IS THE HP TOUCHPAD WITH WEBOS SAYING BYE BYE FOREVER OR IS HP PURE GENIUS’S?

Now that the HP Touchpad webOS fire sale is over, what will become of this low sought out operating system?  HP’s Executive Vice President Todd Bradley is reportedly looking to leave HP in search for another CEO role elsewhere.  This is due to the plans that HP will discontinue its webOS smartphones and tablets and is interested in splitting off the PC business, which Samsung is quite interesting in buying and becoming top dog in the PC world.

Here is an interesting fact, due to the fire sale and HP dropping their Touchpad to an unheard of price of $99, it became the biggest talk of the town in the tablet world.  Not iPad, Android or the Blackberry Playbook.

HP has now flooded the market with their webOS tablet, which was no where even close to competing with any iPad or Android tablet and sold out in record time.  People were lining up to lay down the cash in stores everywhere and buying several at a time, not to mention scooping them up on the internet.  So now HP has them in millions of hands with a system that is said to be obsolete in the coming days, or is it?

One thought is what HP is claiming, which is, since it seemed they had no chance in competing with the iPad or Android, they would cut their losses and drop the price so low they had to sell out of all their inventory.  Good call if they knew they would discontinue their lines of webOS smartphones and tablets.  Common sense not genius.

The price to make a Touchpad is around $318, so at $99 they are losing a ton of cash.   The lucky ones who purchased these things at $99 are selling them on the internet all day long at $250, so why didn’t HP at least try to get some of this money by selling them at this price when they knew they could get it?  Did they really lose out or was this just some smart marketing?

HP Touchpad Theory 1:

My thought is they were thinking a very smart marketing strategy called a no brainer.  At $250 buyers may have thought twice about purchasing, but when you drop the price like they did, it never ever crossed a buyers mind to purchase and purchase many at a time.  So now HP knows at this point that price is a HUGE factor in buying a tablet.  Maybe its not the operating system at all.  And they know they can sell Touchpads at $99 all day long.  The people who bought and are now selling them at $250 are selling out also.  So HP could keep producing these things and slowly raise prices until they hit that top out mark for buyers, leave the price and essentially out price there competitors.  We already know they are still producing Touchpads to fill the back inventory for buyers, so why not continue.

HP Touchpad Theory 2:

If HP does decide to phase out the webOS smartphones and tablets, they have now circulated millions of this operating system out there that will need support and updates.  This could make the bidding war start with buying the webOS.  Think Samsung.  I have always thought that putting this system on a nice slab device like Samsung would go over with consumers really well if marketed right.  Whoever decides to buy, the one step of startup marketing has already been done by HP.  They have already put it in front of the whole world now and people will soon learn that the webOS is a top notch system.  HP did a horrible job with this when first launching webOS and with this fire sale, somehow hit the nail on the head.

So which way do you think HP will go?

UPDATE:  After writing this article just a day before, 9to5Mac came out with this interesting article that looks like one of my theory’s could be what HP is trying to do.

=>PC head Todd Bradley tells Reuters HP could resurrect the Touchpad

Talk soon,

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