In the last few years, HP has been suffering from a major identity crisis. The days of HP innovation seem long gone.
When HP acquired Palm it appeared that the company had a clear focus on mobile computing. It acquired Palm Inc. and, more importantly, webOS in order to get back into the smartphone game and offer a tablet to compete with the iPad. webOS was and still is one of the best designed and most intuitive mobile operating systems; unfortunately HP killed it before even giving it a chance.
When Palm unveiled webOS at CES in 2009 it stole the show and received many awards. It was to be Palm's comeback, the next-generation operating system was beautiful, intuitive, and seemed like it was going to be a big hit. The demise of Palm and webOS began after the company walked off the stage at CES in January 2009 and waited until June 2009 to ship the Palm Pre. A few days later, the iPhone 3GS went on sale and Palm's future or lack thereof was sealed.
When HP acquired Palm it seemed like webOS would thrive with HP's cash. HP announced the Palm Pre 3, Palm Veer and most importantly its first webOS tablet, the TouchPad, in February 2011. HP must not have learned from Palm's timing mistake with the release of the Palm Pre and waited until July 2011 to release the TouchPad. In that six-month gap Apple would release the iPad 2 before HP shipped the TouchPad. Six weeks later HP announced that it was killing off webOS and all of the new hardware running it.
HP got back into the tablet game a few days ago, with the Android-based HP Slate 7, and announced Wednesday that the company will be shifting its resources from PCs to tablets to try and catch up with its PC rivals, who all have established a tablet presence.
HP's CEO Meg Whitman said in a statement, "We're not incrementally changing the business, we are shifting resources from PCs to tablets, from one operating system to another, from one kind of chipset to another."
Only time will tell if this helps HP find a new identity or if it's just another failed attempt by HP to play catch-up because it sees every one of its competitors selling tablets.
