Last week HP made it's big announcement rolling out the revamped Palm. They skipped CES and pre-empted MWC to try and gain their own time for this news, which lasted about one day until Nokia announced its Microsoft partnership.
The Palm rollout was a surprise to me in its lack of vision and scope.
For B2B I can see some real opportunity for HP to move in the tablet uptake in SMB and SOHO segments.
For consumer mobile devices I was very surprised at the small scope of this rollout. Devices only, no ecosystem. In fact here are the list of "no"s:
No channel strategy or key partners at the announce. During my time at Amazon we always said if the product/business launch didn’t include one known brand customer testimonial, a specific in-market date, and at least one defined success metric then it wasn’t a fully baked idea. The entire idea of HP buying Palm was to bring the heft of HP to a moribund brand. They couldn't find one single customer to sing the praises of the new devices and show thousands of them in their employee's hands?
No app or content approach outlined to make up the huge deficit relative to android and iOS. Building more device types (printers, etc) won’t help it will hurt—more form factors and drivers and complexity to develop for.
Most damning of all: No core brand promise or user benefit. Nothing they have released says why this OS is materially better than existing alternatives. There is no core use case or consumer they are staking as theirs.
This will all just be the Pre all over again, at slightly bigger scale.
