[mgkimsal]

$99 is obviously just 'get rid of them' pricing, but there's a big gap between $499 and $99.

$249 or $299 pricing may have lost HP a bit per sale, but during that time, they could have really established a bigger presence without using much advertising budget.

Is it better to have lose $30 per device and sell a million - which then gives you a million + devices in the marketplace with a unified hardware/software platform - or try to sell at $499, then spend $x on nebulous marketing/advertising which may or may not make a dent?

HP would have sold far more at $299 than $499. They'd have still had a business - even if they wanted to sell it to get out of hardware. It would have been worth far more than a massively damaged brand due to a total abandonment of a market that you've been public touting for more than a year.

[MatthewPhillips]

The parts alone cost $328[1] I think it's safe to say that your pricing plan would have them losing $100+ per device. So selling a million Touchpads (which wouldn't even be that great) has them losing at least 100 million. And who knows if they would have even sold that many at $299. There are Android tablets priced at what you're suggesting, but I doubt their components cost as much, and I don't think their sales are anything massive.

[1]http://www.techfever.net/2011/07/hp-touchpad-parts-estimated...

[mgkimsal]

Most of the Android ones I've seen at that price are pretty abysmal compared to webOS. Personal view, obviously, but webOS in general is a nicer experience.

So... they paid $1.2billion for a company, but another $100 million (I suspect the delta would have been less) is too much to put in to an investment?

If you actually had a million of those devices sold even within 6 months, that'd be a big momentum for a third party player. Devs would have paid money to be part of their dev program - jumping on a unified platform bandwagon for $99/year (same as Apple) would have led to some revenue as well to offset some of those "losses".

[MatthewPhillips]

In their earnings call they said they lost $332 million on WebOS in the last quarter alone. Again, people are drastically underestimating the costs of developing, manufacturing, and advertising consumer electronics at this scale. When you have a product that is pretty much a total loss, the number of companies that can swallow that type of loss and continue on can be counted on one hand and HP isn't one of them.

[glhaynes]

Even if they sold 1 million of them at a loss, that'd still put them about 30 million units behind Apple - so still a distant loser, especially with Android being in the game too. Besides, then all they'd have bought is a chance at selling to roughly that same small group again next year, again at a loss because most of the folks that only bought this year because it was super-cheap aren't going to be willing to buy at $500 next year.

The key to a sustainable platform is to make a profit on each device or be able to make it up with highly profitable post-device sales (video games for consoles or blades for razors).

[mgkimsal]

"Android" is not a standard hardware platform - it's pretty much whatever any manufacturer wants to ship. The TouchPad had the potential to be much more akin to the iPad/iOS line because one company was controlling the hardware experience.

[glhaynes]

I agree it had that potential in theory, but in practice it had nearly none of the market advantages of the iPad. It didn't have the Apple (or iPod / iPhone) brand name to catapult off of nor a large base of users that already own similar devices; it didn't have many apps nor much developer support; and, importantly, it didn't have the iTunes ecosystem of easily-obtained media. It'd be awfully tough to out-Apple Apple right now. Without some really strong differentiator, I don't know why anybody - least of all those at HP - would have thought they had a chance.