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Comment by rkalla | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of it has to do with how the decision was... presented?

  1. HP tablet sales fail.
  2. HP warns of low earnings, then announces them.
  3. Promise to make announcement only after market closes on the 18th.
  4. Rumors that they are spinning Compaq back out.
  5. Changes mind and makes announcement.
  6. They are buying Autonomy (enterprise/IBM space)
  7. They are shooting the mobile device effort in the face.

That is... a lot of change to suddenly announce, especially given that the Palm/WebOS aqusition[1] not more than a year ago was the big new vision for the company.

They made one product and couldn't sell it[2] and pulled the plug on the entire vision while at the same time announcing a huge corporate shift.

Busy day for HP.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/28/hp-buys-palm/

[2] http://allthingsd.com/20110816/ouchpad-best-buy-sitting-on-a...

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Realize that a different CEO was in charge at HP when the acquisition of Palm occurred and the new CEO came from an enterprise software company (SAP) and seems intent on turning HP into a company he knows how to run, rather than running HP as the company it is. Someone (maybe at precentral.com) likened it to when a sports team gets a new coach he recruits players for his style of game instead of building with the talent at hand, AKA "a rebuilding year".

I really, really hope they license WebOS to a good phone manufacture, The only real problem with the touchpad was underpowered hardware. I read somewhere that they got WebOS running once on iPad hardware for testing purposes and it rocked. WebOS on a dual core tablet has the potential to be really cool.

The thing is, the Touchpad already had a dual core cpu built in.

I can't really imagine that HP has put the effort of completely porting webos over to a different hardware platform, but I think that instead they might have tested the enyo toolkit on the iPad and have seen tremendous performance improvements. Those, I think, can be attributed to the superiority of MobileSafari (having hardware acceleration and having a very fast Javascript VM being the primary sources of better performance).

>The thing is, the Touchpad already had a dual core cpu built in.

Except it's an A8 instead of an A9.

>seems intent on turning HP into a company he knows how to run, rather than running HP as the company it is.

but what is HP currently? all their consumer-level products are shit. i don't have any experience with their current enterprise services, but from the way apotheker is talking i'd assume they have a decent infrastructure in place there to build upon. their last few CEOs have kind of run their consumer hardware manufacturing division into the ground, maybe pulling out is the best thing to do at this point.

They have been moving towards enterprise services since Carly. Mark Hurd bought EDS and Mercury specifically to strengthen HP's enterprise offerings. Mark buying Palm seemed really out of place at the time.

I am not so sure it was out of place. If you think of WebOS as a client to the enterprise software, it provides an interesting story. No need for Microsoft licenses and somewhat common (good enough for marketing) development set with the web people.

Was HP's expecting customers to kill each other over Touchpad?

HP is buying spree feels like recently dumped women who finds solace in shopping and dumping the new dress in overflowing closet.

On serious note, WebOS is praised all around for beauty and technical supremacy yet HP wants to drop it because the failed to execute one piece hardware. This is a very emotional and personal reaction.

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