[schtinky]

I wonder to what degree public perception of a company's brand (think HP, Microsoft, Ebay vs Google, Apple) helps or hinders their ability to get a product off the ground. It reminds me of the old Shakespearean "What's in a name?" question.

One would like to believe that the product, if good enough, will always win out, but that's probably not the case, especially if it relies on an ecosystem to develop around it to be fully viable.

If brand quality matters severely, then an interesting question is whether or not startups have an advantage against large corps with bad reputations. Is it better to be StartuppyMcstartup nobody's ever heard of or Microsoft?

[michael_h]

I think it can hinder it quite a bit, especially for something like this. The UX design for blending physical and virtual environments has to be nearly perfect. HP's track record with consumer facing software does not instill me with confidence that they can pull this off. I hope to be surprised.

[vxNsr]

I think this will have a huge impact on the success of the product. I have an HP laptop right now and all the HP made software is terrible, it doesn't run well, crashes constantly and doesn't use the UX rules of any Microsoft OS (in fact parts would feel more at home on OSX than Windows) If they can get their stuff together and have a team that actually puts out usable software, that would go a long way towards making this a viable product.

[Joeri]

If apple had released this product, it would sell like crazy. I think the fact that HP made it will prevent it from getting traction, but it would be nice to be proven wrong.

[mcphage]

Maybe, but I think it's more likely that Apple would just never release a product like this.

[Joeri]

That's true. This product is weird, and apple doesn't do weird.

[schtinky]

Or is it that Apple markets products so well that by the time whateveritis hits the shelves, it doesn't seem "weird" anymore?

[mcphage]

I feel like Apple does a good job of describing WHY you'd buy a product of theirs. This doesn't do that.

[Devid2014]

Yes Apple just do the same thing over and over again. For me Apple now is just zero innovation.

Any way Sprout looks very interesting and promising.

[lurcio]

I understand your sentiment, but can't quite agree.

Apple are innovating. I like the way all my iDevices are becoming 'as one'. Not quite to Mark Weiners vision yet - but its compelling and builds on Apples core value proposition: non-fragmentation.

Sprout is a 'gilding the lily' kind of innovation. Its impressive (in my humble opinion) and could open up a new type of product if there is sufficient demand for HP to continue. But it feels more like a marketing led shot in the dark, than HP building on their strengths in the touchscreen PC space.

-- Anecdotal cul-de-sac: My assumptions about innovation were overturned on a college summer project (EE). Having been told to 'innovate', I produced a thing + bells + whistles. My comparatively low marks & tutors comments showed me (rightly) that innovation should have focused more on 'thing'. The rest was not so important.

I now think of it as an Overton window in the product lifecycle (Im sure theres a term for this, but I don't know it). 'Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should.'

[mcphage]

> Any way Sprout looks very interesting and promising.

Interesting, I agree completely. Promising? I dunno about that. Given the price, I'd be afraid to buy it, given the high likelihood that HP forgets it exists in 6 months. Unique hardware like this requires serious development effort to utilize it properly, and if this doesn't get traction—and at almost $2,000, I think it's unlikely to get any traction—then nobody's going to bother writing that software. It's a chicken-and-egg problem; without sales, there won't be much custom software, and without that custom software, there's no reason for most to buy it.

[crucialfelix]

Even if this fails commercially (as most out of the blue innovations do) its good for HP and people will reference it for years.

So in the long run its a good move for them.

[VLM]

I admit the second thing I thought of after finally figuring out what this thing does, was how are they going to sell this for $50 and what will be the equivalent of the required every three months $75 ink cartridge?

The first thing I thought of was whenever you see something like this, its to goose the stock price. Generic investor types will fall for anything, as generations of AT&T and IBM advertisements have shown. I checked finance.google.com and this must be either very new news or older than a week news.