Trying to make sense of HP

I never really thought the HP Touchpad had much of a chance. Too little, too late. With any kind of platform, it is all about apps. Developers can handle developing for at most two platforms.

In fact, I suspect most want to develop for two. Having all your apps on just one platform is putting all your eggs in one basket. As Amazon found with Apple, a platform can pull the rug out from under a developer pretty quick by suddenly demanding, as Apple did, a 30% cut of the action that they had not previously. Amazon recovered nicely with their HTML5 app that bypasses Apple's AppStore. The mere existence of Android as competition should keep some of Apple's avarice at bay, at least to some degree.

Back to the Touchpad. A third platform needs apps, and thus developers to make them. Getting the hardware out there was part of the battle, Courting the developers takes time. Which is why HP's impatience with the platform seemed odd.

Today, Daring Fireball has a possible explanation that makes so much sense, I suspect it is right.

In a nutshell, Palm was purchased by the previous CEO. The new CEO is the former CEO of SAP. He does not know, nor care about, the PC or Tablet world. He is an Enterprise guy. His acquisition is Autonomy, an SAP like company.

So he has been planning to transform HP into an SAP like company. The hardware business has to go.

Might have been nice to pickup an Touchpad for $99. Or five. As my brother said early in the life of the iPad, he wants them cheap enough to have in every room of the house. But on the other hand, with Android tablets coming in now under $400, having an unsupported tablet makes little sense. Maybe hackers will get Android running on it, but how well? I had a period in my life when I tried to get also rans to behave like the big guys. I actually owned a PCJr. at one time, and had a floppy drive for my Radio Shack Model 100. Never as satisfying as a "real" solution.

Comments

Notes Folder : My new note taking system

I'm in the process of moving to a new way to keep my notes. It would be best to make a separate post on my long time notetaking app, Evernote, and how it now disappoints me. Bottom line, I no longer trust the company behind Evernote since it was acquired. My first inclination was to finally look at alternatives. like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. I was not enamored with any of them, so I gritted my teeth and stayed with Evernote. The situation made me think about how I use Evernote. To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder Updates : January 24, 2024 and in updates noted here. Most of the things I store are quick notes, lists, online receipts for online bills, that sort of thing; kind of an online file cabinet if you will. If I were a doctoral student though I could see storing PDFs of papers and research materials. If were working on a large project, then plans, communications etc. would all be there. Back when I began using Evernote way b...

Recording your own notes with Google Voice

Note : April 2016: Frankly I don't know if this works anymore. It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th...

Ten Years of Evernote

This blog post was set to publish exactly as the day begins on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. That is ten years to the day after my first Evernote post. With my second note, I was already getting down to business; recording the agreement I'd come to on the phone on a minor business matter. My affection for Evernote has not dimmed since that day ten years ago. Since then, I've accumulated about 7.8 new notes a day. Ironically, I have needed to pull up only a few notes a year. Yet, when I need them, I need them badly and am glad to have Evernote all over again. My philosophy of what to capture is simple : If you encounter something you might remotely want to see again, it goes into Evernote. from a blog post June 1, 2015 I've written here about Evernote than any other topic. Even wrote a now horribly out-of-date book. Don't get me wrong. If something better comes along that imports my Evernote notes well, I can be enticed to move. But in t...

Ideas from Mark Stout

Search This Blog