HP | Palm deal thoughts
That HP rode in as a white knight took me a little bit by surprise. I tuned into the conference call to find out more about the deal. I have bullet-pointed out my thoughts below:
- Is HP executive Todd Bradley the right person for the deal? He was CEO of the company in the early noughties when it should have been sorting out its OS issues, the Palm OS looked tired even back then
- Is HP overpaying for the company? There isn’t that many people interested in Palm and analysts had set a target share price of zero. Is this price as much about emotion as assets?
- Why is the Palm WebOS going to live up to HP’s faith in it?
- Much was made of Palm’s cloud services technology in the webcast, but how many extra servers or services will it actually sell for HP?
- SKUs. I was alarmed at the amount of proposed device variants HP was envisaging in the future on the call with possible support in differing form-factors for Micrsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Android and WebOS in personal devices. Add into this memory or colour variants and you are looking at product range bloat similar to Sony consumer electronics range