HP to Microsoft Sayonara?
Maggie Shiels
HP made its play for the lucrative mobile market with a number of products that will be powered using its own operating system, sending a message to Microsoft that the clock is ticking for its Windows OS.
During a two-hour presentation at a disused fort situated by San Francisco Bay, the world's biggest technology company unveiled two new phones and its long awaited tablet computer that will be driven by its webOS. The Veer is tiny, the size of a credit card and the Pre3 is aimed at the smartphone market.
The centre piece of the whole presentation at Fort Mason was the TouchPad. Apart from all the specs, I can't really say how it handles because the demos in the backstage area were done by HP professionals and we mere mortals were not even allowed to touch them.
Early industry word is that the TouchPad will open up the competition in the tablet market. Sure Apple dominates with its iPad, which it got out of the gate months before anyone else. Since April last year the company has sold almost 15m devices.
RIM's Playbook, which should find a solid foothold in the enterprise market, is due out in March for around $500.
Google is putting up a good fight for market share now that it has finally unleashed its Honeycomb operating system to developers, an OS specifically designed for tablet computers.
Morotola's Xoom, which was the darling of the consumer gadget fest CES in Las Vegas last month and is powered by Android's Honeycomb, is due to hit shelves next week. Still no word on price though. However, early rumours peg it at roughly $800. The basic iPad is $499 and a survey earlier in the year by the Consumer Electronics Association said that the sweet spot was between $500 and $700.
Talking of price, there are no figures for HP's TouchPad, Veer or Pre3.
Why? There is no doubt the number crunchers have come up with a figure that works for the company and gives a return they can more than live with given the growth potential of tablets, so why not just put it out there now?
When Apple announces products it tells you how much it is going to hurt your bank account and when they hold a press conference they have real products in the back that you can actually touch and mess around with.
At the end of the presentation, HP dropped a bomb on Microsoft by announcing that its laptops and desktops will also be powered by its webOS. No-one would tell me what this means for its relationship with Microsoft and Windows, the de facto OS in most PC's but I did speak to one or two industry analysts about the situation.
Microsoft has nothing to worry about, for now, Charles Golvin at Forrester Research told me.
"It is crucial to underscore that having webOS in a PC does not necessarily mean not having Windows. If you think about it in the way in which a Mac user today can run Windows, the same thing would be true for HP products - having a PC running Windows but also delivering the webOS experience.
"At this stage one does not exclude the other. Clearly though the reason HP bought Palm was for the webOS platform - so they could have a software platform that they could control and allow them to design a unique experience across all their devices.
"The truth is if they put only webOS in their devices starting tomorrow, they wouldn't be able to sell PCs into the corporate world and that means for the moment Windows remains at the core of the PC experience for all manufacturers including HP."
However Mr Golvin said that situation will undoubtedly change as time moves on.
At the HP event the big focus was tablets and as far as analysts, industry watchers and bloggers were concerned, Microsoft is not even at the races here.
"What is interesting here is that HP chose not to parent with Microsoft but spent over a billion dollars buying Palm and doing it for themselves," said Michael Gartenberg, senior analyst with Gartner.
"No-one is even mentioning Microsoft right now. They are just not overly relevant in the tablet space right now. They have a decent product with Windows 7 but the consumer mass market has not embraced Windows as a tablet platform despite the fact Microsoft has been pushing tablet PCs for ten years. This is not good for the software giant when tablet computing is one of the hottest products generating so much revenue that Microsoft is not even part of the conversation."
Forrester's Mr Golving agrees that Microsoft should be worried that it has been left behind in a market that many forecast will sell as many as 50m tablets this year alone. He said:
"In the broader context of the growing category of connected devices that are increasingly in consumers hands, Microsoft is losing share of that broad market. They have a very weak presence in the smartphone market and virtually no presence in the tablet market.
"Given those weak presences in these two fast emerging markets, the strategic challenge for Microsoft is they need a software platform the device manufacturers can count on for delivering a compelling experience across these various platforms and not just on PCs running Windows."
Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's personal systems group, noted that by 2014 one in five adults will own a tablet.
There is little doubt that growth potential of tablets is evidence that Microsoft needs to get its head in the game quickly or prepare to cede the market to Apple, Google and perhaps RIM and HP.
Credit: BBC (www.bbc.co.uk)
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