Almost two and a half years ago, Steve Jobs, the late Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO, made a comment where he compared traditional computers to trucks. In the words of the iconic CEO,
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular. PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.
Now, in 2013, it seems the words of Mr. Jobs are coming true. The ever-dynamic nature of the consumer electronic space has created as well as destroyed competition. We have already observed that the PC market is gradually declining, whereas the smartphone and the tablet markets are gaining more and more momentum. What Apple realized back in 2010, Hewlett-Packard Company(NYSE:HPQ) finally truly realized now, after reporting a record loss of $12.7 billion in 2012.
CEO Meg Whitman recently confirmed that the company is looking at entering the smartphone and tablet space, and is also working on storage, networking, and servers. Meg’s statement “I mean company’s like us come back on the basis of great products, great services, that solve really tough problems” clearly tells us that the CEO is pretty optimistic about what is being cooked at HP’s kitchen. She hopes these new fantastic devices will finally make things better for the troubled computer maker.
Now, why did I use “finally” and “truly?” That’s because this won’t be the first time that HP has ventured into this segment of the consumer electronics space. Around two years ago, HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion and within months since the acquisition, the company had launched a smartphone under the Palm banner. However, things didn’t work out and soon HP decided to close the door on it. The company decided to focus only on what it was best at – making computers, and the rest is known to all of us. HP continues reporting huge losses, its PC shipments went on plunging quarter after quarter, and the company also saw a change in management.
However, under the leadership of Meg Whitman, things have a chance to improve. The CEO is highly focused on getting new innovations out in the market and is banking on them heavily. Earlier, in September, as pointed out by All Things D, Meg stated
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.
