HP laid out ambitious plans built from the rubble of Palm today: three smartphones, a tablet, printers and even WebOS PCs. That's great, but frankly, we've been burned before by Palm's big ideas.
HP unveils TouchPad tablet, WebOS headed to PCsHP laid out ambitious plans built from the rubble of Palm today: three smartphones, a tablet, printers and even WebOS PCs. That's great, but frankly, we've been burned before by Palm's big ideas. I don't trust them to bring these products to market in time, and I don't trust them to follow up. For HP to make a mark in the mobile market, it has to prove it can deliver.
For the past few years Palm has been an ideas company, not a products company. They have big ideas that they flub as products. Take the Palm Pre. It's beautiful. It took six months to come to market. That's okay, I guess. The iPhone took six months, too. Then it stuck with one carrier for way too long and ended up a bit of a laughingstock because of one of the worst tech ad campaigns in modern history. Palm then took 15 months to produce the Palm Pre 2.
The Pre 2 was HP's first Palm product, arriving three months after HP acquired the company. That's been another slowpoke coming to the market: we saw the first retail version in October of 2010, and it's only now getting a U.S. carrier announcement. This isn't just expectation management. HP/Palm now has a history of delivering products to market that look old on their first day of sale.
The history of the Palm/HP merger also doesn't give me much faith. Once more: big ideas, no products. HP closed its Palm acquisition in July of 2010. It's taken them seven months to even come up with a strategy of what to do with WebOS. The products are going to take several months more. In the fast-moving world of mobile, taking seven months to think is what gets you left behind.
Let us note, now, that the Veer, Pre 3 and TouchPad were announced with no prices, with no hard release dates, and with no wireless carrier partners. There are plenty of potential slips between those cups and consumers' lips, that's for sure.
Microsoft and RIM are also going through big transitions. But the two companies have shown that they recognize past mistakes and that they aim to do better. I didn't see any of that from HP. That's the down side of Palm's old Apple DNA: you can't tell if they're learning from their errors if they never admit to having made any.
Apple, meanwhile, doesn't put out many products, but they do so like clockwork. You can set your watch by Apple's steady, reliable product releases. The company doesn't need to tease the iPad 2 or iPhone 5 because, over the course of years, they've built up trust that it's coming. We have none of that trust in Palm. As Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi just said on Twitter, "For HP, selling itself will be harder than selling the TouchPad."
This is all frustrating because so many of Palm's ideas have been so great. WebOS was ahead of the curve with its beautiful, user interface, HTML5-style technologies and social networking integration when it debuted in January of 2009. It fell behind during that long, wordless gap between idea and widely available product.
The good news for HP is that there's still a lot of room in the mobile market. The smartphone and tablet markets are expanding by leaps and bounds, and companies are trading market share constantly. Think Apple dominates? According to IDC, Apple has only 16% of the global smartphone market. Google, Nokia, RIM and Microsoft are all duking it out for space on shelves. It's crowded, but a scrappy, dynamic competitor could still find a place.
And WebOS may yet make its mark in the one area HP has absolute control over the sale of: PCs. Mobile is a pain because you have to deal with carriers, and mobile insiders have told me Palm's dealings with various carriers have been quite rocky. But if HP puts WebOS in PCs and printers, they control the sales channel. We could see that happening before the TouchPad finds a carrier partner.
I want to believe. HP could be a player. But Palm could have been a player. We've been burned before; when I close my eyes, I see that horrible ad campaign for the Palm Pre. HP has made the first step. Now it's time to prove itself.
