back to article HP plots tablet comeback to penetrate biz world with slab

HP is returning to the tablet game, but it doesn't want to take on Apple in its consumer backyard - instead the vendor would prefer business types fondled its hardware. Troubled HP spectacularly canned its TouchPad slab last summer after it spent just six weeks on the market, despite the gear flying off the shelves when the …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Valerion

    Good old HP

    If at first you don't succeed, cut thousands of staff and then try again.

  2. Steve Todd
    FAIL

    So they are going for a big and chunky Win8 tablet then?

    User serviceable / upgradeable implies a bigger case. Business oriented implies Windows.

  3. Nate Amsden

    probably won't make a dent

    I suspect that most of the companies that may look to deploy large numbers of these things internally to take advantage of the native app functionality, in many cases I suspect will lean heavily towards ipad or android and leveraging remote application hosting, rdp, citrix, whatever (maybe VDI). With that you can provide a more portable experience for the users anyways so they can access from many different devices instead of needing to have a slate with windows 8.

    the only thing the HP tablet has going for it right now is low expectations, which I suppose can put it in a better position then their Touchpad. Though you never really hear about the HP slates that they have been selling for years when people talk about tablets.

    At least initially - in a year or three the market may shift again, there's just too much momentum behind iPad to get in it's way (even in the business space - note a major airline recently announced it's going to use iPads for their pilots manuals). iPad has gone far beyond a consumer device.

    (written as someone who clings to his many WebOS devices with his cold dead hands)

    1. asdf

      Re: probably won't make a dent

      >(written as someone who clings to his many WebOS devices with his cold dead hands)

      Well as much as dead and WebOS belong in the same sentence the hardware is far from dead. Throw Android on there and boom (yes I liked WebOS in some ways more too but let it go).

      1. Hooksie

        *COUGH*horsemanure*COUGH*

        Too much momentum behind the ipad?? My hoop there is. Maybe for the Execs and the SME's who have it because they can write off the tax on it but for an actual piece of usable business hardware?? Pull the other one. This, and other Win 8 tablets, will be exactly what businesses have been waiting for because they want the tablet stuff but they want to be able to control it by group policy and have the apps controlled by SCCM etc etc. The Windows ecosystem is so embedded within business that Apple, despite it's unbelievebly huge share of the consumer market still hasn't made much more than a minor scratch on the surface of the Enterprise world. Having said all that, I, as a once proud Touchpad owner who now has an ipad and desperately wants a Surface am quite clearly a tech-whore who happens to have an unqualified affinity with MS stuff. Not sure that HP can pull it off but I think they have a really god shot at it.

  4. Tom 35

    The only question is...

    How will HP screw it up.

    Too big, too expensive, not actually work, all of the above?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Re: The only question is...

      No, they'll screw up far more easily - they'll launch a tablet, probably a nice bit of kit, reasonably priced, it'll be an assemblage of third party hardware and work well with W8..... and find there's not a big market for business tablets. I'd accept there is a market, but the size is critical for HP, with revenues last year of almost $130 billion.

      Most businesses want productivity (ie the user to input) from devices - hence desktops, laptops, mobiles. I can see tablets being a bit of use for salesforce work that requires slick devices but limited input. Oh, and good for C-level grumble browsing. Stocktaking and field data collection could make use of tablets, but there's a degree of rugged-isation that would add cost and detract from other uses (and already there's a range of specialised devices in that sector).

      So I'm guessing that for most of the orporate workforce, tablets won't be of any use. Meg is running after the tablet and smartphone bandwagons, rather than focusing on the many ills that HP actually has. Worryingly, these moves suggest that Meg thinks that throwing a few fashionable devices out will restore PSG to real profits and to some form of fit with the rest of HP. More likely it won't, and the problem is that HP is too diverse. PSG need to go it alone (remarkably, a correct assessment by Leo). Software needs a new home (no fit at all, no clout in HP group, Autonomy mess up proving they don't know what they are doing).

      That leaves Imaging & Printing, Services, and Enterprise hardware, all of which have a common B2B infrastructure theme. But perhaps that would be a bit sensible. Much more in keeping with "the HP way" would be buying RIM: Lots of exciting M&A action for the suits, the pretence of B2B synergies, the claim of a rapid journey to sunlit, fast growth mobile device uplands.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP is pathetic

    They couldn't buy a clue on what to do.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HP is pathetic

      That's a bit harsh.

      I pondered for a few minutes what HP was. We all know what they were, but I think that does lead us to question what they are now.

      And then it came to me HP's vision must be "to be the biggest exporter of US jobs, employing third world labourers to worsen the US trade deficit, amplify the decline in the dollar, thus helping to speed the return to the gold standard".

      Now isn't that public spirited?

  6. Robert E A Harvey
    Thumb Down

    Erk?

    What the blue blistering blazes is the business demand for a tablet?

    I don't mean touch screens like warehousemen or doctors or van drivers, we have those gadgets already. Why the black japanese fire-baked enamel does a sales herbert or a management dwonk need a tablet?

    They've already got a flaptop, and a crackberry and a deskweight, and probably an eyePhone. What on earth do they need to do that they can't do with that lot and can do only with a tablet?

  7. Mikel
    Windows

    Own words

    ]Bradley said HP's tablet will be the "only serviceable tablet there is" and claimed "it is expandable". But what it won't be is a consumer device, which is a brave - some may say foolhardy - move given the trend toward employees buying their own devices from shops and bringing them into the office.

    Might as well shut this entire line of inquiry down right now before you waste more billions of dollars. You started 5 years after the race began, on a different track, headed in the wrong direction.

  8. solidsoup
    Mushroom

    Mum, I want those toys

    So HP wants smartphones and tablets? And it wants them to be only for corporate market? Oh, this is getting better and better. And to think that it's after their previous foray ended in completely unnecessary tears and managed to piss off just about everyone. HP has zero credibility when it comes to mobile.

    Tablet makes no sense if its business-only device. Corporate edition only makes sense when consumers "subsidize" the line by increasing hardware order volume. Serviceable? Bah! Do I really want the cost and privilege of servicing a tablet? How about making it cheap enough to chunk it? I predict HP will release a half-baked line of products with an exorbitant cost. Its failure would be blamed on divergent synergies or some such drivel.

    Now who wants to start a countdown until Meggy is replaced...

    ... by someone even more idiotic, if the trend for HP CEOs holds?

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like