Reuters: HP should reconsider dumping TouchPad

[kjk]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7KF14Q20110915

"HP has established a lead in the race to be the number two behind Apple in the pad business but the window of opportunity will begin to close if delays occur," Canalys said.

I guess selling a $499 tablet for $99 is one way to take the lead.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by kjk

I guess selling a $499 tablet for $99 is one way to take the lead.

That was a very silly article. Suppose they got a 10% market share selling at $99, and losing (say) $150 on each tablet. Apple's selling a million a week at present, so they'd need to be selling at least 100,000 per week to take a 10% share. That's a weekly loss of $15 million, or near $800 million per year.

I suppose if that doubled the value of the PC division from $8 billion to $16 billion, it'd be well worth it.

But I can't quite see big investors being fooled like that.

[Graham]

"HP has established a lead in the race to be the number two behind Apple in the pad business but the window of opportunity will begin to close if delays occur," Canalys said.

This is a meme that's being widely disseminated at the moment, but is there any truth in it?

We know that with between 100,000 and 200,000 new Touchpads being prepared for the final run that there will be about a million of them in circulation.

Yet, Asus have said that they expect to sell two million Transformers in 2011, with some reports saying that they have already done so (though that isn't borne out by Honeycomb market checkouts).

Graham

[OtterBooks]

"HP has established a lead in the race to be the number two behind Apple in the pad business but the window of opportunity will begin to close if delays occur," Canalys said.

Sure, if you like throwing money out a window.

[avariel]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

That was a very silly article. Suppose they got a 10% market share selling at $99, and losing (say) $150 on each tablet. Apple's selling a million a week at present, so they'd need to be selling at least 100,000 per week to take a 10% share. That's a weekly loss of $15 million, or near $800 million per year.

I suppose if that doubled the value of the PC division from $8 billion to $16 billion, it'd be well worth it.

But I can't quite see big investors being fooled like that.

The more people using WebOS 3.0, the more apps bought in the app store. This type of business model can work when you have other ways to turn a profit besides hardware sales.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by avariel

The more people using WebOS 3.0, the more apps bought in the app store. This type of business model can work when you have other ways to turn a profit besides hardware sales.

Probably not selling the hardware at a $150 loss though... you'd need each user to buy a hundred or so apps. You've got a chance though with a smaller loss and a strong ecosytem where you can also charge for subscriptions on magazines, music and movies.

Graham

[Hellmark]

Wasn't it already established that the touchpad was being discontinued?

[dmikov]

Well, they can actually sell it not at $99. They selling like hot cakes on ebay for double that or more. So if they sell it at a cost, they can get platform more widely adopted and then come up with better hardware that's profitable. My main gripe with TouchPad (before I snapped one on fire sale) was absence of decent readers epub or pdf.

[rhari79]

HP panicked; i cant think of any other way to explain the touchpad firesale.

There are not enough apps and most people seem to buy it for a quick profit on resale. There are just too many now-overpriced touchpads on sale in ebay.

I have quite a few apple and android devices. There are many people out there with similar lock-ins(via purchases). All these people are not going to change overnight and purchase a touchpad.
HP should have given some time for the sales to pick and during that time, boosted the appstore.

I think the same goes for Playbook too. I was almost ready to purchase one, when i realised there is no way to sideload books in it. So dropped the plan.

2 wonderful concepts: Webos/QNX being wasted by shortsightedness.
Maemo/Meego is another.

They seemed like fresh air in the now boring ios/android world.

[Hellmark]

Given how there are now Android options for the touchpad, does have some value still.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by rhari79

HP panicked; i cant think of any other way to explain the touchpad firesale.

HP should have given some time for the sales to pick and during that time, boosted the appstore.

Webos/QNX being wasted by shortsightedness.

That they did but I can't say I blame HP. Apple, Google and Microsoft can afford to duke it out in a long war of attrition. While I found the UI of webOS to be very nice, it had a limited number of apps, a bunch of bugs (e.g. faulty page rendering in web browser on the TouchPad) and serious performance issues. Sure, it supports Flash, but when I tried Hulu, video was not particularly fluid. HP needed to sink a lot more money and resources into webOS and I don't think they're willing to do that.

[RainingLemur]

While I would like to see some more WebOS stuff... At this point, I really can't really say that HP would do well to give it another go, considering how the TouchPad went (prior to the firesale).