Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I fail to understand why HP felt the need to have its own mobile OS. They don't have their own desktop OS for the computers they sell; and look how successful they are.
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Just for fun, what would you suggest they use instead, Android? Do we really need more one horse races? If the Kindle hadn't taken off, would you ask why they needed to roll their own?
Competition is vital in this area - at the moment iOS is... a non starter for other companies. Android as much as some people like it, it's really not that amazing. I rather like WP7 and Meego, but I guess most are blinded by colourful logos and media hurf blurf.
You also have to understand that HP is not exactly 'doing well' with the whole desktop business, in fact it's doing rather badly and has struggled for a number of years with it, every few months they talk of selling/dropping it internally; "and look how successful they are" indeed.
On the other hand their HP-UX has managed to lock in a lot of clients for the long haul, easy money from all that expensive legacy stuff. Servers too, businesses arnt going to opt for the cheap stuff, and they're going to want some support to go with that... Hmmm! Playbook/QNX/BBOS was the competition, not Android. There's a
lot more money to made by not bothering with consumers (i.e look at the prices) but rather just aiming at the business market and making sure you're there for the long haul with services, software and hardware lock-in.
Something people don't quite grasp is that there's no money in the tablet hardware business, you're making 10% max per unit, unless you can command the 200%'s and such of crApple, but anyone that tries to do this in consumer space, fails. Tablets are a software game for the home consumer market, if you cant get in there, you're going to be making nearly nothing.