Last night the HP company officially announced that it will stop selling the HP TouchPad tablet starting this month due to poor sales. The HP tablet has been on the market for only 6 weeks, during which time it benefited from 2 price reductions, but unfortunately it failed to convince many consumers. Those from HP claim that at the moment the tablet market is concentrated around the iPad and a tablet like the HP TouchPad does not have the necessary strength to attract enough customers, to generate enough sales and to be profitable.
In the company's quarterly earnings conference call, Apotheker stated that after careful consideration about "what needs to be fixed, what needs to be shut down, and what needs to be separated," the company would begin an effort to shift priorities in multiple respects. The first, affecting HP's PC and mobile hardware business, acknowledges a competitive landscape and changes in how consumers are using PCs, a clear nod to Apple's blockbuster iPad sales. Apotheker said HP's Personal System Group, which builds PCs, needed "the flexibility and agility" to explore its options independently.
For Apple, this is unfortunately a clear sign that the iPad 2 tablet is currently the best on the market and that it may not have that much competition. Of course, Samsung's tablets sold quite well, but not so well that they can be considered "iPad killers". Apart from Samsung, there is no other tablet manufacturer that has brought something really extraordinary to the market and that has recorded sales on the scale, and for consumers the lack of competition is not good because Apple does not feel "forced" by the competition to introduces new and "innovative" functions in its products.
TouchPad has become history, WebOS could live on through licensing, unofficially iPad made another victim and we will see who will follow.
