- Posts tagged HP
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Fast Decisions: Steve Jobs vs. Meg Whitman
In writing about the recent news that HP is taking their time to decide webOS' fate, John Gruber wrote:
So the longer HP waits, the less valuable WebOS becomes, because more and more of the smart and talented people behind it will have left…
When you’re faced with a “we need to stop the bleeding” problem, you need a fast decision.
This sounds much like the situation at Apple when Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO and Steve Jobs was acting as an active advisor. Apple was in such disarray top employees were leaving. Jobs first order of business was to stop the talent drain by repricing their stock options. What happened next, according to Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs:
Jobs called for a telephonic board meeting and outlined the problem. The directors balked. They asked for time to do a legal and financial study of what the change would mean. "It has to be done fast," Jobs told them. "We're losing good people."
When the board proposed a study that could take two months, Jobs exploded: "Are you nuts?!?"
Ultimately, Jobs threatened to leave Apple if the board wouldn't support this kind of decision, which they did.
Desperate times, desperate measures, and all that. I don't know if feet are being dragged by Whitman or the board, but if the latter Whitman might want to crack a head or two.
There Is No Plan B.
The chart totals over 100% because respondents were allowed multiple choices. That's too bad because it skews things a bit. Yes, the iPad is stomping everyone, but 94.5% has less meaning when the total comes to nearly 150%.
It's better to look at this one column at a time, where we can determine a device's absolute rejection (not acceptance). For example, we don't know that 3.8% of respondents would buy a RIM PlayBook, because it may have been their second choice, but we do know 96.2% of respondents rejected it outright, since it's not on their list at all.
I think of the beatdown like this: for each iPad competitor (column), 90% or more of respondents rejected it. In other words, nine out of 10 people wouldn't even put it on their list as a second choice. Meanwhile, the iPad is rejected only 5.5% of the time. Put it all together and we know not only that the vast majority of respondents are interested in the iPad, but that for most of them there is no Plan B.
The Answer Is No.
Sales not as fast as expected… a Samsung executive revealed those figures don’t represent actual sales to consumers. Instead, they are the number of Galaxy Tab devices that Samsung has shipped to wireless companies and retailers
According to one source who’s seen internal HP reports, Best Buy has taken delivery of 270,000 TouchPads and has so far managed to sell only 25,000, or less than 10 percent of the units in its inventory.
RIM has quietly cut its sales expectations for the BlackBerry PlayBook after its disappointing sales from the spring
New estimates for sales of Motorola's Xoom tablet--available since late February--are in, but even the most optimistic predictions are scarily small and pale next to the iPad 2's first-weekend sales numbers.
HP's TouchPad media player, HP Play, is in beta
Based on the open source Songbird software, it has more than a passing resemblance to iTunes. Still, why not use a successful layout, and I like the look.
The article's headline is way too ambitious, though. "Who Needs iTunes?" Well, anyone who wants a store, or movies, or TV shows, or AirPlay, or books, or apps, or Genius…
Adobe Flash 10.3 beta on the HP TouchPad
Boasting a “full web” experience, the TouchPad is capable of playing Adobe Flash content on the 10.3 beta version of Flash Player. And just like our past experiences with Flash on tablets, it’s nowhere near perfection. It took me forever to load content on PopCapGames.com, a popular Flash gaming web site. When I finally did get a game up and running, performance was choppy at best, a gaming experience punctuated with pauses and stuttering. YouTube videos ran somewhat better, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d call reliable.
Better Flash performance is coming "soon", I'm sure.
Tablet Haikus
I'll Take "iPad Competitors Flummoxed" For $1,000
Interesting tidbits on supposed tablet redesigns. Perhaps my favorite:
according to the tips: [HP] would supposedly be transferring the development of the next TouchPad to its notebook division rather than rely on the former Palm team.… A switch wouldn't preclude the involvement of the former Palm team but would suggest that most of their involvement [sic] to webOS rather than the complete design, as they had in the past.
This one's hard to believe. HP would have the software and hardware groups less involved with each other? Sure, it'd still be an all-HP effort, but it seems this approach is more like every other tablet being made except RIM's. HP has everything in-house, yet they'd build a wall between them? That'd be crazy. Is HP that crazy?
Regardless of HP's plans, other companies making dedicated tablets were also said to be planning urgent redesigns of their own. Two to three companies were postponing their tablets to rework them and compete more effectively with the upgraded iPad. In some cases, hardware was being moved back one to two months, while others might be canceled altogether, a second round of insiders claimed.
"Insiders claimed." Again, the source of the story is questionable, but we can gage its accuracy if any of the recently announced tablets set to arrive this spring begin getting pushed back.
