HP Selling PC Division, Kills Web OS - End of the PC Era?
This has been a chaotic couple of weeks - between the global market gyrations, Google buying up Motorola and some really bad economic numbers (welcome to the Tech Winter Part II), the recent announcement that Hewlett Packard selling its PC division seems only par for the course. However, like the Google deal, this may come to be seen as the official end of the PC era. No one knows what the fate of HP's spin-off will end up being (as Michael Dell snarkily posted on Twitter, perhaps they should call the new company Compaq), though its pretty clear that this wouldn't have happened if the handwriting was not on the wall - the sale of desktop PCs is no longer profitable, a stance that IBM came to when they sold their PC offerings to the Chinese firm Lenovo.
Perhaps Microsoft should buy up the division - they've held off creating Microsoft OEM'd PCs because they were worried about polluting the vendor channels, but at this stage, there's not much channel left to pollute. The aforementioned Michael Dell might decide to put out more Linux boxes, or perhaps cut a deal and create an Android 4.x fork with Google, but the damage has been done. Microsoft is king of the PC empire, but that empire is now shrinking, with a horde of smartphones and pads and laptops becoming the dominant devices upon which people work, and this market is about evenly split between Apple and Google.
HP's announcement came with an additional counterpoint - they are ending development of WebOS, originally started under Palm's leadership before that company was bought out by HP. WebOS has its followers, but it makes up a comparatively tiny sliver of the overall mobile OS market, and that sliver is shrinking under the Android assault. HP is also killing their tablet offering that came with that operating system, because of poor sales. I looked at a Touchpad myself recently - and hardware wise, the Touchpad was actually a pretty nice little tablet - but the reality there was the same issue that I suspect kept sales slow: the app market was too small, there were comparatively few developers working on such apps, and the possibility of being stranded with an also ran technology was too high. As Google figured out (and as Microsoft had figured out a generation ago and then forgotten) - an ubiquitous, if not necessary great, operating system on a host of machines will beat out a great operating system that had no market share. It's unlikely that HP will not go back to the drawing board and create an Android tablet, though if I were Steve Ballmer I'd have the entire marketing division for Microsoft camped out on HP's doorstep right now. If HP wants to stay in that space at all (and they'd be foolish not to), their long-standing alliance with Microsoft could very well see the next tablet that HP produces sporting a Windows 7 logo.
So what will happen to WebOS? It may be spun off as an open source project, which may be attractive to some low end commodity vendors who are nervous about Googorola, but in general open source dynamics tend to reflect the commercial side - so long as Android remains open source, it will likely block any major FOSS challengers, and unlike Microsoft Google does not have a lot to gain by making Android proprietary. More likely WebOS will become the CPM of the mobile world, fondly remembered by diehards but noncompetitive in the marketplace, and will just fade away.
As to the PC side, I suspect that there will be a surge of buying as electronics retailers firesale their existing units - for a $1000 you might eventually be able to buy three or four multi-CPU PCs, making them nice for render farms or other heavy duty processing requirements, but between cloud systems, laptops, and mobile phones and pads, the benefits of mobility generally outweigh immediate power gains on fixed systems. Moreover, even in the DIY arena, specialized process systems are already quite perfectly capable of controlling the heater and air conditioning (and are online), turning on or off the lights, monitoring the kids, checking the milk and so forth. Coming out of BestBuy one day, I was amused to see a refrigerator with a small display screen running Android, with the ability to download web apps, a camera, mic and speaker. No, you're not going to write your next business report on your refrigerator, but where better to place a to do list, an app for grocery planning, a diet calorie counter or a calendar showing who's where that day.
This is the future of the computer - the PC is dead, long live the Fridge!
PC's are not dead. HP and Web/OS is
I like the article but I think your totally off the mark on one thing. The "Desktop PC" is not split between Apple and Google. The "handheld" or "tablet" market is.
There is still a *strong* market for desktop and laptop PC's and google hardly touches that market. The Failure of HP wasnt in the PC market. It was in the handheld/Tablet market. And realizing that the PC market has become "comodity". "Comodity" != "Dead" ... "Comodity" just means there is so much of it that there is little differentiation to drive high profits. PC's are far from dead. Laptops and Notepads are far from dead. Web/OS well ... RIP. It was late to the game, and HP was a fool to buy it. But atleast now they are now realizing their mistake.
Hmmm ....
Actually, I'd stand by the thesis of the article, though with a qualification. I think the PC - a physical box with large monitor and low mobility - is in fact a dying beast, though it may still be a few years before it gives up the ghost completely. In most places I've seen lately, even in large corporate environments, new employees are given laptops, and the large investment made in desktop systems over the last twenty years have left companies with computers that are sitting idle.
In retail, desktops have given over to intelligent tills. Most schools (the few that can still afford to buy computers at all) have begun shifting to laptops (or have been requiring their students to buy them, occasionally with subsidies). I suspect that over time these will shift to tablets - smaller form factor, easier to use on a desk or stick in a backpack, easier to manage networking and cheaper ... and more consistent with the handheld world that kids are growing into.
Netbook sales are actually declining pretty precipitously, primarily because this is a niche that tablets fill well, especially with an OS that was designed for mobile from the get-go, rather than being a retrofitted desktop OS. Laptops will continue to run on the WinTel architecture for some time, but I'd be willing to bet money that five years from now, a laptop will simply be a clamshell of two tablets, the bottom handling input, the top display, running on Android 5 or iOS,
Meanwhile, even desktops as a commodity are failing. In the personal market (what the industry calls the consumer market, though I've always found the term insulting) the only real buyers of high end PCs are gamers, and increasingly these are shifting away from the PC to dedicated game consoles, because that's where the newest releases are first - PC games are an afterthought. We have a desktop system at home, but its never used - my wife has her own laptop and my kids have our seconds. They like being able to take their laptops to friends' houses or to move around the house from bedroom to den to living room with them. I suspect we're not unusual in that regard.
I suspect that this is going to be a common refrain everywhere. In business, you're either seeing a preference towards mobility over security or you're seeing the introduction of specialized hardware appliances that are more suited towards single tasks (primarily because these are more secure, easier to learn, and generally more stable). Government runs pretty much the same way. Larger organizations with a major investment in PCs will be slowest to change, but with HP out of the market, Compaq gone, Dell a shrinking presence there and Apple pretty much totally dedicated to RISC processors and mobility, even these organizations are seeing the handwriting on the wall.
So, yeah, I think that the "Desktop" PC is dying if not yet quite a corpse, and that unless Microsoft/Intel manages to figure out mobile FAST they are also dead on the OS side. The WebOS issue is a side-note - this industry tends towards two player orbits because they are relatively stable - they change only when a third player gains enough momentum to disrupt the orbits, usually with one of the players getting throw out on a hyperbolic orbit, leaving the remaining two to re-establish a new quasi-stable state.