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Telecom & Wireless

HP To Launch New Handsets Into Jaws Of Competive Market

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

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Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) made a mistake when it bought Palm. It is about to make a much more costly mistake in launching  a series of smartphones that run the rickety Palm webOS, scheduled for early next year. The mobile operating system was a failure for Palm. There is no reason to believe that HP can change that.

Palm ran into two problems when it launched its Pre generation of handsets. The first is that Palm had neither the distribution network nor the marketing budget to support its launch.

The second problem was that Palm was forced to enter a market dominated by Symbian, Apple OS, and Blackberry OS smartphones. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) had also recently released its Android mobile operating system. That OS has now passed Apple and Blackberry OS in US market share, according to recent research, and its dominance continues to grow.

There is no room for a fourth mobile operating system in a field that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is also desperate to enter. Redmond has nearly unlimited resources to push Windows 7 Mobile. It at least has an established presence with handset companies and can give them developer and market support.

HP has made several strategic decisions recently, some of them personnel-based, which has hurt the tech company’s reputation. It is about to compound that by choosing an operating system which has already been rejected by the retail and enterprise markets.

It may have been humiliating for the company that bought Palm to use Android in its new product, but at least that decision would have had a good chance of success.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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