HP still top of PC league, but trailing fourth in all-devices rankings

HP may still be clinging onto the top spot in the global PC stakes but in the world of smart connected devices it is becoming less and less of a relevant player, market stats show. The boxes - desktops, notebook, tabs and smartphones - sold globally in Q3 have been counted by abacus fondler IDC and the US titan has come out of …

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Posted Monday 10th December 2012 12:28 GMT

Eadon

HP needs to invest more in non-Microsoft-infected hardware

It's ironic that Microsoft's de facto takeover of Nokia (via their exec, Stephen Elop) has, instead of making Windows Phones successful, actually shown the world's OEM's that even Nokia cannot make them sell.

In fact, Nokia has shown the world that the Windows operating systems are a kiss of death on mobile devices.

Now that Microsoft have been making their own tablets (Surface) and hint at making their own phones, this alienates OEM's even more.

Does an OEM really want to licence an OS from your *competitor*, especially one that the market has rejected?

The logical thing to do, then, is to go with Android (the market likes Android, with 75% of the market and growing) or to go with a different OS, possibly one based on Linux, like Android is.

Of course, MS still have a lock down on the desktop (though Windows 8 may weaken it's grip), but I doubt OEM's will want to give MS a similar lock on mobile computers.

Posted Monday 10th December 2012 19:06 GMT

Nate Amsden

damn that autonomy

Wish HP would of dumped those billion$ into WebOS instead..

Posted Monday 10th December 2012 23:25 GMT

P. Lee

Re: damn that autonomy

True. They could have just given away x million devices to get things going. I think the webos interface is great.

However, just because the tech press is obsessed with tablets/phones doesn't mean that HP should be doing that. Quite a few vaccum-cleaners are sold each year, but that isn't HP's market. Getting into mobile just because the business PC market is tanking may not be the right move. Let's face it, HP isn't really in the consumer space in the way Samsung already was with TVs etc. Autonomy may have been a badly executed decision, but the enterprise is HP's focus, probably rightly so.

If hp want to get into the consumer market there may be better ways of doing so. They have a good micro-server and a cloud. How about cloud-hosted mythtv database? Clean up the EIT data a bit, sell a small AMD box with tv tuner, HDMI and disk space? HP have some ARM expertise they can tap. They could provide non-x86 home servers at high-volume. Talk to Valve, see if they are interested in some sort of collaboration. Lots of options are out there.

Posted Tuesday 11th December 2012 09:37 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Big deal

So, HP aren't doing well in the highly commoditised low value, low margin, PC or slab wannabe market. Who cares? Not even HP who had the good sense to try and exit that market IBM style, and then the poor sense to execute against that strategy so poorly that they had to turn back.

Even margin on x86 server tin is dropping like a stone, they need to figure out what they want to be, and fast!

Posted Tuesday 11th December 2012 11:46 GMT

Anonymous Coward