Alas, poor Léo: HP drifts toward disaster

[Renew Deal]

<snip>
HP flummoxed Wall Street and its own customers just two weeks ago by announcing the death of the TouchPad, the implied death of WebOS, and its likely exit from the PC business. Note the weasel words in that sentence: "implied" and "likely."

The muddled message and the lack of a road map for the company's PC-less future freaked out investors, who promptly dumped the stock, pushing share prices down 20 percent (it has lost another 5 percent since then) in one ugly trading session. WebOS developers reacted the same way, with scores jumping ship and signing on to write for Microsoft's mobile platform.

All of that was bad enough. But this week, the company spread even more confusion, resurrecting the TouchPad -- but only temporarily. You'll recall that the underwhelming tablet was so unpopular that hundreds of thousands were piling up in the warehouses of Best Buy and other retailers. In a sad admission of failure, HP announced a fire sale, cutting the price from $399 to $99. Not surprisingly, a lot of them were sold to customers who figured that whatever its failings (there are a lot), you can't go wrong at that price. (Incidentally, $399 represented a $100 cut from the tablet's original price.)

Meanwhile, Apotheker's good buddy, Todd Bradley, who ran Palm into the ground and was rewarded with a plum job heading HP's Personal Systems Group, has been talking about HP's commitment to the PC business and telling his salesforce to go out and sell like hell. "Regardless of what happens, we're the largest PC company in the world. We need everybody energized, and while this isn't business as usual, we need people to go out and sell products every day," Bradley said in an interview with Reuters. Right. You have to feel sorry for those sales reps. I wouldn't buy a single PC for my home office under those circumstances, let alone 500 for an enterprise.
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http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/alas-poor-l%C3%A9o-hp-drifts-toward-disaster-171332

[mrdmk]

1. Web OS along with its companion called cloud computing

is giving up your privacy when using a computer. The reason for that is every time you boot-up your computer, use an application and save the data, it all goes to a centralized computer (i.e. Google). It may work well for a corporation that has its own servers, but for an individual, you might as well put your out there for anybody to read!

[customerserviceguy]

2. Sooner or later

someone will come up with a nice hack for a cheap piece of hardware.

[Yavin4]

3. Folks Pretty Much Do That Now With Facebook

In essence, Facebook is a giant database, and every time you make an entry into it, that data is saved somewhere, and it can be retrieved even if you delete it.