HP announced yesterday that not only will they stop making WebOS devices, but they’re considering spinning-off their PC business and likely selling it. HP is currently the largest PC manufacturer in the world, but they look to be taking a page from IBM’s book and selling off their PC hardware interests. Looking at that from another angle, they are going to take a profitable part of their business, and toss it overboard.
HP makes money on PCs. They do! It was a third of their revenue last year. But they’ve read enough tea leaves to know that people don’t want PCs anymore. That making PCs is a business with a lot of overhead. And that it’s easier to pull the plug than to recharge the defibrillator.
Every act of cowardice comes with an excuse, so what’s HP’s? CEO Leo Apotheker (who has software, not hardware, in his bone marrow) blames the “tablet effect”, saying that HP has definitely felt it. Let’s be real here: “tablet effect” is just code for “Apple effect”. And it’s a cheap deflection from the real problem.
Yes, Apple’s business is expanding, and the PC market is contracting. It’s true, but you can’t keep up with Apple if you quit instead of innovating. And don’t tell me that they tried to innovate with the TouchPad and they failed. No. Throwing in the towel six weeks after you release a product that you almost got right doesn’t cut it. It just shows a lack of fortitude. Yes, the TouchPad wasn’t good, but webOS was. The problem was the hardware. Don’t believe me? WebOS reportedly ran twice as fast on an iPad 2 than it did on the TouchPad. So, you figure out how you screwed up the hardware, and you fix it. You try again. And you sure as hell release the TouchPad 2 as fast as you possibly can. You don’t throw in the towel.
But back to PCs. When demand for Apple’s product is going up, and demand for your product is going down, you don’t quit. You don’t just take the short-hand money and walk away. Why? Because the world needs you to innovate! When Apple’s stampeding toward you, circle your wagons, come up with a better plan, then come out firing. If the world’s biggest PC manufacturer doesn’t, then who will?
Apple’s not the reason the PC is dying. The PC only dies if PC-makers turn coward and run away. The world needs Apple competitors. It needs better Apple competitors. I switched from a PC laptop to a MacBook Pro a few years ago because I was working on a project where I had to use FinalCut Pro. Now that that project is over and Apple has screwed up Final Cut, there’s no reason why I couldn’t switch back to a PC. Really, there is a lot about OSX that pisses me off on a daily basis. The thing is, I still need a compelling reason to switch. I need to know why my life will be sweeter if I go back to PC. I want to know that they are going to push the limits and only get better, otherwise why shouldn’t I just stick with the status quo? Seriously, PC makers, GIVE ME A REASON TO SWITCH! I’m practically begging you.
What’s worse is that Intel is trying to make this so easy for you. They’re investing $300 million of their own personal money so that you can finally make a MacBook Air competitor that’s worth a damn without doubling the price. See that money? Take it! Use it! Make something wonderful that’s not a printer with apps.
If you see a little dip in your market share, pee yourselves, and run away, then Apple is our only alternative. And, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to live in a world made by Apple. I like buttons! I like options! But damn it, PCs, if you don’t f**king grow a pair, stick your neck out, and really come up with a better product, then that’s the world you’re leaving us with. That won’t have been created by us, the users, who walked away from your product. That will created by you, the PC manufacturers, for being too slow to adapt to a changing world.
Do not run away from this fight. You will be making the world a worse place, with fewer options and less competition pushing innovation. We need you (I’m talking to YOU, HP!). Now fucking grow a pair and come out swinging!
Ha
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 12:52 PMThere are PCs that are more powerful than Macs and cost less too. Now fucking grow a pair and go buy one.
Hugh
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 1:41 PMPretty sure he knows this. He just wants a reason… and there are heaps especially for gaming :)
Ha
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 2:11 PMYes I know, it’s just what else are PC manufacturers meant to do? They produce PCs. They take the parts from suppliers and put them together. They don’t really develop any new hardware or software for PCs so really what else can they do? They might have a few addons but the core of the PC will still be the same as any other PC or even Mac (which is a PC anyway…).
They have a say in the specs, price and appearance. How do you innovate with that? You make a new design and put new hardware in. :/ Apple ‘innovates’ because they have OSX to play with. Would Microsoft let hardware manufacturers make significant changes to the OS so they can be innovative like Apple?
Ozoneocean
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 10:37 PMApple doesn’t innovate any more than any other maker of PCs in reality. Different cases, different form factors, a new port standard added here or there… such has always been the case with all of them.
In fact the new post standards tend to get added to non-Apple PCs first just because Apple only releases updates of its machines at specific times in a year whereas other PC makers are always constantly releasing new models whenever.
Ha
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 12:06 AMHence the ‘innovates’ ;)
Just like USB3.
typedmillepede
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 1:55 PMdude, you have completely missed the point. spec wars are over. for 99% of the population, they want something that works without a fuss, and looks good doing it. they want something that feel like it will stay together. pc makers have missed the point… they can fight specs all they want, it just doesn’t matter anymore. people want a real alternative that is fun and easy to use. they don’t care whats inside.
for example, a simple thing like scrolling. in macs, its all smooth and flowy… on a windows laptop it isn’t. why? the flowy one is easy to implement, and looks a lot nicer! its frustrating!
i’m quite happy to pay the mac premium on a windows machine if i get the same sort of quality.
Ha
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 2:04 PMSo the software is the hardware makers problem now?
This is a hardware company, how much say do they get over the workings of Windows?
Ted
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 7:10 PMOSX can keep it’s fancy flowy scrolling.. my mouse wheel turns in clicks (as it should) and I like my page to scroll down in the same fashion.
You can keep your low spec machines too, I like to get some bang for my buck not something that puts form over function.
Ozoneocean
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 10:50 PMThat’s not true. 99% of people who buy computers need one to do work with. Flowy crap and looking good comes a poor 4th place to many other concerns.
HP is just run by cretinous, panicky, business school graduates who know the PC market as well as they know the dark side of Pluto. “Tablets” are hot right now, even though they make up a tiny proportion of the mobile computing device market, and the HP executives think they’ve failed to make inroads there so they’ve wet themselves and gone home crying to mummy.
It’s people like that who’re responsible for the global financial crisis.
MotorMouth
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 11:07 AMWhat? Scrolling on my PC is EXACTLY the same as it is on my MacPro. There is absolutely not the slightest difference between the two. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Scrolling on my PC is actually better because the Arc Touch mouse I use on it won’t work on my MacPro and it provides much better scrolling than a standard mouse wheel. But if I use the same mouse on each, the experience is identical.
As for simplicity, compare the simple elegance of Windoze 7′s window management with the increasingly tangled nightmare of OS X Lion. You need to do a 4 day course to work out how to take full advantage of OS X’s dashboards and control panels and expose, where you just need to know one or two simple keyboard shortcuts to get full control in Win7.
Then there is quality. I have been using laptops on the road since 2002. They have been work-supplied machines, mostly from Dell, as well as a couple of my own, again mostly Dell, and I have not treated them well. I hate travelling and have, on occasion, taken it out on my work laptop, stuffing them into overhead lockers or throwing them across a hotel room onto a chair (in their bag). In all that time I have never had any issues with quality at all. If a MacBook offers even higher quality then it is irrelevant, because my PC laptops provide more than high enough quality and reliability already. Why pay extra for something you don’t need?
Sicarius123
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 3:58 PMI have zero desire to buy a mac, absolutely hate OSX, but Apple hardware has a much higher quality feel to it.
Hell if I don’t see some competetive ultrabooks soon I’d rather buy a macbook air and run win7 on it.
Ozoneocean
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 10:44 PMThere is good quality hardware out there from a 1000 manufacturers. It just takes shopping around. In my PCs I have Apple keyboards, Samsung monitors Logitech mice and so on.
Not to mention the internals… but Apple only make some peripherals and assembled PCs though. They’re really not really a hardware maker, just another big company that assembles and brands.
Aliasalpha
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 1:02 PMSo HP are effectively deciding to go out of business? To the best of my knowledge they make servers, enterprise quantities of adequate but not flash desktops & laptops and crap printers. How many servers would they sell per day, 20 worldwide? HP will be your number one source for printers that cost less than the ink you use in them.
Oh well I suppose Dell will be happy for the extra business
olearymo
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 7:47 PMPC doesn’t mean server.
Sam
Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 2:57 PMNo more price gouging and theft by ink! Yaaaaaaaay!
Boz
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 11:18 AMIt’s all about profit margin. Hardware is a race to the bottom on expense and revenue. Your average notebook these days goes for around $1000, where’s the margin? But consulting is a high margin business – $250-300/hr for consulting, you pay about $50-80/hr in salaries (plus overheads).
I see the PC market going to two extremes – the cheap do-anything that can do documents, spreadsheets and web browsing, and high-end systems that are gaming machines or graphic design. HP don’t want the cheapo stuff, and they’re don’t want to go fighting with the high-end stuff from specialists because buyers of these types know their stuff and care about specs.
HP is just saying that they don’t this business anymore – high end servers and corporate systems are their game, with revenue coming from integrating those systems into business though a consulting arm. it’s now up to a young company to take the hardware development initiative, like HP did all those years ago.
MotorMouth
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 11:45 AMOne assumes they are only talking about their consumer PC business and will continue with their high-end workstations and server stuff. Apple have nothing to compete in those markets, they are purely consumer-focussed.
HP’s consumer PCs have always been garbage, I say good riddance. I also think their problems are far more from Asian manufacturers like Acer and Samsung, who are increasingly moving up-market, than from Apple. Or possibly the combined effect of being squeezed from both ends into an increasingly small middle-ground? Whatever, the sooner they go away, the better.
As for reasons to switch back to PC, I would have thought they were manifold. I always include a Mac in my selection set when I am looking for a new computer and the simple fact is that they never makes the cut. This year I bought a new Vaio SB19GG which, if you edit video, should be an obvious choice over any Mac. It has dual SSDs in RAID-0 for the best disc performance you have ever seen in a 13″ laptop, as well as USB 3.0 for super-fast transfer from external devices. (I got a USB 3.0 case for $25, put an old 64Gb SSD I had lying around in it and it gives phenomenal performance.) The 1Gb Radeon graphics also gives it a huge edge for other related things. (Even Photoshop uses OpenGL these days and I do a bit of 3D animation now and again.) Add to that things like a hardware switch to swap over to the on-board graphics to save power when you are out and about, along with a free extra battery, which extends battery life to as much as 11.5 hours, and no MacBook can hope to compete. Premiere Pro is also pretty damned good these days, so I hear (I have editors at work to do all that stuff for me). I also got a port replicator for it, so it acts like a workstation at home and a lightweight laptop when I am working at a client’s office or on stage. It really is having your cake and eating it too, in a way no Apple product, or any other PC for that matter, can hope to compete with.
dan
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 1:51 PMHP might make a profit on PCs, but it is piddly. they stated it was 5.9%. you could get 6.5% by putting your money in the bank… why go to all the effort and risk of building heaps of PCs to earn less money than you’d earn doing nothing??
HP reckon they can make more money on software than they can on hardware. makes sense to me?
Michael
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 3:42 PMThis article seems to be going down the path of comparing hardware vendors inovations with Apple software inovations, no pun intended but you are comparing apples and oranges in this case.
As one of the earlier comments stated, what impact do hardware vendors have on Windows? Not really much at all, so perhaps this articles should be more aimed at Microsoft to make new inovations to drive the hardware rather then expecting hardware vendors to inovate and take on Apple.
BenDTU
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 10:53 PMPretty sure Leo was just looking for an excuse to turn HP into SAP Leo edition.
Norgan
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 9:43 AMLOL it’s not that Apple are taking over, although obviously their advertising is working great ;)
The computer hardware market has stagnated, the old model no longer applies as most hardware, even the low spec more than meets the requirements for the average joe.
It is very true and Apple have helped push this, that hardware manufacturers need to innovate and provide appealing hardware that people want.
Operating systems will always evolve and Windows 8 is a strong move by Microsoft to shift the paradigm there.
HP have not yet announced anything with their PC hardware, and there is still plenty of choice when it comes to all platforms with strong players such, they just chose to drop hardware that they saw as being untenable.
I doubt that any PC hardware manufacturer believes that Apple is the cause for any change in hardware sales. In fact I see Apple dropping in the next few years as people wake up to the social irresponsibility of Apple and see great alternatives in the mobile platforms and I am sure in the other hardware platforms as the next wave of hardware is designed, planned and released.
The next few years are going to be very interesting to say the least, a mix of needing new and innovative products weighed against the drop in consumer confidence and struggling financial markets.
TSH
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 10:09 AMHardware manufacturers are sloooowly catching up to Apple’s early insight that the hardware race is over: form is the distinguishing factor nowadays. Dell is catching on with its Zino range and the acquisition of Alienware. ASUS and Samsung have some very cool “Ultrabooks” (what used to be called ultraportable notebooks). So there is hope – it’s just a shame to see HP give up on its own sweet Envy range.
FJA
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 12:05 PMPC Morons. If apple didn’t innovate you would all still be star, dot, star, backslashing away. hahahahaha