So… it’s been a while since I last wrote anything about technology. This time we have two big pieces of news, so it seems a good time to write something. I’ll start with the WTF news of the last week.
Yup, it’s HP canceling the production of its TouchPad. So, first they spend 1.2 billion dollars acquiring Palm. Then, they take almost a year to release the TouchPad and two months after the release they kill it. Not a smart, move, it seems.
From a technical-only standpoint, we saw that webOS 3.0 was very mature (more than Android Honeycomb, if you ask me) and had some solid essential apps (e-mail, Facebook, etc). However, the product hasn’t taken off. Which is expected, since there are no products in the market these days that can face the iPad 2 as a content-consumption tablet – the Apple ecosystem is too solid and strong in the tablet market, period. It’ll take a while until the competitors have a matching offer. So, ideally, HP bet should had been in a long-term strategy. And it doesn’t seem it was, which is weird. I wonder if this is a Mark Hurd leftover they decided to get rid off…
One can argue that HP is trying to move away from the consumer market and that’s why they killed the TouchPad. Okay, but that kind of move is usually very far-sighted and planned ahead. So why the hell did they acquire Palm last year if that was the plan? If this is a recent change of plans, then the past strategists didn’t do a very good job.
Anyway, the market loses a good tablet and HP lost a lot of money. That’s it.
Now onto the biggest piece of news today: Steve Jobs resigned as the CEO of Apple. Although expected, this was a bit of a surprise for most people – I was expecting him to do it after the iOS5/iPhone 5 release this fall. This is the end of a bright era for Apple and it’s sad to see the last of the two CEOs I admired the most go (the other was Bill Gates).
Although most people will think that this is the end of Apple, let’s face the facts – it isn’t. The company has a solid product base, has a very competent and passionate team of executives, has a very loyal customer base and has one of the best programs for maintaining corporate culture out there (Apple University). And, last but not the least, Tim Cook is a very trained CEO for the company (and very competent, IMHO).
Despite all of that, investors (the stupid ones) started to freak out (Apple stock dropped more than 5% after the announcement), and some idiotic comments started to pop out on the web. I guess some people need to get more informed. The company will not rot overnight. It’ll just do what it’s always done: follow strictly the plan. Apple is one of the few companies out there that doesn’t draw its strategy based on Wall Street financial expectations. Instead, they draw their strategy based on what they think it’s going to be best for the company and their customers and follow it thoroughly. That’s their culture, and that’s not gonna change with Jobs gone.
Apple will continue to be Apple. The rest is pure speculation.