Lines Form for $99 TouchPad, Now Sold Out
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 22nd Aug 2011 21:19 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Last week, HP killed its webOS devices unit. Over the weekend, the company slashed the prices on the TouchPad. The result? The TouchPad sold out completely in a matter of hours. This confirms what I've been hearing from friends and family: "I'd love a tablet, but I'm not paying laptop money for one."
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BallmerKnowsBest
Member since:
2008-06-02

Here are a few of the many lessons learned:

a) Build a better value stack for your customers (world's best and biggest app store, world's best retail experience, world's best brand, world's best digital content store, etc).

b) Build a set of products that cater for every market segment, except the piss poor crap end, and which are highly integrated, snap together in ingenious ways, allow easy user skill and content migration.

c) Build the world's best supply chain and use your cash mountain to not only secure the best components but prevent your competitors from getting their hands on any. Note the way that would be Macbook Air competitors cannot get any unibody manufacturing deals because Apple sewed them up. Similarly when the retina display iPad arrives probably next year no one else will be able to buy such displays.

d) Based on the above build products that no one can else can match in price and quality and make any money on. Kill the OEMs one by one.


You forgot one:

Fill all of your marketing materials with words like "best", "biggest", "most", etc. This sort of juvenile triumphalism will appeal to people who have a compulsive need to brag about something & who will endlessly repeat those talking points to anyone who will listen (as you've done here). That sort of thing appeals to people with no actual accomplishments of their own, so they latch onto Apple. It's just the adult version of "my dad can beat up your dad," but with Apple as daddy.

These are the folks who choose computing devices solely based on which one will give them the best bragging-rights-by-proxy. Which is why Apple fanboys stick out like sore thumbs on tech forums: when you have a community of actual technology enthusiasts, it just makes the wannabes and hangers-on more obvious.

Trying to dismiss the scale of Apple's achievement or the size of the impact it is having on the PC and tech world is just silly. The iPad is kicking away the last legs that the sclerotic PC makers were leaning on. HP' departure won't be the last.


Hahaha, jump the gun much? Outside of the "tablets are killing the desktop" hype-bubble, the total sales of BOTH models of the iPad have barely managed to overtake the first XBox (only 125 million to go before they catch up with the PS2). Decent numbers for a game console or consumer electronics toy, but utterly pathetic for something that's supposedly going to "kill the desktop" and be the "computing platform of the future."

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