HP blames smartphones and tablets for job cuts

Rating: Doing a Nokia and ignoring Android at its peril

It appears that Hewlett-Packard (H-P) is blaming its current misfortune on the rise of smartphones and tablets – such as the iPad. These have impacted sales of laptops for the world’s largest vendor of computers. GoMobile News isn’t surprise given the mess which current CEO, Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay) inherited from her predecessor, Leo Apotheker. What is it with global market leaders? H-P appears to be ‘doing-a-Nokia’ and ignoring the Android OS. Which is bizarre given that even GoMobile News has been able to port Android onto its H-P TouchPad tablet.Given the lengthy speculation of this particular round of job cuts at H-P, GoMobile News notes that The UK’s Press Association has finally reported that the actual figure is 27,000 workers which represents circa eight per cent of its global workforce of around 350,000 people.

Luckily H-P says it hopes to reduce the number of redundancies by offering an early retirement programme.

A spokeswoman described the cuts as “setting H-P on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders.”

Well, even the most loyal of H-P’s supporters wouldn’t claim the company could do that with webOS as it choice for market leading tablets.

GoMobile News thinks that H-P should follow the lead of the techies and introduce dual boot (webOS & Android) tablets. See our previous story here.

The same could possibly apply to H-P’s latest smartphone – the Pre 3, although there would appear to be little point in dual boot. Android on its own would be enough.

As far as GoMobile news can tell, nobody’s actually managed to port Android onto a Pre 3 successfully.

Although some raving nutter has posted a video of the Pre 3 booting into Android on YouTube (see below) but all it seems to do is turn the handset into a clock, though.

Here at GoMobile News we think there is a market for a combined tablet and smartphone package. Rather than installing 3G (or even 4G) into the tablet itself, simply offer a compatible handset which makes ‘tethering’ [turning the handset into a Wi-Fi hot spot) a doodle.

One last point – the chief victim of these cutbacks is Dr Mike Lynch, CEO of HP’s Autonomy division. Autonomy being a UK company before H-P acquired it. Wonder what Dr Lynch might do next?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQY6DZj8RCI. Alkl