Sign in / up

back to article HP's UK PC boss: We're going nowhere

HP's UK Personal Systems Group head Paul Hunter has sent round an open letter urging calm on recent news that the ink giant is rethinking its PC strategy. This was widely reported as "HP gets out of PCs" – not hugely surprising given IBM's similar strategy. But Hunter said: "Let me be absolutely clear in saying that at no …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

    1. Vic
      Reply Icon

      Re: DAMMIT

      > I would have got one like a shot if I'd realised they were that cheap!

      No you wouldn't. You'd have been bounced around by the Dixons website, the same as the rest of us. And PCWorld would have been out of stock as well.

      Vic.

      3 0
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    economics for idiots?

    Yeah, reduce the price enough and anything will sell like hotcakes

    (Hmm, what analogy would a baker use to describe his fast moving product?)

    0 0
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      50p Pints

      zzzzzz ;)

      1 0
  3. rav

    HP PC's....

    HP makes a good Laptop. But I would never buy one. Why. They are too big, too clunky and too plastic. They are massive, like folding desktops! The perfomance is fine. But I would purchase Lenovo simply because of it's metal case, matte finish and much thinner form factor even with the same perfomrmance.

    0 0
    1. Davidoff
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Lenovo and the quality myth

      "HP makes a good Laptop. But I would never buy one. Why. They are too big, too clunky and too plastic."

      Yes, their consumer models (Pavilion/Presario). Their business laptops are really solid devices.

      "They are massive, like folding desktops! "

      WTF? Are you shipping at Toys-R-Us only or what? A quick look at the HP website should have told you that this statement is BS. There are lots of HP laptop models from tiny 10" netbooks to 19" mobile workstations.

      "But I would purchase Lenovo simply because of it's metal case, matte finish and much thinner form factor even with the same perfomrmance."

      Good luck. Lenovo builds crap, too, as did IBM before. Want examples? Thinkpad T61: cracking display covers, breaking inner frames (which are not made out of some magical steel but cheap diecast aluminium), and cheap hinges which either came loose or seized/after a while; Or the Thinkpad T41/T42 which easily overheated because of insufficient cooling and which showed lots of mainboard defects because of warping (caused by lifting your laptop on one side only). And there are many more cockups in many Thinkpad models. Go figure.

      Oh btw: there is no Lenovo laptop with metal case. It's all some kind of plastics (Lenovo claims it's some superstrong composite for certain parts, but experience has shown that it's hardly more robust than cheap plastics). If you want a laptop with a metal case then you have to buy a Panasonic Toughbook.

      If you think that Lenovo is better than others then you're delusional.

      2 0
  4. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    "The sheer scale of interest in the discounted products...

    Since a boss of UK HP is, presumably, a person of at least average intelligence this statement that they were "taken a little by surprise" can be nothing but a conversation filler. After all, how can _anyone_ be surprised in a customer stampede if they discount ANY product to less than 1/4 of its original price? Anything, from a loaf of bread to a Boeing dreamliner, with a few IT bits in between those two.

    btw, it would be interested to see if this price in any way reflects their cost-per-unit.

    1 0
    1. Piro Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Pint

      I don't think it is sustainable at all...

      iSuppli suggest a far higher cost on the components, let alone labour.

      http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx

      0 0
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        I don't think iSuppli is sustainable...

        ...but they keep dribbling out their guesswork vaguely disguised as facts, and people keep quoting them.

        1 0
  5. Kay Burley ate my hamster
    Thumb Up

    If HP had...

    If HP had sold them with Android for the same price as the iPad (That name still makes me think of sanitary towels) it would have been a bigger success than the iPad could ever be.

    0 2
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What HP should have done...

    ...was to price the 16GB Touchpad at £199 and take the battle to the Android tablets. Yes that would mean selling at a loss but HP has deep pockets and they should have absorbed the losses for a while trying to build market share.

    Despite HP claiming that 'it's a marathon not a sprint' a little while ago they didn't stick with it much past the warm up...

    1 0
  7. James Melody
    Trollface

    I got it!

    1) Make a Tablet that costs £300 to manufacture

    2) Sell it for £89

    3) Profit!

    Eugh......

    1 0
  8. Dana W
    Meh

    Lesson learned.

    If you sell something for far less than it costs to make it, people will buy it!

    Imagine that!

    The funniest thing is the eBay speculators trying to resell them at inflated prices who think that this is demand driven and not cost driven.

    if it was selling at or near cost it would still be a dust gathering, inert lump.

    3 0
  9. Peter X
    Boffin

    Overpriced

    I think where a lot of these companies screw up is that they want to make huge margins, but they don't have the product quality to do it. Apple are expensive, but at least they do manage to have a consistent fit and finish both though their hardware and software. Costs more, looks lovely, works pretty much perfectly provided you don't want to root it... which most "normal"** people don't.

    Cheapy clones from China can compete on price alone.

    But "brands" like HP and Dell seem to think they can knock out something pretty average looking, and still charge Apples margins. They can't. They might sell to business who can negotiate a slightly better deal plus support pacakge, but with consumers they need a better product. I'm guessing they don't lower their prices though because that would just kill their business market?

    But the interesting thing with the HP TouchPad is that they were selling their own WebOS. But as WinMo7 proves, if you're starting on a back-foot (small user-base) you're unlikely to get anywhere. HP had an advantage over MS in that they have (had?) their own hardware AND software.... so, with the benefit of hindsight, if HP had built the TouchPad to the cost of say, the Hannspree Hannspad Tablet (10.1" ARM9 + Tegra II T20 1GHz), loaded WebOS on it, sold it at the same price as Hannspree (£149), then with an advertising push, they would've not made much money, but they would've likely gained much more market share which is important for WebOS and it's app-store. Once they have earned the right to charge a larger margin, they can.

    Basically... HP should have *ME* as their CEO. Let's face it, it couldn't be much worse! :D

    **Yeah, so not us lot!

    1 0
  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Amazon not making many friends here

    First they cancel most people's HP Touchpad orders, then they remove all the 1-star negative reviews from those upset about how Amazon has treated them.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/forum/cd/discussion.html/ref=cm_cd_ef_rt_tft_tp?ie=UTF8&cdForum=Fx5LSN2L3F7QCM&cdThread=Tx1UR3ZOPR8Z9FW

    Not their finest hour.

    1 0
  11. ElNumbre
    Joke

    The statement is missing some words...

    "We are now working on ensuring everyone that owns a webOS device has a positive experience."...

    They missed:-

    By selling ebay a load of new servers to ensure that the crapomarket keeps running at full speed.

    0 0
  12. John Dougald McCallum
    Devil

    Cheap prices

    In the grocery trade this is known as a loss leader and is a favourate of most if not all supermarkets look at the price of beer (for instance) of any type and tell me that they or the brewers are making any money on it.

    0 0
  13. Top B
    WTF?

    HP - No Common Sense

    If they would have released the Touchpad 16gb for $299 to start, they could have made inroads into the tablet market. What gets me is all these other players in the tablet market want to sell their wares for a similar price to Apple, the leader at this moment in the genre.

    While their specs may be better or similar, Apple has it locked up because all the non techy people who have IPhones can go to the Ipad with no learning curve.

    People are not going to change unless they have a compelling reason to do so and the $299.00 price would have gave non tablet owners a reason to do so an built market share.

    1 0
  14. Furbian
    FAIL

    Support? What support?

    "...the team in the UK remains committed to creating and supporting great products and services."

    Oh really? The support's not in the UK for starters, and calling it 'support' seems a misnomer anyway, http://furbian.blogspot.com/2011/08/hp-envy-17-17-desktop-replacement.html

    0 0
    1. Davidoff
      Reply Icon
      Thumb Down

      Consumer support != business support

      "http://furbian.blogspot.com/2011/08/hp-envy-17-17-desktop-replacement.html"

      So someone who bought a 'refurbished' consumer laptop at Curry's which (knowing Curry's) very well could have been a customer return which they tried to get rid of, and then complains that 'support' means calling a hotline? Of course consumer support is lacking and unhelpful, no matter what brand. This is because the sad truth is that many consumers are indeed the morons they are treated as by hotliners, and they rarely show brand loyality unless it's an Apple product. Consumer products also only compete on price, and there is hardly any room for proper local support with experienced technicians. You get what you pay for.

      The point is that if support is important then don't buy a consumer toy, but a professional computer which is well supported. If you're too cheap and prefer the consumer crap then don't complain about poor support, period.

      Also, this guy said he's not an idiot but then he buys a 'refurbished' laptop from Curry's, which generally means 'this laptop has been returned by the previous buyer as faulty but we didn't find a fault or couldn't be bothered looking, and it's condition doesn't allow us to sell it as new so we sell it as refurbished'. The word 'refurbished' has been widely mis-used and generally means 'it's second-hand but we like to avoid this word'. In case of HP, everything which has been truely factory refurbished is called HP RENEW, and this is also visible from the model number (trailing 'R'). But he obviously didn't buy HP RENEW, he bought a second grade item which is a well known tactics in Curry's and all the other gadget chains.

      I'd say it's his own fault. Having written some Assembler programs obviously doesn't make one knowing the IT business.

      0 0
  15. JDX Gold badge

    We are now working on ensuring everyone that owns a webOS device has a positive experience

    So they weren't worried about that previously?

    0 1
  16. xperroni
    Trollface

    "We're going nowhere"

    Finally a PR burt I can take at face value!

    0 0
  17. Brian Catt

    Paul Hunter is RIGHT!

    HP is going nowhere. Period.

    I swear the current 3 are also my last HP printers. Great printers and good on volume cartridges BUT the ink deciding it is too old and switching itself off when it isn't at £25 per cartridge is a blatant rip off, and the software's failure to work with OS upgrades on the Mac, and hang the computer which NOTHING else does is just utterly abysmal, means I have to use my PC to scan, etc.

    0 0

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like