So, Aug 18th HP announces their lack of ability to take on a serious market-breaching effort by dropping production and pretty much all support for the HP Touchpad and all webOS devices after a six-week launch period. But wait, there's more! On Aug 20th they begin selling direct against their retailers at cut-rate prices - $99 for the 16GB tablets, and $149 for the 32GB tablets. They also are rumored to be offering rebates to those who paid full-pop for the Touchpad in the record-breaking six weeks prior to the announced discontinuation. I have found no corroborating press releases on the HP website, and have received no notification from HP. Worst case, since it's been less than 60 days I might be disputing the charge for the purchase if I can't get any satisfaction through reasonable channels. Maybe Costco can apply more pressure than I can as they have a whole display full of HP hardware at the local store...?
You can bet your socks that I'm not touching anything that was acquired by HP in the future, and most likely will be boycotting them in general as there are way better, more fiscally stable, and more advanced options out there for most every other aspect of computing than HP. Additionally, although I'm only a wee bitty retail customer, I do work for enterprise customers and am asked all the time for hardware recommendations. Guess who ain't going to be making my short list.
And what about those poor souls that just locked in a nasty-ass AT&T 2-year contract on the Veer in the US and the Pre3 in Europe? Can you say potential class-action lawsuit?
The real kicker is, if you read the posts over the weekend from people that bit on the $99 tablets, they all love the webOS interface and features, and in most cases prefer it to the much-vaunted iPad and Android interface. Go figure. Maybe you guys should have stepped up when it was released and given the platform a chance...? I'm hanging on to mine since I already have the SDK and can build anything I want for it, and the webOS Internals guys are hacking away at the platform. There is at least the option of community support, whereas the iOS platforms have naught. Oh, and I don't have to worry about voiding a warranty now!
Way to go, Apotheker et al! May your EPS and market cap drop, and your bonuses shrivel to nothing.
UPDATE
OK, so HP wound up making nice by refunding the price difference to all early adopters, and also it appears is honoring my $50 rebate for being a Palm Pre owner. They are also liquidating accessories instead of trying to gouge people who bought into the firesale. All in all - not a great situation, but they are at least trying to do right by those of us who bought into webOS. It's a shame they also convinced shareholders to buy into it and are now possibly facing some serious class-action lawsuit badness.
Hopefully someone will either step up and take on webOS as the only real non-Microsoft contender against Android, or HP will release webOS as open source and try to foster an already burgeoning community of developers and owners.
