I just got off the phone with Bill Veghte, executive VP for software and solutions at HP, and Dr. Skott Ahn, president and CEO of LG Electronics’ mobile operations.

Veghte told me that the acquisition grew out of a series of discussions that HP and LG held around a potential partnership. It wasn’t long before LG simply offered to acquire webOS outright. The deal, Veghte said, will include the source code, documentation, a license to all the associated patents (HP won’t be letting those go) and the remaining user experience team. People associated with the cloud services infrastructure that had been part of the webOS operations will stay with HP. Veghte wouldn’t comment on exactly how many people will be moving from HP to LG. Financial terms aren’t being disclosed.

Ahn told me that webOS will become a “core technology of LG,” and that “we would like to incorporate it first into our Smart TV platform, and then in the future in other devices.”

What other devices? Probably not phones and tablets. LG is pretty firmly in the Android camp there. But there are other appliances that might benefit from webOS, Ahn said, like refrigerators and other appliances and also smart signage.

So there you have it: webOS will appear first in TVs, and then perhaps later in other household appliances from LG.

LG has a technology called Smart ThinQ that it embeds in some models of refrigerators, laundry machines and kitchen ranges. I found a video from CES demonstrating what Smart ThinQ is like now. So maybe down the road you’ll see the legacy of webOS there.

Update: The official press release just moved. Here it is:

LG Electronics Acquires webOS from HP to Enhance Smart TV

LG to License HP IP, Integrate webOS Technology into Next-Generation Devices

SEOUL, Korea, and PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 25, 2013 – LG Electronics Inc. has acquired the webOS operating system technology from HP, the companies announced today.

To support its next-generation Smart TV technology, LG has entered into a definitive agreement with HP to acquire the source code, associated documentation, engineering talent and related websites associated with webOS. As part of the transaction, LG also will receive licenses under HP’s intellectual property (IP) for use with its webOS products, including patents acquired from Palm covering fundamental operating system and user interface technologies now in broad use across the industry.

Today’s announcement paves the way for continued innovation on the webOS platform and on LG’s roadmap of innovative solutions for many years to come, while allowing HP to focus its resources on strategic business opportunities such as cloud computing.

“This groundbreaking development demonstrates LG’s commitment to investing in talent and research in Silicon Valley, one of the world’s innovation hotbeds. It creates a new path for LG to offer an intuitive user experience and Internet services across a range of consumer electronics devices,” said Skott Ahn, president and chief technology officer, LG Electronics Inc. “The open and transparent webOS technology offers a compelling user experience that, when combined with our own technology, will pave the way for future innovations using the latest Web technologies.”

Ahn explained that LG Electronics’ investment in webOS technology and its acquisition of the innovation team’s R&D capabilities are expected to extend LG’s leadership in bringing Internet services directly to consumer electronics devices. “Integrated with LG, this team will be the heart and soul of the new LG Silicon Valley Lab, focused on bringing innovative technology solutions to market through the most popular platforms for sharing and consuming content and experiences,” he said. With the transaction, LG will add the Sunnyvale and San Francisco sites to its global R&D locations, in addition to its existing U.S. sites in San Jose and Chicago.

Also under the agreement:

LG will assume stewardship of the open source projects of Open WebOS and Enyo. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.

HP will continue to support Palm users.

“WebOS and its associated community deliver market leading platforms for the next generation of connected devices. We are constantly looking for opportunities to accelerate the delivery of this platform from the community,” said Bill Veghte, HP’s chief operating officer. “LG’s track record of innovation and broad distribution provides this opportunity, while enabling HP to accelerate our Cloud efforts. In particular, with the cloud assets that will remain with HP, we will focus on delivering innovative solutions that will enable our enterprise customers to mobilize their workforce.”

HP and LG do not expect this transaction to have a material impact on either company’s financial statements. Terms were not disclosed.

The operating system, developed by Palm and sold to Hewlett-Packard, is changing hands again.

Korean electronics giant LG is scooping up the technology and what remains of its development team. However it is LG’s television unit rather than its smartphone business that is acquiring the software.

It’s the latest twist in a long saga of the software developed to be the reinvention of a classic name in the mobile space.

Palm released its Pre and Pre 2 phones using webOS before selling to HP for more than $1 billion. The software, though well-received initially, languished amid a paucity of apps and the slow introduction of new products.

HP shipped the TouchPad tablet before essentially giving up on the business. HP had released some of the operating system last year under an open source license, and had held out the option of using the software in its own products down the road.

CNET reported the news on Monday morning, ahead of what was expected to be an official announcement later in the day. An LG spokesman wasn’t immediately prepared to discuss the deal, but the details appear to be correct.

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In March, Greenblatt left his job as the chief technology officer of the webOS unit and took a then-unspecified role within HP. That job turned out to be general manager of the Critical Systems Management unit.

He held on to that gig for seven months, then took the job at Dell this month.

Greenblatt’s LinkedIn profile now lists his title as chief technical evangelist at Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group. He describes his job like so: “As chief technology evangelist at the Enterprise Solution Group I am heavily involved in the architecture, communication and technical promotion of Dell’s Enterprise family of products. I will help drive the ESG company’s development teams toward a strong and unified architectural construct, while externally translating and communicating the technology vision to customers, new prospective partners and the industry as a whole.”

The ESG is where the action is at Dell. That’s where CEO Michael Dell put a lot of emphasis, transforming it from one focused on selling PCs to one that’s better known for supplying IT hardware and software to corporations and other large organizations. Dell himself talked about the process in an interview with AllThingsD over the summer.

Greenblatt will be working with and probably reporting to a former HP colleague, Marius Haas, the former head of its networking unit, whom Dell recruited in August.

“We don’t have any plans to introduce a smartphone in 2013,” Whitman said during HP’s analyst day on Wednesday. “But we’ve got to begin thinking about our play here. How do we capture this segment of the personal computing market? … I believe that, five years from now, if we don’t have a smartphone — or whatever the next generation of that device is — we’ll be locked out of a huge segment of the population in many countries.”

Tough to disagree with that assessment, given the soaring smartphone market and the dawning of the “post-PC” era.

But it’s also hard not to wince at the idea of HP taking another run at the smartphone and tablet market after a failed first attempt that ended in embarrassment and more than $3.3 billion in goodwill- and inventory write-offs. As Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said, following Whitman’s first smartphone comments, “While [it] makes sense strategically, we see it as a high risk move. On top of adding costs and working capital burdens to an already stressed balance sheet, there could be additional write-offs. We note that to date almost all PC OEMs have failed to gain significant traction in consumer tablets/smartphones.”

HP shares are trading lower by more than 2 percent in premarket action in partial response to the downgrade note by Peter Misek of Jeffries and Co. Misek lowered his target price for HP shares to $14 from $17, and maintained his already low estimate on its per-share earnings for fiscal year 2013 of $3.58, which is far below the consensus estimate of $4.22.

He has lots of reasons: For one thing, Misek is worried about HP’s intentions in the tablet and smartphone arena. After failing to capitalize on the acquisition of Palm and shutting down the webOS hardware business after sales of the TouchPad tablet failed to gain traction — and a subsequent $3.3 billion write-off for goodwill and inventory — Whitman has promised to try again with another smartphone. Misek sees that “makes sense strategically,” but it carries with it a lot of risk: “On top of adding costs and working capital burdens to an already stressed balance sheet, there could be additional write-offs.”

Meanwhile, HP already has significant trouble with its bread-and-butter PC business. Overall demand in the PC market is slowing, while Microsoft’s Windows 8 doesn’t yet appear to be much of a catalyst, at least if you look at the slow demand for PC microprocessors from Intel.

On top of that, the transition to a renewed emphasis on higher-value IT hardware and services is sputtering. Documents revealed in the lawsuit with Oracle over the Itanium chip — HP won the first round, but Oracle has promised to appeal — laid bare the fact that HP has long been relying heavily on revenue-derived service-and-support contracts with customers who buy Itanium-based servers. Referring to the Business Critical Server unit that sells the servers, Misek writes that his conversations with its customers don’t bode well for HP: “Our conversations with BCS customers indicate a lack of confidence in the longevity of the product platform. While migration off of BCS is not lightly undertaken, we expect continued weakness in BCS hardware and related Services revenues.”

Then there’s the printer business: Inventories of printer ink have built up because they’re selling more slowly than before. The correction, Misek argues, will take several quarters to resolve. He thinks tablets are cutting into demand for printed pages.

Finally, there’s software: The one still-unfinished bit of messy business left over from the 11-month service of former CEO Léo Apotheker is the $11.7 billion acquisition of the British software firm Autonomy, announced 13 months ago. Misek says he expects HP to write off some of the value of Autonomy. This would follow the massive $8 billion write-off announced Aug. 22, related to the EDS acquisition from 2008. After that first big write-off, HP hinted strongly that more goodwill write-offs are in the offing, probably in Software, Misek says. “After Autonomy’s poor performance the last couple quarters, we think HP will write off half of the $6 billion goodwill from the Autonomy acquisition, which will put further pressure on its debt to equity ratio.”

Which brings us to HP’s debt situation. Misek notes that HP has $1 billion in debt payments due in the fourth quarter of this year, and another $5.5 billion due in fiscal 2013. While not unusually high for HP historically, it doesn’t exactly help the already-strained balance sheet. Investors in debt markets have certainly noticed as credit default swaps on HP bonds experienced a textbook case of “blowing out” over the summer, though in all fairness it wasn’t the only PC maker they worried about.

Misek isn’t the first to place a “sell” rating on HP shares. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities was notable for placing a “sell” on HP in August of 2011, and has remained bearish on the shares since then. The bearish case is strong, indeed, and many investors are working it: Short interest in HP shares — an indication of sentiment that the share will fall further — has increased substantially in the last year.

As markets opened for trading in New York, HP shares fell by 15 cents, or a little less than 1 percent, to $16.96 on the New York Stock Exchange, after closing yesterday at $17.11. If HP shares fall to the $14 price target that Misek has set, it would constitute their lowest price since April of 2003.

“We have to ultimately offer a smartphone because in many countries of the world that is your first computing device. You know, there will be countries around the world where people may never own a tablet, or a PC or a desktop. They will do everything on the smartphone. We’re a computing company; we have to take advantage of that form factor. … We did take a detour into smartphones, and we’ve got to get it right this time. My mantra to the team is: ‘Better right than faster than we should be there.’ So we’re working to make sure that when we do this, it will be the right thing for Hewlett-Packard, and we will be successful.”

HP, you’ll remember, acquired Palm in 2010 for $1.2 billion, not long before its then-CEO Mark Hurd departed. Under his replacement, Léo Apotheker, HP sought to apply Palm’s webOS operating system to a tablet that it hoped would challenge Apple’s iPad. It didn’t work out that way and Apotheker shuttered HP’s webOS hardware operations in August of 2011.

Whitman, who replaced Apotheker 40 days later, ultimately decided that the webOS software was better off in the hands of the open source community, and is working on an OS called Enyo. Meanwhile, HP has placed the remains of the company formerly known as Palm into a stealth subsidiary called Gram.

Also during the interview, Whitman said HP has no interest in buying the troubled Canadian smartphone outfit Research In Motion. Well, thank goodness for that! Fox Business (which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.) has broken the interview into three segments, which I’ve embedded below.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120914/whitman-says-hp-has-to-do-a-smartphone-again-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120817/hp-hires-nokias-former-meego-head-torres-but-not-for-gram/ http://allthingsd.com/20120817/hp-hires-nokias-former-meego-head-torres-but-not-for-gram/#comments Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:17:34 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=242764 Don’t look now, but Hewlett-Packard’s mobile strategy is starting to look increasingly confused. Earlier this week we learned about Gram, a stealthy, wholly owned subsidiary that is being fashioned out of the webOS remnants of the company formerly known as Palm. It has even taken to buying up cool domain names.

Anyway, today we were reminded, again via a memo leaked to The Verge, that there’s still another mobile group within HP, and this one, unlike Gram, will be building hardware.

In the memo, Todd Bradley, head of the Printing and Personal Systems Group (PPSG), which encompasses the world’s biggest manufacturer of both PCs and printers, announced the creation of a new Mobility Global Business Unit that will operate within PPSG, and named Alberto Torres, the former head of Nokia’s abandoned MeeGo smartphone operating system efforts, to run it.

I’ve confirmed from sources that the memo is authentic, and I’ve also gotten one bit of clarification for anyone who may still be confused. Torres (pictured from a video interview conducted last year), whose title will be senior vice president of Mobility, will report to Bradley and will not be working for Gram. Also, the Mobility GBU has nothing to do with Gram. Got it?

So now HP has one mobile group working on an open source operating system with an uncertain mission, and a hardware group that will be building tablets primarily running Windows.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s Bradley’s memo announcing everything.

As the world’s largest PC and printing business, we make it matter for hundreds of millions of people each and every day. Today we are taking an important step to serve even more customers in new and exciting ways.

I am pleased to announce that we are creating a team dedicated to delivering the best mobility solutions in the industry. With this move, we are building on our commitment to re-invest in mobility via dedicated leadership, focused research and development, amazing new products and a growing suite of applications and services.

Our new Mobility Global Business Unit initially will focus on consumer tablets and will expand to additional segments and categories where we believe we can offer differentiated value to our customers. Our existing notebook teams, including our soon-to-be launched commercial tablet, will remain within the PC GBU under James Mouton at this time.

To lead the Mobility GBU, I am thrilled to announce that we have recruited a proven executive from the mobile-device industry. Alberto Torres, who most recently oversaw the MeeGo products and platform at Nokia as Executive Vice President, will join HP as Senior Vice President of Mobility, reporting to me.

I am excited to have Alberto join us. During his seven years at Nokia, he held a variety of critical leadership positions, including two years on the company’s Executive Board. In earlier roles at Nokia, Alberto ran the company’s premium brand, its accessory and CDMA businesses and corporate strategy. Prior to Nokia, he was a partner at McKinsey and Company, where he worked with industry leaders in mobile devices, consumer technologies, software and Internet services. A Ph.D in computer science from Stanford University, Alberto currently holds vice chairman roles with the firms Bang & Olufsen and Opera Software.
Alberto’s first order of business will be to accelerate our tablet strategy and begin to execute products against our consumer/SMB target. The exact structure of his team will follow that strategy.

Alberto’s start date will be September 3. Please join me in welcoming Alberto to HP and in supporting him and his team in their important work.

Regards,

Todd

There’s not much to know about it beyond the name and that HP is keeping it stealthy for now, but AllThingsD just learned an interesting detail: HP has registered the Internet domain name gr.am.

See my screen shot of the domain registration information. We also have another small detail: The company paid $18,000 for the domain. According to this post on the message board for Namepros, the person who had it before, who goes by the name XMAN, makes the claim.

As domain names go it fits perfectly with the super-short type of domains that are popular precisely because they fit easily into Tweets.

And it’s probably not the last domain that HP will register for the purpose of doing business under the Gram name. It turns out you can make practically any word into a top-level domain name, so there will probably be a .gram when the time comes, along with probably a gram.hp, too.

Thanks to Jay Mahal for pointing me to the post on namepros.

But now there’s a glimmer of hope. A new wholly owned subsidiary has been created within HP called Gram, and it’s essentially the remaining bits of the old Palm.

Sources confirmed to AllThingsD that a leaked memo that appeared on webOS Nation is authentic.

Gram will be based in the same HP Sunnyvale digs that were the last known home base of the webOS Global Business Unit, and will become steadily more visible in the fall after HP puts the finishing touches on the open source version of webOS, which is expected in September.

It’s the latest step in the long sad saga of Palm and something like that entity’s ninth identity change since its founding as a start-up in 1992.

HP shut down the division producing hardware running Palm’s webOS operating system after sales of its TouchPad tablet failed to gain traction.

Then after Meg Whitman took over as CEO came the decision last December to turn the webOS software into an open source project.

HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm in 2010 under then-CEO Mark Hurd. In its later years, the public face of Palm was largely investor Roger McNamee, who had pumped in a bit under a half-billion dollars, and its CEO, Jon Rubinstein, who left HP in January.

They had taken over a company that had struggled with a long identity crisis. Palm was started by Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan in 1992 with the aim of creating handheld computing devices known as personal digital assistants. It was acquired by USRobotics in 1995.

Its first big product, the PalmPilot, debuted in 1996 and was a big hit. By 1997, USRobotics had been acquired by networking concern 3Com, making Palm a 3Com unit as well.

By 1998 Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan had split off and started another handheld outfit called Handspring, which in time created what is probably considered the first commercially successful smartphone, the Treo. Then, in 2000, 3Com spun off Palm, which by 2002 had split into two pieces, a hardware company called PalmOne and a software company called PalmSource.

In 2003, PalmOne acquired Handspring, bringing Hawkins, Dubinsky and Colligan back into the fold. Later, in 2005, PalmOne bought back the rights to the Palm name and trademark and simply became Palm again. And later that year, a Japanese software company called Access bought PalmSource. Then in 2007 came the investments by McNamee and the move to webOS.

In May, a group of former HP employees who had been working on Enyo, the HTML5-based development environment for the open source webOS, surfaced at Google. And earlier this month we learned that the new OS won’t support the old devices like the TouchPad tablet, and Pre or Veer phones.

Other than that there’s not much known about what Gram will be about. But in case you haven’t seen it, below is the leaked internal HP memo from Martin Risau, the HP vice president who has been running the remnants of the webOS business.

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all of your enthusiasm at yesterday’s new brand announcement: GRAM. We hope you will fall in love with the brand just as lots of us have already.

Please note that our Mission, Values and Plan of Action are the same. We are continuing to march forward on our timelines as usual—nothing new there.

We have much work to do, and, again, I solicit your help.

Yes, this is a new brand—it is just the beginning, and there is so much more to do. And yet unveiling the new brand is also a Call to Action:

· Try it on. We don’t expect you to love it overnight. We are no longer a consumer hardware brand, we are a different company with focus on software, User Experience, Cloud, engineering and partnering. This change in identity will take some getting used to and that’s normal.

· Stealth mode. We are an incubation company, and we are trusting you to keep this company name and product under the radar to give it time to take root and grow. You can wear the logo, help build the momentum of the new identity, talk to your families and friends about it. If someone from the outside asks, you can say, “GRAM is a new company. We are in stealth mode on our product offering.”

· Tap your network. Help us hire the best and the brightest, refer your friends and help us in our shared purpose as we continue our rise to the top. You can use the name to help us to recruit.

· Be the culture. Spread our Values: People Matter. Integrity and Trust. Deliberate Innovation. Act small, deliver big.

For those of you who could not attend yesterday’s unveiling – we really missed you. Please be on the lookout for the gift bags with our new cool branded items, which we be mailing out to you this and next week. All of you should get one, if not – let me know.

Best

Martin

The Open webOS project announced Tuesday evening that the fledgling OS won’t support any existing webOS hardware. “For open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated,” the Open webOS team said in a blog post. “Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel.”

In other words, the TouchPad tablet and the Pre3 and Veer handsets that HP released prior to its abandonment of webOS have been relegated to a legacy, unsupported version of the operating system. That’s certain to be a vast disappointment to consumers still interested in the platform, particularly since HP obviously does have access to proprietary drivers for its current webOS devices, and presumably could make them work with the standard Linux kernel with some tweaking.

“We are not at all thrilled with this decision,” Derek Kessler, editor of webOS Nation, wrote in a post bemoaning HP’s move. “Yet again, HP’s made the decision to neglect a small but loyal customer base in favour of pursuing bigger dreams. … This pattern of dumping on those who have stuck with the platform isn’t the makings for continuing loyalty. People love webOS, but they can only put up with being slighted for so long.”

Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company’s ebbing smartphone market share in the U.S., some are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform.

To wit, a new survey of developers by Baird Equity Research which finds dev sentiment toward BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry 7 in general at a new low. Baird surveyed 200 developers culled from a sample set of 4,300 and found that their collective outlook for BlackBerry 10 — charted on a 10-point scale from poor to excellent — had fallen to 3.8 from 4.6 in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, their outlook for the BlackBerry 7 declined to 2.8 from 3.8.

To put those numbers in perspective, consider this: The respondents’ outlook for Google’s Android is 8.7, and their outlook for Apple iOS is 9.3. At 2.8, devs’ outlook for BlackBerry 7 is only slightly better than their view of Hewlett-Packard’s not-quite-abandoned webOS, which still managed to rate a 2.1. And at 3.8, the outlook for BlackBerry 10 is hovering in the same range as Adobe’s Flash/Air platform.

Not exactly encouraging data points. And there are others that are more ominous still.

Says Baird, “31 percent of sampled BlackBerry 10 developers said that they have shifted some or all of their work away from BB10, compared with 34 percent in Q1. This is the second quarter in which we have seen fewer responders indicating that they will shift some of their work away from BlackBerry. We believe that many developers who planned to jump ship have already made the move, leaving a BlackBerry developer base that is smaller but increasingly loyal.”

While there’s some comfort to be found in the idea of a small but increasingly loyal developer base for BlackBerry 10, two consecutive quarters of 30 percent declines in its membership is a foreboding sign indeed for a platform that’s purportedly six months away from launch.

RIM’s potential for a turnaround is crumbling before our very eyes. And it’s getting harder and harder to watch.

Baird isn’t the only research outfit charting a decline in developer sentiment toward BlackBerry. According to IDC/Appcelerator’s latest Mobile Developer report, developer interest in BlackBerry declined from 20.7 percent in Q4 2011 to 15.5 percent in Q1 2012.

RIM, for its part, disputes the notion that its developer base is in decline. Speaking with AllThingsD, a spokesperson noted that the company’s app vendor base has grown 157 percent in the last year and that its BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour has seen over-capacity registration in almost every city. RIM also called attention to its recent announcement that more than three billion applications have been downloaded from BlackBerry App World, something we covered here last week.

A few other quick observations from Baird’s survey:

• 71 percent of developers surveyed said the announcement of Windows Phone 8 three weeks ago increased their interest in the platform, while 64 percent said they were enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new Surface tablet.
• 78 percent of iOS developers expect Apple to eventually launch an HDTV.
• 62 percent of developers surveyed said that most of their tablet-specific downloads come from Samsung; 23 percent said Amazon’s Kindle Fire was their top device for downloads.

UPDATE: Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP Developer Relations, responds at length to the Baird survey in a new post to the company’s Developer Blog entitled, Bleeding Developers? Far from it.

(Charts courtesy of Baird Equity Research)

For one thing: Once the legal trial with Oracle is concluded, one way or the other, she’d like to see HP and Oracle work together again, even though she conceded that the damage done to HP’s Business Critical Server business is hurting HP. She also said that HP will create a version of HP-UX, its version of Unix that will run on Intel’s mainstream server chip known as Xeon.

For another, she will not accept a job in a Mitt Romney White House in the event one might be offered. To do so would be to leave HP too soon at a moment when, more than anything, it needs consistent leadership.

Additionally, she doesn’t see a scenario where HP would spin off any piece of its operations, because in her mind they all fit together.

Below is a transcript of our conversation in its entirety. And while I realize it’s a long read, I thought it was important to let Whitman address every question I had for her completely. As you will see, we covered a lot of territory, because, well, there’s just so much territory to cover.

AllThingsD: Today’s message was long on what HP is about and less about specifics. There was the new marketing slogan “Make it Matter.” Hearkening back to your days running consumer branding for Procter and Gamble, can you walk me through what you think the new message means?

Whitman: When I came to HP, I was remarkably impressed with the assets that it has, and the people who are here. The crown jewel of the company is its people — it’s remarkable — and what they have lived through would have created far more disruption at other companies. As I began to understand HP, I said that it hasn’t been very good at telling its own story. Every CIO I talked to today — and I have a room full of 160 CIOs over there — when they walked through the showroom floor after today’s keynote, said they had no idea as to the breadth and depth of everything that HP does. And these are our best customers and they did not know. So I thought we needed to tell our story better. And when you start a marketing campaign, you always start with the authentic truth about the company because you have to be able to say something that no one else can say and that’s authentic about the company. So we got the 50 marketing executives in a room and started to think through what is unique and different about the company and we came very quickly to “Make it Matter.” Because in fact what we do makes it matter. It matters to the International Space Station or the Department of Works and Pensions or the U.S. Navy or Alianz or Deutsche Bank or Facebook. It matters what we do. Our people take great pride in that. And it’s also true that HP will do anything for its customers. If you get into trouble, we will darken the skies. That seemed to be the authentic thing that we could say.

And how will we be seeing this message in HP marketing?

All the business units will tuck under that messaging. So you will see it around PCs and printers, and in servers and storage and networking, in the storage business. Sometimes it will be digital, sometimes it will be print, sometimes in social media, sometimes on TV. Corporate wide, everyone will tuck under that message.

Does the HP brand need major rehabilitation and repair or more of a polishing?

I think we need to tell people what we do, so I think that’s more of a polishing, to tell people what we do. In my view we just need to tell people who we are, what we do and the value that we bring. And I think the other thing about HP is that this is not about the network or the database. It’s about our customer. This is something that I bring to HP, because I’m not an enterprise salesperson. At eBay I was a customer, and so, I think we can be completely differentiated by saying it’s not our agenda, but your agenda. And I think that’s very authentic to HP.

Let’s talk about the restructuring process that you announced during the last earnings call. You said on CNBC the next day that you thought the restructuring process was by that point about 10 to 15 percent complete. You announced that you’re going to cut about 27,000 jobs, so then I wonder what you think is the next big step in that process? What’s the next big hurdle that gets you to, say, 20 or 25 percent complete?

I would say this is a journey of decisions that need to be made and of strategies that need to be laid out. If you go back to when I took over, I made the decision about the PC business, I made the decision about WebOS. I recognized that we needed a strategic realignment to remove complexity from the business, so I combined PCs and printing under Todd Bradley, moved the Global Accounts sales force to Dave Donatelli, combined our sales organizations — we had two huge sales organizations under John Hinshaw — and then unified marketing and communications, all with the objective of making it easier to sell, easier to buy from us, and easier to get work done at HP. Then we all recognized that we needed to have the financial capacity to invest in the business. The way we were headed it was not going to happen, it was unsustainable. And we have a cost structure that we can no longer afford, so we took the very tough step of addressing how we can do things more effectively. And it’s never easy to reduce the workforce by 27,000 because it disrupts peoples lives. But in my view we couldn’t afford to wait to make the needed investments to set HP up for the next five years.

Is cutting 8 percent enough? Some thought the cut wasn’t large enough.

I think it’s about the right size. You never know for sure, but we’re taking the very best analysis that we can. I will say something about HP: When this company set its mind to something it brings to bear deep analytics, and so when you know what you’re doing you know why because they just get after it in a very deep analytical way. When we weighed the PC spinoff, we spent 30 days on it, and it was like, ‘alrighty, then.’ And this was the same in many ways. Once we knew, we decided to go forward thoughtfully. So we’re also tacking cost structures around supply chain and SKU reduction, and simplifying the overall organizations. So I think you’ll see us execute against this for awhile. We’ve got to deliver the savings, we’ve got to restructure some of our business processes and we’ve got to make it easier to do business with us. So now we’ve got a strategy, we’ve got the mechanism. Now we’ve got to execute.

Execution is a word I often hear described as a specialty of yours. What do you do to get people to execute?

I think you get results from what you measure, so what I measure is really important. At a company this big you have to have a cadence around that measurement and around the dialogue with your business units. It starts with my executive team. And I think I have the right people on the right jobs at the right time. And now it’s a matter of holding ourselves accountable. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be challenges and problems, but once you’ve identified the problems and a way to fix them you have to measure the progress. This was something I learned very early and was a hallmark of how I ran eBay and how I think I did well at P&G and Disney. But at the same time, you have to identify the pockets of creativity and where to invest, and that’s just as important as how you capture value. Once you save all that money the question is what do you do with it? We better make sure we put it in initiatives that have a high return on invested capital. You can’t do everything, and you can’t give everyone a little. You have to give a small number of people a lot.

So, about the investments you’re going to make. You talk often about a renewed focus on services. This question comes from a former HP employee. You said today in your keynote remarks that about 70 percent of HP’s sales come from infrastructure or what I would call hardware. And yet you talk often about services. Given those two choices, which do you think is more likely to save HP? Selling more boxes and things or selling more services?

Let me reframe it for you. It’s about optimizing our existing set of businesses to perform as best as they possibly can. They’re not. Revenues are down 7 percent and earnings are down 21 percent year on year so we have to get our core businesses, all of them, optimized and functioning really well. And then we have to position ourselves to take advantage of the bigger changes in the technology industry. I’m a big believer in focus. So as we thought about the pan-HP initiatives we might have picked, we went with cloud, security and information optimization. There were others we might have picked. But I thought about what we do well, what we already have, and what we can deploy against some of these bigger shifts in the industry.

So on focus — I’m wondering about the similarities and differences of what IBM went through. It spun off several things like PCs and printing and hard drives. And yes, the circumstances are very different and yet there’s some thematic similarities. When the PSG spinoff idea was floated, it was immediately compared to IBM. Do you envision getting rid of any peice of HP or do you plan to keep the whole thing? Are there some peices that are not core?

No. As I see it, everything stays. Each of the pieces fit together. They are very big and significant businesses in their own right. The PC business is at $40 billion and number one in the world. Not long on operating margins but because of the way its engineered, it has almost an infinite return on invested capital. You gotta love that business.

Let’s talk about two messy pieces of business, if you don’t mind. First is Autonomy. It’s the one thing that’s still lingering from all the announcements of last Aug. 18. The former CEO Mike Lynch is leaving HP. You’ve said that company delivered some disappointing results. What happened there and what does success at Autonomy look like in your mind?

In my view, this is the classic case of scaling a business from start-up to grownup. Going through that barrier of a billion dollars in sales is not easy because you can’t run the organization at $1.5 billion the same way you did at $500 million. You just can’t. And for many entrepreneurs, processes and discipline are dirty words, and you have to have those things, especially within the context of HP. I know exactly how this world [works]. My view was that we needed to make a change to someone who can take Autonomy to the next level. I have every confidence that Autonomy will be a very big and very profitable business. It’s taking advantage of a big shift in the industry toward big data and unstructured data. But we needed different leadership to age Autonomy, and by that I mean age it kind of like wine.

And so you added Autonomy to Bill Veghte’s responsibilities.

Yes, it’s going to be Bill for now and ultimately it may end up back in the software business, but I need full-scale attention on this by someone who has a lot of experience. We’ll figure out later if its permanent or not, but right now he’s the guy.

What does success look like at Autonomy?

I think it needs to grow rapidly. I think this is a very rapidly growing market. We need to continue to lead it. The good news is that I don’t see a competitve disruptor in the marketplace. So I think we have a good opportunity. But I also want to make sure that it gets integrated into the rest of HP in a good way. So we’ve started adding Autonomy into document workflow in our printers. And I want to think through all the different ways that Autonomy can be useful to the rest of HP, and we’re just starting to think about that.

The problem I think you said was that there was some difficulty closing deals at Autonomy that HP had teed up?

It’s classic. HP fed Autonomy a huge number of deals. But Autonomy didn’t have a system for accepting those deals, and closing them. And understand, when you’re working with big companies, there’s processes. When you sell with Enterprise services, there are steps you need to go through. When you sell with Dave Donatelli, there are some steps you need to go through. So that was the biggest challenge.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

That was nice of Larry. There’s no question that the BCS business has been hurt by this. You can see it in the results. It was growing by 10 percent before Oracle refused to port and now its declining by between 20 and 30 percent a year. This has been very tough for HP and very tough for Dave Donatelli’s business. In the end, if we win the lawsuit we will continue to protect our customers interests. The reason we went to the mat with Oracle on this was because we have a lot of customers on Oracle Itanium who do not want to switch, do not want to get off of HP Unix and on to something else. And they kinda like what they have and they’d like to stick with it. I think either way, Dave’s got in the works the next generation of Business Critical Servers on a more open platform. It’s called Odyssey, which is pretty cool. Ultimately we’ve got to build Unix on a Xeon chip, and so we will do that. I don’t have a lot of animus toward Oracle, and historically ours has been one of the great partnerships in IT history. I have a lot of respect for Oracle and when we’re through this court trial I would like to see us work together again.

Has anyone sought to call Ellison or Safra Catz and try to sort it out?

There has been a lot of back and forth, some of it before I came on board. It’s a very rapidly changing industry. I’d like to believe that once we get this behind us we can work together again.

You don’t think the damage to BCS is permanent?

It’s not been a good thing for the business. Let’s be very clear about that. This has not been good for HP. In the end it’s all about our customers, and it’s not been good for them.

Let’s talk again about SKU reduction, which is a favorite subject of mine. How might it become apparent to customers? What does it mean to you?

Reducing complexity, improving quality, reducing inventory, and better meeting customer needs. Somehow this company got into the habit of adding more and more options for more and more people, which on the surface is good, but when you examine the law of unintended consequences it’s not good for the company and it’s not good for the customers. The more platforms you develop to, the more SKUs you have, the more complicated it is, and there’s a higher chance of quality problems slipping in. And so everyone in the company is in agreement with this part of the strategy. I think you will see a smaller number of products tailored to specific market segments where we can get real supply chain leverage, real inventory leverage and real parts leverage. You forget about all the spare parts we have to carry on the inventory. I think this is a big part about how we deliver better quality at lower cost and deliver real benefits to customers.

You’ve been on the job eight months. No one really brings up the question of succession, you have deep management bench, but — knock on wood — if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, who’s in charge?

The board takes this sort of thing very seriously. We have a succession plan in place for all my senior execs, including me. I’m not going to give you any details about it, but that was a good try.

Mitt Romney has said that he thinks you should have been elected Governor of California, and so the fact that he’s talking about you makes me wonder, if he wins in November, if you might find yourself offered a job in a Romney White House.

He might call me, but categorically I would not accept. This is a decision I had to make before accepting the job to run HP. You can’t land at a company like HP, that has gone through what it has gone through, and think that you’re only going to stay 18 months.

Even if he offered you a spot on the as his vice-presidential running mate? Not that anyone is talking about that.

Categorically no. HP needs consistent leadership more than anything else. And my view I will stay as long as the board would like me to stay. It would be completely the wrong thing to do to leave HP right now. And by the way? I love it.

Approximately a half-dozen people — the core of what remained of the Enyo engineering team — have been hired by Google, and will start at the company next month. Enyo is the HTML5 app-creation framework that HP is in the process of turning into an open source project.

Google didn’t strike a deal with HP to acquire the technology, according to a source, but has been talking with individual workers over the past month. Rather, each of the workers making the move was hired individually by Google, with the team set to regroup at their new employer next month.

While it’s not 100 percent clear what the team will be working on, Google has been a big proponent of HTML5 apps, particularly as it looks to boost its Chrome OS effort, which depends on there being lots and lots of Web apps out there.

Also unclear is what HP will do with what remains of the webOS effort it had said it would help fund as an open source project. The webOS unit had significant layoffs earlier this year, and many of those who remained have since moved on, from former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein on down throughout the business and engineering ranks.

Google’s hiring of the Enyo team was first reported by technology news site The Verge.

Update: In a statement, HP reiterated its commitment to Enyo and webOS:

“We’re pleased with the traction Enyo has gained to date and plan to continue its development along with the open source community,” HP said. “The Open webOS project is on schedule and we remain committed to the roadmap announced in January.”

The latest to depart is David Gee, an eight-year HP veteran who had been head of marketing for the webOS business. Gee is leaving to become executive VP of marketing for Infoblox, an enterprise IT company that recently filed to go public.

Gee, who left HP last Thursday, is the latest to leave the webOS unit, following the company’s move to exit the mobile hardware business and open-source the software it acquired when it bought Palm.

Other departures include Jon Rubinstein, Richard Kerris and Brian Hernacki.

In addition, HP said last week that Sam Greenblatt has moved on to another role at the company after serving as CTO of the webOS unit.

As for Gee, he had led marketing efforts for HP’s enterprise services business before taking on the webOS assignment. Before HP, Gee worked at Yahoo, Sun and IBM.

I just received an email statement on the subject from an HP spokesman: “Sam Greenblatt is moving from webOS to a new role at HP and will continue to assist the team during the transition. The Open webOS project is on schedule and HP remains committed to the roadmap announced in January.”

Naturally, when a senior executive leaves a position for an undefined “new role,” it’s often seen as a signal that he or she is on the way out, and simply remains on the payroll to handle the details of a smooth transition. I’m told that this is not one of those cases, and we’ll see what Greenblatt’s role is soon enough.

This, of course, comes in the wake of HP’s downgrading of its webOS business into an open-source software project last last year, and the departure of several executives from within the group, chief among them Jon Rubinstein, the onetime CEO of Palm, which HP acquired in 2010 for $1.2 billion. Others have included Richard Kerris, former VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, who fled to Nokia; and Brian Hernacki, chief architect of webOS, who left in January.

The webOS unit is certainly a lot smaller than it was a year ago. In February, HP cut 275 people from the group, on top of the 500 or so it fired in September.

Greenblatt’s job change was first reported by the enthusiast site webOS Nation.

This would be the second round of cuts in the webOS group. The first came in September and affected about 500 people, bringing the total to about 775 since former CEO Léo Apotheker announced HP’s intention to end production of webOS hardware, after sales at Best Buy and other retailers failed to gain traction.

The webOS business has been a particularly difficult subject at HP. The company acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010 under former CEO Mark Hurd. In a November filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, HP said about half of a $3.3 billion in write-down came in the webOS unit.

HP just issued the following statement on the subject and it appears that some will get a chance to be redeployed elsewhere within the company. But make no mistake, most of those affected are being laid off:

“As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term.

HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company.”

The cuts come after two key events in the webOS group’s recent history. One was the departure of former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, which was first reported by AllThingsD on Jan. 27.

Before that came the decision, announced in December by HP CEO Meg Whitman, to take the webOS software that Palm had developed and turn it into an open source project.

Hernacki had joined Palm in 2009 as its chief security architect, before it was acquired by HP in a $1.2 billion deal the following year. Previously, he’d spent nearly seven years at Symantec, where he was a researcher and architect.

His departure follows not only that of Rubinstein, but of Richard Kerris, the former head of webOS developer relations, who decamped for Nokia in October.

Coming as these moves do after HP’s decision to turn webOS into an open source project, one suspects they aren’t the last.

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

Why leave Hewlett-Packard now?

A few months before we shipped the TouchPad, I told Todd Bradley (executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group) that once we shipped I wanted to move on. And he asked me to stay for a while in an advisory role and to help out with the transition to webOS and brainstorming about the directions of PSG, so I told him I’d stick around. And I did. And now there’s a path for webOS and PSG has its path and it’s time for me to move on. This has been in the works for quite some time.

What are your thoughts on webOS as it exists today? Do you think HP made the right call open sourcing it?

Do I think HP made the right call open sourcing it? Versus what? (laughs) You know, we always developed Enyo so it could be open sourced because we saw it as a very powerful cross-development platform. The future is clearly Web-based apps. And some people don’t get that, and I certainly understand, but that is the reality. And, frankly, we were way ahead of our time. WebOS is a great piece of work and really it’s just beginning.

Okay, assuming that’s the case, what does the future look like for webOS?

Well, if HP invests in it the way it says it’s going to and they can build a community around it — and that’s not just people developing for the platform, but other companies using it — it will do well.

Can anyone break through the Apple/Google lock on the smartphone market?

The smartphone market’s a tough one, because it’s controlled by the carriers in a lot of ways. So it really depends on what the carriers do. The route to market isn’t controlled by consumers, it’s controlled by carriers.

What went wrong with TouchPad? Clearly, it wasn’t the resounding success for which you’d hoped.

Well, it wasn’t exactly given much time to find out. But I really don’t want to rehash all that. There’s really no point.

Do you regret selling to HP?

This wasn’t something where I had an opinion. The process was very carefully crafted, as all aquisition processes are, and HP is the one that won the process. I don’t get an opinion on the subject; I never did.

What are your plans for the next year?

I spent the past few years working really hard on webOS and working really hard on turning Palm around and getting it into good enough shape where someone would want to buy it, so I’m going to take a break.

So are you retiring?

No. I’m going to spend some time with my family and think about what to do next. Who knows what I’ll do. Anything’s possible.

FURTHER READING:

• Former Palm Head Jon Rubinstein Leaves Hewlett-Packard
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?
• HP and webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Another Day, Another Shake-Up at Hewlett-Packard
• Exclusive: Palm Boss Talks Past, Future of WebOS
• Palm Boss Jon Rubinstein: We Still Have a Chance to be a Major Player
• Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market
• Palm CEO Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein Talks About the HP Deal
• Who Will Buy Palm? If Not HTC, How About HP?
• Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein: I’ve Never Used an iPhone
• Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein: The Full D7 Session
• Guess That’s What You Call a “Pre” Forma Loss, Eh?
• Palm’s New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein

Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12- to 24-month commitment to stay with HP after the acquisition. “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.

In a brief comment to AllThingsD, Rubinstein said, “I am going to take a well deserved break after four and a half years of developing webOS.”

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smartphone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time competed seriously against Research In Motion’s Blackberry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smartphone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

After HP decided to exit the WebOS hardware business, Rubinstein was assigned to a vaguely described “product innovation role” within HP’s Personal Systems Group during a management shakeup last July. It was an unusual move and one made with little explanation at the time. But sources say it was a preface to Rubinstein’s departure, one intended to lessen its PR impact when he finally left. “That ‘innovation’ gig he was given in July was his first step toward the exit,” said one source, a former Palm exec with close ties to Rubinstein.

Here’s the video of Rubinstein’s onstage interview at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco in December 2010.

FURTHER READING:

• Rubinstein Interview: With webOS Transition Under Way, It Was Time to Leave HP
• With HP’s Raising of the World’s Biggest White Flag, Will Jon Rubinstein and Todd Bradley Surrender Too?
• HP and webOS: But They Seemed So Happy Together!
• Another Day, Another Shake-Up at Hewlett-Packard
• Exclusive: Palm Boss Talks Past, Future of WebOS
• Palm Boss Jon Rubinstein: We Still Have a Chance to be a Major Player
• Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market
• Palm CEO Jon “Ruby” Rubinstein Talks About the HP Deal
• Who Will Buy Palm? If Not HTC, How About HP?
• Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein: I’ve Never Used an iPhone
• Elevation Partners Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein: The Full D7 Session
• Guess That’s What You Call a “Pre” Forma Loss, Eh?
• Palm’s New Pilot: Jon Rubinstein

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120127/former-palm-head-jon-rubinstein-leaves-hewlett-packard/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120125/hp-starts-process-of-making-webos-open-source-full-release-due-in-september/ http://allthingsd.com/20120125/hp-starts-process-of-making-webos-open-source-full-release-due-in-september/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:00:53 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=167513 Hewlett-Packard said on Wednesday it is heading down its promised path of making webOS available to the open source community.

To start with, HP has released an updated, open source version of its Enyo developer tools and plans to deliver Open webOS by September. The company published a roadmap (see below) detailing its plans to release different components of the software, including key apps and its Linux kernel, over the coming months.

“This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform’s development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of Web applications,” newly minted Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a statement.

Of course, the big question now is how much interest there is outside HP in using the operating system.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120125/hp-starts-process-of-making-webos-open-source-full-release-due-in-september/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120112/hps-former-cto-ultrabooks-are-nothing-new-webos-still-has-life-yet/ http://allthingsd.com/20120112/hps-former-cto-ultrabooks-are-nothing-new-webos-still-has-life-yet/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:02:37 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=163254 Phil McKinney, the former chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard’s PC unit, is taking a hard stance on Ultrabooks.

“There’s nothing new,” he told AllThingsD in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “And many look the same. If you covered up the label on them, you can’t tell them apart.”

Ultrabooks, in case you’ve missed the ultra-noisy hype this week, are Intel-driven lightweight laptops, with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, and Acer getting into the game, to name a handful. In addition to portability, some computer makers are punching up the laptops with features like carbon fiber and Gorilla Glass coatings, flexible bodies, NFC chips and battery boosters.

“At the end of the day, they have Intel chips; they’re running Microsoft Windows operating systems,” McKinney said. He pointed to the HP Voodoo Envy 133, which hit the market in 2008, had a 13.3-inch display and weighed only 3.4 pounds (albeit at a $2,000-plus price point).

McKinney was attending CES as a member of the press — he’s writing a column for Forbes. He was also promoting his upcoming book, “Beyond the Obvious.”

McKinney exited HP last fall, following a tumultuous couple of months that included a CEO swap, the abandonment of webOS hardware, and reports that HP might spin off its PC unit. During McKinney’s nine years at the PC maker, he guided much of the company’s innovation and R&D. More recently, that included the development of Ultrabooks, he said.

McKinney also offered his thoughts on webOS, which HP acquired with Palm back in 2010, and which recently became an open source project. “I was disappointed by the decision to kill the hardware. I still think, though, there’s a lot of life left in webOS,” he said.

He hears from developers and tinkerers, he said, who are still excited to work with webOS, but are waiting for the code, the access and the governance model from HP in order to really begin developing on the platform.

“Ultimately, I think webOS could become the alternative OS that you can download on devices that come with another operating system built in,” McKinney said. “Apps from developers are continuing to grow for webOS. The interest is still there.”

(Photo courtesy of the DEMO Conference/Flickr)

MORE CES NEWS:

• Complete coverage
• HP’s Former CTO: Ultrabooks Are Nothing New, webOS Still Has Life Yet
• Walt Shows Off CES Gadgets for Fox Business News (Video)
• What Kind of Web Video Plans Does Sony Have? (Video)
• Fujitsu Seeking Way Into Crowded U.S. Smartphone Market
• Why Rhapsody Is (Probably) Bigger Than Spotify — In the U.S.
• Microsoft Beefing Up CeBit Presence Even as It Pulls Back on CES
• Inside the CES Lost & Found
• FCC Chairman Has New Tablet, but Same Script: More Spectrum!
• Verizon Wireless: We Want to Connect Five Devices for Every Subscriber
• Ultrabooks From HP and Lenovo That Are (Kinda, Sorta) Different
• Walt and Katie Take a Tour of CES (Video)
• Schmidt-Storm Alert: The Google Chairman Didn’t Like Your Question
• T-Mobile Expands Bobsled Messaging Service
• Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video)
• Motorola CEO: We’re Going to Release Fewer Phones This Year
• Kinect Helps Keep Aging Xbox at the Top of Its Game
• More From T-Mobile CEO: On Pricing, LTE and That Ever-Elusive iPhone
• Exclusive: New Boss Acknowledges Windows Phone Still Has “Awareness Problem”
• And You Thought Jawbone UP Was Going to Miss the CES Party!
• Interview: T-Mobile CEO Says No Second AT&T Deal Out There
• Grover Is at CES and I Am Missing It
• BlueStacks Bringing Android Apps to Windows 8
• Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon
• Nvidia’s Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways
• Dynamic Dual Coverage: Ballmer’s Last Act in Vegas and the BCS Championship in 3-D
• Microsoft Phoning In Its Last CES Keynote
• Myspace — Yes, Myspace — Says It’s Going to Sell You Web TV
• Samsung Unveils “Super” 55-Inch OLED TV
• Nokia Unveils That LTE Windows Phone It’s Been Dying to Share
• Steve Ballmer Gives Ralph De La Vega a Very … Vigorous Greeting (Video)
• Interview: AT&T’s De La Vega on LTE, Tablets and Life After T-Mobile
• AT&T’s De La Vega: Shared Data Plans Still in the Works
• LG: 55-Inch Glasses-Free 3-D Screen Is on the Way
• LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum
• Live: AT&T’s Vegas Act Stars LTE and, Making Her Return to the Stage, Nokia
• CES Notebook: The Constant Search for Power and Vegas’ Worst-kept Secret
• Belkin Bringing Mobile TV to Lots of Cellphones, Will Anyone Tune In?
• Acer Introduces “World’s Thinnest” Ultrabook and a “Me-Too” Cloud Service
• There Better Be Some Cool Stuff at CES, Because CE Holiday Sales Data Bytes!
• CES 2012: Snooki and Bieber Are In, Gaga Is Out!
• Coming to a Smartphone Near You: Gorilla Glass 2
• RIM Hopes Next PlayBook OS Will Impress at CES
• Ultrabooks, the Ultra-Fancy New Name for Laptops
• At CES, Expect More Gadgets Telling You to Get Off the Couch
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Microsoft Pulling Out of CES After Upcoming Show
• Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month
• Dell Will Drop the Flashy Vegas Act for CES This Year
• Ultrabook Conga Line Preps for CES 2012

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120112/hps-former-cto-ultrabooks-are-nothing-new-webos-still-has-life-yet/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20120104/holidays-over-mobile-industry-gears-up-for-a-busy-2012/ http://allthingsd.com/20120104/holidays-over-mobile-industry-gears-up-for-a-busy-2012/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:05:27 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=159214 If 2011 was the year where a rising tide lifted all the smartphone boats, 2012 could be a year of choppy waters.

It’s likely a make-or-break year for troubled RIM, and a time when a growing armada of Android-based ships must prove they can sail on their own. Meanwhile, after several years in dry dock, Facebook must finally launch a mobile vessel or risk being left on shore permanently.

Those were some of the predictions offered up in wireless analyst Chetan Sharma’s annual outlook survey.

Other developments seen as likely are the entry of Amazon into the mobile market (beyond its Kindle line), as well as the question of whether a tight partnership with Microsoft will help Nokia to right its listing ship.

Of course, even smooth sailing wasn’t enough to keep all boats afloat last year. HP managed to capsize its webOS in calm water, while RIM found itself further and further adrift and Windows Mobile struggled to get beyond the marina.

On the tablet front, Google is seen steaming ahead despite a slow start, with as many respondents seeing Android as the leading tablet maker as the current leader, Apple.

And with that, it is time to torpedo this nautical metaphor.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120104/holidays-over-mobile-industry-gears-up-for-a-busy-2012/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111226/has-the-hp-touchpad-lost-its-resale-luster/ http://allthingsd.com/20111226/has-the-hp-touchpad-lost-its-resale-luster/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:44:28 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=156919 After a resale run that had consumers clamoring for the discontinued tablet, has Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad finally lost its appeal?

If eBay and Amazon listings are any indication, that appears to be the case.

Amazon.com currently lists 59 new 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi TouchPads, ranging in price from $263.69 to $272.99. There are also 18 used TouchPads (and a couple of refurbished ones) being sold via the site.

EBay shows more than a hundred 32GB TouchPads for sale, some available through auction and others through immediate purchasing, ranging from $225 to $350 (yes, really).

It’s a far cry from the fire sale on the device earlier this month, through HP’s own eBay channel. It was reported that the computer maker went through its remaining inventory in minutes at resale.

Of course, TouchPads were then going for a mere $99 — much less than the original asking price of $399 (for 16GB) and $499 (32GB).

The TouchPad first hit stores on July 1. But it failed to catch on with consumers, and HP announced six weeks later that it would be exiting the hardware business of its webOS software system. That meant the death of the TouchPad, which had seen disappointing sales, to put it kindly.

Suddenly, the discounted device became a hot item, with some vendors reselling fetching nearly $300 for the tablet on eBay.

In October, the tablet was offered as a part of a bundle with any HP- or Compaq-branded PC, through Best Buy, which had sold less than 10 percent of the 270,000 TouchPads it had in stock.

It’s hard to say whether the TouchPad would still be flying off virtual shelves now, post-holiday, if it was listed at a lower price point. HP recently decided to open up webOS to the outside development community, but there are still questions about the future of the platform. With no new apps coming for the killed tablet, and with users facing the possibility of a lack of technical support — not to mention the entrance of the $199 Kindle Fire into the tablet market — it’s hard to imagine that many people will want to pay exorbitant prices for HP’s tablet.

But for now it’s safe to say that consumers don’t seem to want to touch the TouchPad anymore.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111226/has-the-hp-touchpad-lost-its-resale-luster/feed/ 20 http://allthingsd.com/20111221/year-of-the-talking-phone-and-a-cloud-that-got-hot/ http://allthingsd.com/20111221/year-of-the-talking-phone-and-a-cloud-that-got-hot/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:04:22 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=156106 While other industries struggled, consumer technology seemed to march ahead as always in 2011, with important new products and services continuing to roll out. Sure, some tech companies, like BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, suffered reverses. And some products, like Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad, flopped. But many shone.

So here is a look at a few of the biggest tech products of the past year, with some analysis of what they signified and what issues they raise for 2012. As with all my columns, this one is focused only on products and services provided to consumers. Also, as usual, this column isn’t meant to offer investment advice or to evaluate the management skills or financial condition of companies.

The iDevices

Siri, right, the voice-controlled artificial-intelligence system, made the iPhone 4S stand out even though it looked like its predecessor.

Even in a year when its iconic leader, Steve Jobs, resigned as CEO and then passed away, Apple kept going from success to success. In March, it introduced the iPad 2, a thinner, lighter, faster version of its groundbreaking tablet and sold tens of millions of them. In October, it brought out the iPhone 4S, which proved popular even though it looked identical to the prior model. One reason: The phone introduced a voice-controlled artificial-intelligence system called Siri that answers questions and performs tasks without requiring typing or searching. Siri, while still rudimentary, could herald a revolution in practical artificial intelligence for consumers.

The lesson here is that Apple is driving the industry toward simpler, more reliable digital experiences tied into ecosystems of content and cloud services. It is expected to bring out radically new iPhones and iPads in 2012. But can it fend off challenges from popular, rapidly improving rivals using Google’s Android operating system? And, in the absence of Mr. Jobs, can it keep churning out game-changing hits?

With its ultralow price and Amazon connection, the Kindle Fire may be the first tablet to gain significant traction against the iPad.

The Kindle Fire

Despite some initial software flaws and its chunky, plain hardware, the diminutive Fire appeared to be the first color tablet to gain significant traction against the iPad. The biggest reasons are its ultralow $199 price and its tie-in to Amazon’s huge content library. But the Fire may have started a trend that could be a problem for Google: It demotes the Android operating system to an under-the-covers piece of plumbing, ignoring Google’s user interface and apps marketplace.

In 2012, Amazon is expected to bring out a larger, possibly sleeker Fire, and, if it continues to prove popular, it could attract larger numbers of apps designed for the Fire and sold only through Amazon. But despite its success with simple e-readers, Amazon has little experience as a maker of general-purpose computing devices, and it will have to be nimble and creative to keep up with Apple and more-traditional Android rivals.

LTE

Though several cellular technologies claim the moniker “4G” to indicate fast data speeds and greater capacity, only one, LTE (Long Term Evolution), delivers true broadband speeds consistently. This past year, it finally spread significantly in the U.S., both in terms of geography and in the number of devices supporting it. The LTE leader by far is Verizon Wireless and it has the potential to make the wireless Web, and wireless streaming of video, the equal of their wired counterparts. AT&T is racing to catch up and Sprint, which uses a different 4G system, says it will join the LTE parade.

But at this stage, LTE still consumes too much battery power. And LTE networks, if they become the norm, could get overwhelmed. To fend off this prospect, the biggest carriers in 2011 began charging more for greater data usage, a move that could curb the spread of innovative services that rely on large data downloads, such as video streaming and sharing of music and high-resolution photos.

More companies took advantage of cloud computing, with Google introducing the Chromebook, which relies almost entirely on the cloud.

The Cloud

Many players began offering consumers the opportunity to both store their data on, and run apps from, remote servers on the Internet, a system called cloud computing. Google even introduced a new kind of laptop, the Chromebook, that has almost no internal storage and relies almost entirely on the cloud. An example of a cloud service: music “lockers” that store all your songs on multiple devices. Cloud services are sure to expand in 2012, but questions remain on their reliability, security and privacy. And while most now cost little or nothing, these offerings could become another monthly fee burden for consumers.

Android became easier to use with the release of the Ice Cream Sandwich version, used in the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The Android Army

In 2011, Android overtook Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating system, called iOS, in users. Though no single Android device is as popular as the iPhone or iPad, Android is now the collective leader, with hundreds of devices using it. Samsung, in particular, had success with its Android-based Galaxy devices. And a new version, called Ice Cream Sandwich, continued Android’s steady improvement by making it easier to use. However, Google may be losing control of Android, as hardware makers and cellular carriers redefine it to suit their own needs, and fail to offer consumers updates in a timely fashion. Except for the Kindle Fire, the operating system hasn’t caught on in tablets.

Windows

Microsoft has been way behind in the new areas of super-smartphones and tablets. In 2011, the software giant began to try to reverse that situation. It introduced the first competitive version of its sleek, sophisticated Windows Phone software, called Mango, though so far without much uptake by consumers. And it previewed a bold new version of main Windows, called Windows 8, with a multitouch interface that, unlike Apple’s approach, is a single operating system meant for both PCs and tablets. It will start shipping in 2012.

Following in the Apple MacBook Air’s footsteps, a crop of thin and speedy ultrabooks, such as the Toshiba Portege Z835, pictured, became the new standard for laptops, with Windows PC makers coming up with their own versions of the machines.

Still, Windows Phone must somehow attract many more users. And Windows 8 is a gamble, because it includes two interfaces: the new tabletlike face and the old, familiar Windows look, which could confuse consumers.

Ultrabooks

In 2011, Apple’s MacBook Air, previously a niche product, became the new standard for laptops—thin, light, speedy, with long battery life and solid-state memory for storage instead of a hard disk. Now, Windows PC makers are following suit with similar machines called Ultrabooks.

Ultrabooks may recharge the Windows laptop scene in 2012. However, they will have to become less costly—they now hover at around $1,000—and their solid-state drives don’t offer the capacity of hard disks at an affordable price.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U300

Television

The reinvention of television picked up steam in 2011, albeit in a small way. Despite some miscues, Netflix streaming of TV shows to many devices grew in popularity. Set-top boxes that bring Internet video to TVs, like the Roku box and Apple TV, got better and more popular, though Google’s competing effort was a dud. Microsoft’s Xbox is set to compete strongly, using its Kinect add-on to find and play media apps with gestures and voice commands.

The big test may come in 2012, when Apple is believed to plan to ship a whole new type of Internet-connected TV, which the company hasn’t confirmed. A big obstacle: Cable and media companies will have a huge say in this potential revolution, and the current system serves them well.

So, 2011 was an exciting year in consumer technology. I can’t wait for 2012.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

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