[i2y4n]

The Touchpad was the the front page of the Best Buy Circular on July 17 with a full top page ad on the 2nd page with details and accessories.

It was in the Staples Circular as well.

Do you not remember all the TV advertising? Russell Brand, Miranda Cosgrove, Manny Pacquiao and Lea Michele?

This site loved the ad posted on June 30 with Russell Brand (he did many versions)

I never mentioned TV ads for a reason. Although I personally didn't see very many, I know they were out there.

So no circular ads for the first 2 weeks of product launch. No circulars with the $50 price cut for how long, another 2 or 3 weeks after that. It was a very weak "hard" launch. Best Buy sold the TouchPad for $499 despite HP cutting the price. It was overall very poorly executed.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums

[rnld]

You absolutely do not display any understanding of the point I am making.

You simply continue to misrepresent what I've said based on your own personal narrative.

You refer yet again to a 6 week period as if it were a long term effort that has validity as a parallel to months or years long business paradigms.

Where did I ascribe motive or impetus to the Apotheker decision? I only mention it as being the key factor which makes use of Touchpad sales corrupted data for making comparisons.

Please continue on your way and cease pretending that you are replying to my actual words as opposed to putting words in my mouth to further your own agenda in this discussion.

I am not misrepresenting anything. You are attempting to come up with some kind of "business paradigms" that don't have anything to do with the Touchpad.

Nice buzz phrase but in this case it has nothing to do with the Touchpad scenario. This was real world.

Data for six weeks with trending diminishing sales, coupled with the fact of retail realizing that they had way too much sock on hand - Here's a wholesale sales tip - Retailers do not want more than 6 weeks of stock in the stores/warehouses at any given time - ended with HP stuck with a ton of unsold Touchpads in an iPad 2 world.

They pulled the plug. Maybe they could have taken back a ton of units and left a minimal amount in stores to have it suffer the fate of the Playbook - death in a year instead of 6 weeks but that is a moot point now.

[rnld]

I never mentioned TV ads for a reason. Although I personally didn't see very many, I know they were out there.

So no circular ads for the first 2 weeks of product launch. No circulars with the $50 price cut for how long, another 2 or 3 weeks after that. It was a very weak "hard" launch. Best Buy sold the TouchPad for $499 despite HP cutting the price. It was overall very poorly executed.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums

You claimed you didn't see a BB circular until after the fire sale started now you are moving the goal posts.

It's not unusual to go heavy TV for 2 weeks then go in the circular. That extends the advertisement. Buying into the BB circular on 2 pages is hefty.

[beardedspoooon]

So, let's say HP does come out with an open webos tablet. After all this, who would actually buy one?

Sent from my Nexus 7

[marcedhk]

So, let's say HP does come out with an open webos tablet. After all this, who would actually buy one?

Sent from my Nexus 7

That's a great question. I'm heavily keen on the webOS software, but HP not bothering to support the TP with Open webOS again raises serious questions where HP hardware is concerned. HP just seems unwilling or unable to provide to do the kind of long term investment and commitment that's needed to succeed in mobile hardware. Maybe if they had gone with a lower cost more basic tablet that they could better afford to sell at a loss to gain market share things might have been different from the get go. Maybe they now intend to do a reset with a product like that - say a Nexus 7 type product that they can afford to sustain upfront losses on for an extended period as they grow market share and build up ecosystem revenue - I could see that working well if not for the fact that they have lost the confidence of so many in the community.

I mean, why take a chance on an HP Open webOS tablet and be praying they don't give up on it when you can buy a third party tablet that the community does an Open webOS port for and is more likely to keep supporting until it really becomes obsolete? Sure, an official HP tablet with the officially supported component drivers might be a more refined product, but looking at what Cyanogenmod and others have been accomplishing on the Android side it seems we might well be able to get some really good implementations that come quite close.

[RumoredNow]

I am not misrepresenting anything. You are attempting to come up with some kind of "business paradigms" that don't have anything to do with the Touchpad.

Nice buzz phrase but in this case it has nothing to do with the Touchpad scenario. This was real world.

Data for six weeks with trending diminishing sales, coupled with the fact of retail realizing that they had way too much sock on hand - Here's a wholesale sales tip - Retailers do not want more than 6 weeks of stock in the stores/warehouses at any given time - ended with HP stuck with a ton of unsold Touchpads in an iPad 2 world.

They pulled the plug. Maybe they could have taken back a ton of units and left a minimal amount in stores to have it suffer the fate of the Playbook - death in a year instead of 6 weeks but that is a moot point now.

That's four times in a row you have ignored the dialog I've presented regarding statistical analysis, logical thinking and model validity. The only points I've addressed in the four posts you've quoted. Anything else attributed to me by yourself is your own invention and in no way reflects what I've actually written.

[GreenHex]

HP really is the worst company in existence.

Maybe.

HP took a whole mobile communications eco-system and turned it into a Javascript library. From Mojo to Enyo

What more do you (or anyone) want? Maybe HP was encouraged by Google... for it's crappy Android.

[guinny1759]

So, if HP is not planning support for devices they all ready made, does that mean they are planning new hardware? It seems silly to make an OS without planned hardware. So what do you think?

TBH, I don't think I would buy another piece of HW from HP, given their track record, and I really don't trust them.

As for other OEM's, I don't see it happening either, and while I think webOS is worlds nicer than Android, it doesn't mean much without apps, and if devs don't have devices to test apps on...I think HP has caught themselves in a corner.

[i2y4n]

You claimed you didn't see a BB circular until after the fire sale started now you are moving the goal posts.

It's not unusual to go heavy TV for 2 weeks then go in the circular. That extends the advertisement. Buying into the BB circular on 2 pages is hefty.

I guess you just skipped over the part where I said I don't remember the exact timeline from over a year ago.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums

[rnld]

That's four times in a row you have ignored the dialog I've presented regarding statistical analysis, logical thinking and model validity. The only points I've addressed in the four posts you've quoted. Anything else attributed to me by yourself is your own invention and in no way reflects what I've actually written.

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.

[RumoredNow]

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.

Buzz words LOL. Nice description for entire schools of study that have thousands of years history and millions of users. Clearly you have no use for Statistical Analysis or Logical Thinking and such ideas are lost on you or willfully ignored...

Have a Great Day! Drink a Pepsi! Buzzbye fer now!

[rnld]

Buzz words LOL. Nice description for entire schools of study that have thousands of years history and millions of users. Clearly you have no use for Statistical Analysis or Logical Thinking and such ideas are lost on you or willfully ignored...

Have a Great Day! Drink a Pepsi! Buzzbye fer now!

Nice use of armchair marketing buzzwords with no bearing on the Touchpad's failure to sell.

[marcedhk]

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.

[rnld]

As some like to question the Best Buy sales numbers, where does this 5% margin figure come from?

[marcedhk]

As some like to question the Best Buy sales numbers, where does this 5% margin figure come from?

Many places - it's actually been very widely reported. Here are just a couple references:

Is the new HP just an IBM clone? - Big Tech - Fortune Tech

HP 'wants to spin off PC division' | Business | guardian.co.uk

[rnld]

Operating profit margin - meaning how much profit they make on units after all costs including a contribution to overhead in the P&L.

[marcedhk]

Operating profit margin - meaning how much profit they make on units after all costs including a contribution to overhead in the P&L.

RIght - and it's only 5%, as in only earning $50,000 for every million dollars spent. At that level ambitious companies start to wonder whether it makes sense to keep a division going if you can earn better margins by investing that money in more profitable divisions. Looking at HP, Services had an operating margin of 12%, Enterprise had 13%, Software had 27%, Imaging and Printing was 12%.

Any way you look at it, Personal Systems was struggling and was in no position to absorb the webOS division losses if you made it a standalone company...

[rnld]

The article references $2 billion in profit from $40 billion in revenue. Other division's margins don't mean much without knowing revenue and profit from those divisions.

I don't understand the spent vs profit example you are using.

[HelloNNNewman]

Guys.... please leave the personal attacks out of comments. If you cannot make your point without a personal comment, please take a breath and read another thread.

<<thread cleansed>>

[marcedhk]

The article references $2 billion in profit from $40 billion in revenue. Other division's margins don't mean much without knowing revenue and profit from those divisions.

I don't understand the spent vs profit example you are using.

Huh? But that's the same thing that I'm saying - $2 billion is 5% of $40 billion. $50,000 is 5% of $1 million. So for every million dollars spent there's only $50,000 of profit.

I'm really not understanding what you're trying to say here, so I'll try and make my point clearer hoping that you'll understand mine:

1) 5% operating profit is not good for a division in a business. If it drops much lower beyond that, then management has to start wondering whether all the management time that is consumed keeping things going in that division is justified, as almost the same returns can be had by just investing in paper and not having to deal with all the headaches and distractions that go along with managing a global business.

2) If there are other divisions in the company that are performing better and have potential for growth, it might make sense to cut the under performing division loose and allow management to concentrate their efforts on growing other divisions where a higher profit percentage is being realised, ie any of the other divisions in HP. Being a software guy Leo specifically wanted to focus on the software division.

3) Because the Personal Systems Group was doing poorly (5% operating profit), saddling them with a big money losing unit (the webOS Global Business Unit) probably would be a really bad idea. So Leo decided to just kill the webOS hardware so it wouldn't drag down PSG and try and get something back by licensing the software to third parties (which again makes sense to Leo, since as I said above, he's a software guy).

Do you get me now?