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 Originally Posted by rnld
And you keep going back to the same buzz words.
When a movie is released and does weak ticket sales, advertising is stopped and theaters want it out to use the screen for a movie doing business. That can happen in 3 weeks time.
I don't think this analogy doesn't hold up though, because only a single movie can be shown in a particular room at a time, and while shelf and warehouse space in a brick and mortar is limited to some extent it's not like they HAD to get rid of all the TouchPad's to make room for something else. I think it's just that they lost confidence that sales would pick up and told HP how they felt. HP then could have chosen to double down on things and try their best to spur sales (like Blackberry did), take the product back and try to sell them through other channels, or just call the whole thing off and have a firesale. They chose option 3, and not because it made the most business sense for HP as the company that it currently was, but because it made business sense in the context of Leo's vision of the new HP that would no longer be in the consumer hardware business.
After all, if you're spinning off your consumer hardware divisions as a separate entity and it only makes 5% profit on it's products you really can't saddle it with a billion dollar losing webOS division, so under that scenario webOS had to go. Following this thought trajectory it seems It's the decision for HP to get out of consumer hardware that really killed webOS, as even if the TP was selling well it could not sell well enough in the short term for webOS to be anything but an albatross around the neck of the new PSG company. Even if they were able to sell TP's at the full price of $600 a pop and make the kind of 30% profit that Apple makes on their iPad they would have had to be selling something like 5 million units a year just to break even on the $1 billion a year it was costing them to keep the lights on in the webOS division. Clearly those sales numbers were just not going to be achieved, and without the HP corporation being there to absorb those losses maybe the PSG company wouldn't have been able to survive on its own.
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