[conspire] HP Melt Down

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> Profits are profits and that is much better profits than your typical
> pharmacy.

But not as good, by far, as the rest of the firm.  Thus my point.

> Plus, there is no way of figuring how much of that market share helps
> support their other areas.

When you get really, really good at determining that, you can probably
buy out Warren Buffet as your next move.  Meanwhile, I really doubt that
the PC business, let alone the tablet computing business, is the gateway
drug for HP Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking; or HP Software;
or HP Imaging and Printing Group; or HP Financial Services.  (Those are
the other divisions, not counting central corporate services and the
internal corporate investments division.)

I might point out in passing that, as someone who passed the CPA exam
and used to be a finance geek, I'm probably at least a bit better at the
above 'figuring' than the average bloke.
   

> I thought that the webos idea in every system was laying the ground
> work for a genuine change in the landscape of common computer
> use...one I've been looking for for about 15 years.

Embedded computing's always been a hard nut to crack.

Anyway, if webOS has potential, then the open source _portions_ of it
could still be adapted and used.  But....

Unfortunately, I get the strong impression that webOS was always
highly proprietary at key levels, meaning that it was _always_ hostage
to the proprietary software game of here today, gone tomorrow.
Moreover, it has for quite a few years been pitched as a 'cloud'
solution, e.g., intended to be tied to proprietary hosted services, and
pretty nearly completely useless without them.

For both reasons, I never even paid any attention to it, personally.