterprises and integrate it with the software from the start? Could be an unbeatable combination. Well, let's see what happens in the next months. I know that some executives from SAP/SAP Business Objects followed him but I haven't seen any big announcement of software offerings.
Either way they are all doing a terrible job. How long have they had webOS? Like a year and a half? How many products have they managed to ship out in that time? Like 2? Guess you can't buy your way out of incompetence.
I don't see Apple heading into the enterprise market. Anything they sell to enterprise is just a bonus - their model remains to sell devices with a three year support lifecycle and no concern for legacy systems and backward compatibility.
I've reviewed the iOS Volume Purchase Program in some detail recently. It's not "enterprise" in any sense that I would use that word. To me, enterprise solutions means tightly coupled service and support, and negotiable terms/pricing. iOS VPP is a take it or leave it proposition.
I don't blame Apple for ignoring enterprise customers: they're usually a huge pain in the ass to deal with, and rarely have a clear idea of what they actually want. They engage suppliers just to have "a neck to choke" when things inevitably fall apart.
The iOS VPP is for purchasing apps that are most likely not made by Apple. How could they provide support or negotiate pricing for something made by someone else?
That's my point: it's not a traditional "enterprise" market. Neither price (what you pay to Apple) nor terms are negotiable. There is a certain amount of "support" involved, via the App Store approval/appeal process and transaction dispute handling, etc.
Ofcourse apple will want to enter enterprise. They want to fuel their future growth somehow and enterprise is much more willing to give apple a shot than before. Microsoft should be worried about this which has traditionally had a stronghold on enterprise.
Exactly. Apple can't go after the enterprise market in the way Microsoft or Oracle do without sacrificing the soul of the company. It's the converse of the reason that Microsoft does so poorly in the new consumer electronics markets.
I've had my hands on one of these tablets. It could not connect to WPA Enterprise, so I sort of have a feeling they weren't really thinking about business adoption to begin with.
HP recently did a lunch-and-learn for the IT staff at my university. They had marketing material that heavily pitched WebOS as the basis of enterprise-ready products.
Apple never had a well-developed enterprise strategy, but after killing the xserve and xserve raid and integrating their server software with their consumer OS at least they have a coherent one: they don't care about it.
I'm astonished that they aren't even going to bother selling it off. With the Google/Motorola merger, surely one of the Android partners has to be feeling a little uncomfortable right now. Hell, Motorola was always rumored to be working on its own JS-based OS because it didn't like the position of relying only on Android.
As a whole, I don't see much value. Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free (outside of patent deals with trolls)? The distinction of having your own software didn't work for HP, so why should it work for Samsung/HTC/etc?
However! I think the big sale is yet to come. When HP bought Palm, they acquired their 1,600-ish patents as well. Palm was a very early player in the smartphone market, so it's conceivable that this portfolio contains some attractive property. Having paid $1.2 billion for Palm, either selling this patent portfolio outright, or taking the Lodsys route seems plausible. Given the heat around patent acquisition right now, they'd probably do pretty well; maybe even exceeding their original purchase price.
"Why would anyone be interested in purchasing a failed-to-launch tablet product when Android tablets sell well and the software is free"
a) webOS is an OS that has been shipped on much more than just this latest tablet. It's a fantastic OS, but has been hampered by poor execution by Palm & HP.
Yes. Palm patents have the potential of creating another Nortel type situation. That is possibly a part of "optimization of webOS revenue". Would be interesting to see who gets a hold of this pile.
HP already has a hold of this pile. I wouldn't just assume that because they're exiting the hardware business they have no (future) need for that portfolio. Heck, if anything, they'll have to hold on to those if they hope to license webOS to other handset makers (the latest rumor).
It is hard to imagine why they will sit on the Palm portfolio without hardware business considering their new focus is to become IBM/SAP like - enterprisey. IBM for e.g. sold 1000 patents to Google short while ago.
And besides, I am not certain webOS licensing is going to go very far. We will see..
There's definitely a lot of strategy being reviewed inside HP right now. They have a number of options available to them, some of which include licensing the entire platform, or even specific patents. Having paid $1.2bn for Palm, and having observed two large patent portfolios sell for a number that is 10x that, I'd imagine that there is at least some consideration being given to exiting while the market for mobile patents is hot. Licensing is a much longer play, but it's also fraught with the risk of having to enforce the portfolio with litigation, not to mention the threat of patent reform.
Sell what off? They're keeping WebOS (at least for now) not sure what kind of manufacturing Palm does but its likely small and something that HP could continue to use.
I dont' doubt HP is still going to build Tablets and phones they're just likely going to be Android.
Who would buy it? HTC or Samsung? Nokia? The OEMs are worse at making OSes and dev ecosystems than even HP which has experience making a UNIX based OS. And it's not as if buying WebOS will stop the patent attacks, in fact, it may increase them. They would simply be better off with Android/Windows 8 for tablets
As Nokia's CEO said, it's a battle of ecosystems now, not devices anymore. Maybe RIM's next, either for a takeover, or a failure.
An unnamed source claimed something that the article itself says there's a bunch of problems with this idea and we are supposed to believe it? It was more likely a rumour that someone at Palm was putting around to try and push the price up, and the "source" believed it.
They spent $1.2 billion on Palm, only to kill the whole project after it had been on the market in 48 days?! I had no doubt that HP would bungle that acquisition, but I didn't think they'd do it so spectacularly.
Kin brought some decent tech to the scene but was heavily hampered by Verizon requiring a full cost data plan for a phone that was aimed at teens. Also was an abject failure of the Danger acquisition by Microsoft, so lets see how Google/Motorola does.
Danger was a bit of a different scenario; the Sidekicks[1] and Kin were actually made by Sharp and Motorola, and Microsoft dumped Danger's OS for a WinCE derivative (not to mention the rumblings of being kneecapped by the WP7 team and such). Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
[1] Or Hiptops, depending on if you're in Magenta territory or not
I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped? I am with you on the kneecapping from the WP team though.
>Motorola does their own hardware, they already use Android exclusively, already had a working relationship with Google (Droid, Xoom), and Google doesn't seem intent on totally absorbing Moto like MS did Danger.
That's a really hard tightrope walk for Google. The last one to try this model of both making hardware and licensing the OS was Apple during the nineties and we all know how that ended.
They need to make money from Motorola (currently it's at breakeven) to justify the purchase price for shareholders, but without pissing off the other OEMs like Samsung/HTC. I am not saying it can't be done, but it's very very hard.
> I don't see how having WinCE as the OS hurt Kin's chances in the market after it shipped?
They already had an OS they were developing on, and insider reports were that scrapping it and rebuilding on top of WinCE just to satisfy the Windows everywhere mandate cost them a year of development.
WinCE might not have hurt it after it shipped, but shipping in a much different market than the one they would have hit a year earlier certainly did.
Switching to a winCE based OS delayed the release by at least a year, which definitely hurt their chances in the market. Not to mention that it probably made whatever internal pressures from phone 7 much worse as well, since the phone 7 project was not nearly as far along when kin might have originally shipped. Huge, classic Microsoft mistake to rewrite the OS based on windows tech.
Yeah, seems like ego got in the way of doing what's best for the product. Microsoft just couldn't live with themselves if they ever shipped a product that wasn't entirely "Invented Here."
VZW originally planned to provide more attractive data plans and provide full marketing support, but Microsoft was so late getting the Kin to market that VZW essentially threw their hands in the air and dropped those plans.
It's like Cisco and the Flip, isn't it - pure market plays, zero technical vision or willingness to go over the market'snhead to consumers. That said, HP never had a compelling vision for the mass market anyway.
No one seems to remember that it took the iPod 3-4 years to take over the MP3 market.
HP also bungled by not offering a 7" model, and not competing on price from the very beginning, even if it meant running at a loss to chase market share.
Agreed. You have to wonder how they ever thought they would succeed if they were going to give in this easily. Any fool could see it was going to be harder than the effort they've made so far. It was always premised on pushing WebOS on all their PCs and other strategic ways to promote it ... none of which ever got even tried.
Only yesterday I received this email from a HP.com email address.
"Hello,
I am in business development with the HP Touchpad group and we are recruiting apps to be ported to our Touchpad Platform. I saw your app on the chrome store and wanted to reach out to gauge the interest. Since the Touchpad supports both Flash and HTML5, our technical team believes that porting your Scribble and Pixza Lite apps to our platform should be fairly easy. We have support resources, MDF, marketing programs, and loaner devices to assist the effort. I would be happy to do a quick call to explain things further.
Agreed! Android is Linux + Java, Chumby is Linux + Flash, webOS is Linux + Webkit ( and iOS is...different). Definitely prefer the webOS option, and there aren't that many other permutations.
Unlike the other options, webOS is composed of two open source projects. What prevents someone from knitting them together, with a little hardware interfacing? Would it be legally problematic to attempt to make an OS that was compatible with the existing webOS apps?
Perhaps I was unfair - that's just my perspective of the current state of affairs. I've used some HP printers and some non-HP printers in the last few years, and the HP ones did nothing to stand out of the pack.
I guess what I mean to say is that HP just seems like yet-another consumer electronics company. It isn't apparent to me if people have brand-loyalty to HP in the consumer segment.
The calculator group was shut down, an HP division in Australia tried to revive it a while back. I think the HP calculators that are still being sold are done by a Korean OEM.
It appears this kills any chance of another manufacturer picking up webOS. If HP can't make it work why should anyone else try?
Hindsight is 20/20. Google and Palm could have made a deal. At least then the WebOS team could merge with the ChromeOS team. And Google would have that patent trove for a bargain price. And an in-house manufacturer, too, if that's what it wanted.
Too late for that now. At best Google will get the patents at a significant premium. ChromeOS is too far along to benefit from WebOS. And now Google has Motorola, what would it do with Palm's hardware?
I didn't expect my prediction to come true quite that fast: RIM and HP are the big losers here; I can't see any reason to buy into the Blackberry OS or WebOS from either a consumer or business point of view.
(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2879195)
Height of vague cluelessness in the non-answers. Scary given the impact of the announcements.
"all outcomes are possible, including a potential non-transaction" [about the PC business spin off ] - Why announce anything right now then?
"How will you make webOS profitable? A> We expect the dev expenses to come down dramatically -- down to 1 or 2 cents per share a quarter. If you look at the run rate losses there, you can attribute them pretty much to Palm" -- i.e. we will make it profitable by killing it!
Apple's path of disruption continues. I hope they open source WebOS, but they will probably sell it for the patents based on what MMI got from Google.
I wish Nokia would have bought Palm.
Expect the PC market to be disrupted next by Apple with Macbook Airs sucking up all the profits, and iOS devices crimping unit growth. Who is going to stick their neck out to make single-digit margins on a Windows 8 tablet?
I agree the Macbook Air is an incredibly compelling hardware product placing the low-end mac in the same market as the high-end pc laptop.
However, in the mid-to-low end, your average Windows machine is still significantly cheaper than a similarly equiped Mac. Expect PCs to still own the low-priced market.
I'm not sure where you get your 'single-digit margins' comment from, but what are the real options for hardware manufacturers? You can't make a product without an OS, and your options are Android and Windows. I for one prefer a Windows device (WP over Android anyway). There is a market.
Meanwhile, PC sales are declining in the U.S. and Europe. So it's a slow/negative growth market with small profits.
Virtually all of the (non-Apple) profit in the PC market accumulates to Microsoft and Intel. Windows costs around $50, that means that even if they could make a tablet as cheaply as Apple, they would still make significantly less profit.
And there is no evidence at all that anyone can compete with the iPad right now.
True. Until the generation who is now about 10 grows up and starts driving the PC buying decisions. They'll have been using tablets for 8 years or so and will think nothing of writing a paper on a tablet (bluetooth keyboards being easily available, although kids who have had smartphones since before puberty may end up being just fine typing everything on touch screens) and consuming all their media on a tablet and their smartphone. No bulky laptop required. What does a laptop add, from the point of view of a consumer? The ability to choose from a wide range of anti-virus software and browser toolbars?
So when they go to college, they will see a bargain basement PC laptop with Windows 10 Home Basic Limited Edition (~$600) or an iPad 11 ($500), or an Android "Vanilla Custard" tablet ($449). Which one will they choose? I don't know, but I know it's not the crappy laptop.
AAPL is positioning themselves in anticipation of that day, I have no doubt about it. They intend the iPad to be the "best" tablet the same way the iPod was the best MP3 player, and by 2007 everyone seemed to own an iPod. Once people are ready to let go of PCs the same way we let go of floppies, CRT monitors, and dial-up modems, they will be positioned as the smart choice.
They're also selling off their PC division, and buying Autonomy (http://www.autonomy.com/), who produce search and data-mining type software. I assume this is an attempt to re-focus on enterprise back-end stuff; this is a pretty big part of their business already, so I can see how this move might make sense.
They could do something exceptionally creative, they could sell them at half-cost with full schematics and data sheets for all of the parts. Plus documentation on the boot process, identify jtag/test ports, maybe boot rom source code.
This would save them from an expensive e-recycling bill.
It would put a lot of now 'open' tablets on the market which would give a huge cadre of people who would give it a shot a chance to do something amazing. It could change the world.
Its a shame that winning the lottery is more likely than this outcome.
In an interesting test of Google+ I shared an open letter to HP with this suggestion to 'Public.' Since I don't think anyone from HP follows me it probably won't get anywhere but if you see it and reshare it, perhaps it could increase the odds.
I was. Are you still planning on getting a Pre3 in spite of the announcement? I could deal with a smaller number of apps; but now I'm worried there simply won't be any apps at all for the ecosystem.
I'm still sort of considering it. I already knew there wouldn't be many apps. That's actually fine for me because I'm buying it for the sole purpose of developing for. I use C/C++ and libSDL (which has support on all the major phone systems) for development.
I don't use that many apps actually. Typically I just use a web browser, an ssh client (yes I actually SSH out from my phone often), and the odd solitaire card game every once in a while.
woot-offs are where not-so-successful consumer electronics go to die these days (and I say this as a big fan of woot, and bargain basement priced semi-abandoned technology).
Actually, Apple sold out their Lisa stock after they rebranded it "Mac XL". Turns out there was a market for a "professional" Mac with an internal hard drive back then.
I feel that one of the main problems with webOS is that many people like it a lot for the design and want to see its potential unleashed.
Yet users don't vote for webOS with their wallets and developers don't make webOS apps, because many question whether it can be a sustainable mobile platform. Another reason is that the hardware running webOS has always been a bit of a let-down.
On a side note, I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs feels a little saddened to see HP's lack of vision and commitment nowadays to make great products. Yes, HP's obviously a major competitor but mostly in the PC industry where it makes much slimmer margins. Jobs' first summer job was at Hewlett-Packard and also where he met Steve Wozniak, so it's more of a personal sting to witness the once iconic company giving up on post-PC devices.
So does Microsoft come a-calling with a bag with a giant $ on it, and suggest coming back to Windows? Does Google dangle Android?
Or does this mean HP is getting out of mobile altogether? If so, that's a huge mistake, given the state of the market right now. Especially if they are spinning off the PC side of things, what's left for HP? Printers?
HP couldn't solve the chicken vs egg problem. An upstart OS from an established company is still an upstart OS. With MS launching their Windows tablet in the near future, HP will have to run very hard to establish their positions before the MS onslaught.
The journey to iPad started with iPods and iTunes, then iPod touch apps, then iPhone and finally iPad. Steve's brilliant insight is that a music device with a computer is a computer, and outflanked the music industry and Microsoft in one fell swoop.
Even today, MS still can't ship a music store on the PC.
PS What Google did right was to give away the OS early on, and that allowed the Shenzhen manufacturers to produce the iPeds that swamped the low end markets. I don't know if this is going to work out in the long run, but installed bases is important if you want a developer ecosystem.
I think the PRE2 is a great device. Google Apps email, SMS texting and Google Maps is fantastic. Browser works great. The clever status light, the window swiping, the bottom gesture panel logic and the clever window bundling makes Android and Bada feel completely retarded. Very good over the air software updater. Pointing that out since Bada is very dumb in that department and requires a huge iTunes like application. The HP CEO is either retarded or scared.
Like... I got an HP laptop and an HP phone... and suddenly this is not cool enough for HP because of some premature, rushed to marked, tablets ?
Disclosure: I have received a few developer phones over the years.
If you're an HP engineer working on webOS, given the commitment level your execs have to that platform, why wouldn't you jump ship? Startups, Apple, Google, Facebook, even Microsoft, may benefit in terms of human talent.
One thing I do not understand. These HP and others CEOs earn millions monthly. So they are not stupid.
How many desktop _platforms_ survived? Two. Windows and MacOS by miracle.
So why they think that the world needs more than 2 or 3 mobile _platforms_? Why they think is it possible to beat Microsoft / Nokia / RIM / Samsung with already collapsed company? Why they bought Palm? What was the thinking?
Or maybe they are personally making money with acquisition like this. Similar to CEOs from banking when they led whole financial sector to the cliff.
This logic could have been applied to Android. There were numerous "leading" mobile operating systems when Android launched. Likewise for Apple launching the iPhone and iOS.
Sometimes, a company has to bet they can beat the competition, or we get stuck with the same old crap, forever.
If they had successfully turned WebOS into a major player in the phone/tablet market it could have been a business worth tens of billions. It's perfectly possible that they thought "there's a 90% chance that this will fail, but it's still a smart gamble"
The part that surprised me is that they're apparently killing off the hardware entirely. I'd assumed that their fallback position would be to become another Android manufacturer and at least make use of the Palm hardware expertise they bought. I guess they don't even think they can make a go of it in that market.
esr writes in his latest Smartphone Wars[1] installment:
"WebOS, we hardly knew ye [...] WebOS has looked terminal to us for a long time. [...] WebOS didn’t suck, technically speaking. It was certainly better constructed than the turd-with-frosting that is WP7. [...] The cool thing about WebOS was that its architecture was beautiful. [...] WebOS’s problem was that the coolness stopped there. The source was closed, with all the usual bad effects including higher defect rates and lower developer interest. [...] Some sort of larger shakeout seems to be going on. [...] RIM is next to the wall, probably. WP7 should already have been terminated for extreme failure (Samsung’s own-brand Bada OS is actually outselling it[2]) [...] It might be that Android, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM are now entering scorpions-in-a-bottle time. [...] There can be only one... major incumbent. A whale, with a minnow or two in its shadow. Maybe Android should invert the Twitter fail whale into a success cetacean?"
"HP is recognising what the world has recognised, which is hardware in terms of consumers is not a huge growth business anymore," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of YCMNET Advisors.
"It's not where the money is. It's in keeping with the new CEO's perspective that they want to be more in services and more business-oriented."
I'd love to see a true "open source" mobile operating system make an appearance. However, I don't think HP has a track record of magnanimity when it comes to open sourcing expensive acquisitions IP.
No corp is going to open source their proprietary technology when they stand to make money from selling it. There won't be an open source mobile OS, the best we can hope for are OSes with browser shells (Boot 2 Gecko) and html5 as the platform.
Really? Seriously? Who would buy WebOS today? I'm all ears. I'm sure HP is too. Not only has it failed to gain a foothold under two separate companies, there is no successful licensed (more than $0 cost) mobile OS on the market today. You have two vertically integrated (AAPL and RIMM), and one free one (Android). Windows Phone is not as much of a failure as WebOS, but that doesn't exactly make the job easier for WebOS's next owner. It just means they have to fight even to be #3.
Come to think of it, open sourcing the whole thing could be a good move. It's the Netscape strategy all over again. It wouldn't really make HP any money, though, so they won't.
I have a hard time with the WebOS failed to get a foothold under two separate companies.
HP never really tried. $1.2B and then trashing it so quickly? That's not trying.
This was a perfect opportunity to take the time and do it right. A company that was/is good with hardware, now has a great mobile OS. It had some time to take the loss financially with success of other areas (laptops, enterprise software, etc).
There are more buyers than just those who aspire to compete with the big dogs. WebOS has application far beyond just mobile OSes. Even PalmSource was sold and Garnet OS was in development until just a couple of years ago. There are thousands of potential buyers that have nothing to do with the smartphone wars.
Speaking as someone who ordered one within Europe as soon as it was released directly from Europe, I'm frankly disgusted by this news and disgusted with the execs at HP. Will never buy one of their products again.
I wonder if WebOS will be attractive to any of the handset makers that harbor suspicions about Google/Motorolla - HTC? Samsung (call it Bada 2.0?)? Sony?
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It strikes me that Apple could make a lot of money by making cheaper (sub $1,000) MacBooks now that the competition is running scared. If they could sell a 2010 white Macbook for $900 (which I presume would still have a respectable margin), you wouldn't see a PC on a college campus and they'd even make a compelling case for a bigger enterprise push..
> wonder if WebOS will be attractive to any of the handset makers
As much as I hate Android and am friendly toward WebOS, and would like to see it make inroads, there's still the problem to solve of getting third party developers. Asking all the companies that make the apps that sell devices to develop for more than one or two dissimilar platforms is very hard. Sure, you can get a few, like Facebook and the others who have WebOS apps already, or you can count on an enthusiastic developer base to write grassroots replacement apps when the "big guys" snub your small platform. But you're not going to sell John Q Public with "We have dozens of apps and more are added every month!" Now, though you can't SELL them when you have few apps, you CAN bribe, and that's how Android clawed its way out of last place and into the lead. The only way to get those WebOS phones into enough hands to get developers to take notice and see it as a must-support platform is to give away the phones. Free with contract. That's the ONLY way. And this late in the game, it'd have to be free plus heavy marketing support.
This is really sad. I would have liked to have seen webOS carve out a decent niche against Android and iOS, especially seeing that application development could be largely JavaScript-based with C++ for the high-performance parts.
Commiserations to all the people that worked on webOS.
I don't think HP is throwing the towel, just not putting all eggs in a single basket. They know now how big a challenge is to turn it around on the tablet market. Cloud's the thing now so they're also getting into it.
Yeah, they're also selling off their PC division and buying Autonomy (records management industry leader from the UK) for $10 billion. Overpriced IMHO.
I'd rather see them come out brandishing the Palm brand, and acquiring Fon, and then going after a "home cloud" machine. We could use the "unlimited" home connections we already pay for that are often pretty good (<40ms latency, at least 2mbps up). Handling the home-router firewall in a simplistic way seems to be the best way forward.
Is this a practical example of how Google's strategy with Android is just a bit anti-competitive? Neither Palm or HP could have seriously considered licensing WebOS to compete against Android because neither has a gigantic advertising business to subsidize the cost of development. On the flip side of that how is Palm or HP going to compete with companies like Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc who are getting their OS for free? If they skip the costs to develop their own OS and go with Android what differentiates an HP tablet from a Samsung tablet if they're running the same OS? All roads lead back to Android. You either use it or you can't compete against it.
Android has its pluses and minuses. It isn't impossible for a platform with license fees to compete with that (see Nokia and WP7, for example).
If HP can't find a way to package webOS to compete with Android (either directly or license), that is HP failing in the competition, not Google being anti-competitive.
Some companies don't seem to have caught on that we are in a recession. People don't have the money to just go out and buy the latest cool gadget. No more one-upping friends. No more trying out the latest toy. In a bygone age HP Touchwhatsits would be littering Hummer H2 dashboards everywhere. Not so today.
>HP’s wording up above leaves things a bit vague, with at least two potential routes left open: licensing webOS to others
Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it? Obvious choices for OEMs seem to be Android or Windows 8.
Sign me up for a $150 Touchpad at the firesale if there is one(resisting temptation to call it the Ouchpad like a headline did).
That's how much I am willing to spend for the latest OS with no future joining the ranks of good-but-dead ones like Amiga and BeOS.
WebOS has always been the most impressive mobile OS IMO, it's just never had a competent owner or decent hardware to back it up. I hope they do something with it.
This, of course, is coming from one of the suckers that paid $599 for a Touchpad on launch day, so take it with a grain of salt.
Coming from one of the suckers who bought a Palm Pre two years ago and is still using it (gotta love contracts!), I see nothing redeeming about WebOS. WebOS was Palm's Potemkin village -- a shallow attempt to convince a larger, dumber company that they were relevant enough to warrant a buyout, by creating the appearance of a technically impressive achievement.
Apart from technical merits, of which there are only a few and they are debatable, one of the values of an operating system is the commitment of the company behind it -- and with clowns like Palm and HP who stopped issuing updates only months after launch, I say fuck them and any carrier who allowed these pieces of shit to pass technical acceptance.
The only reason I've hung onto this thing for 2 years is because I'm determined to make this the phone that loses Sprint my business.
I happen to own a Palm Pre 2 and I have a completely different perception. It's light, small and responsive and the way you use it, the just-type interface, the cards thing, is very natural.
It was the first mobile OS that handled running multiple applications in a crisp clean way. Notifications were done very well. These are two very key components. Combine that with a hardware keyboard and an easy/common development platform.
It was totally mismanaged.
I was thinking about the Pre3.. Now I'm stuck with the Android or switching carriers for an iPhone. Neither are pleasing choices.
> Why would anyone license something that's basically stillborn even with a company as big as HP pushing it?
Remember the word license here has multiple meanings ... I read it as a coded message to the other players - start getting ready to "license our patents" or get ready to be sued. In the world of patent MAD the only way to sue and not get sued back with patents is not to have any products. And look what HP is doing - basically announcing the spinning of any product that might be a target and then sending a coded message about "licensing" to its competitors. My tin foil hat might be over-sensitive, but reading between the lines this sounds all too close to be true. When you tie the timing in with Googorola - valuing patents at $510k each - you can imagine this might just have pushed them over the edge to a completely different monetization strategy for WebOS.
Inevitable decision. It's really hard to do complete stack unless you are completely comitted to it like aaple is. It was always going to be an uphill battle for HP and I am glad they realized this sooner than later. I said this before. Nokia did a smart thing by adopting a third party software and leveraging their position in hardware to get a good bargain in return.
I'm gutted. Genuinely.
When I was younger, before Fiorina stepped up to be the first to rape the corpses of the founders, I was a massive fan of HP. My first graphing calculator was an HP48G, which taught me the joys of Lisp... well, Psil, because it came with Reverse Polish Lisp.
WebOS could have been the resurrection of that culture -- fully JavaScript development environment, app development across multiple mobile and tablet platforms with a single environment... just genius. It's sad to see that vision evaporate, along with some of the novel telephony and interactive features that made WebOS a joy to work with.