When was the touchpad fire sale

Woodruff questioned HP on its continued promise to develop webOS, and that was one of the reasons he returned the TouchPad. Despite HP's commitment to webOS, Woodruff worried about the App Catalog, and also was concerned about the shutdown of some back-end services critical to retaining profiles. I'd happily pass my iPad 2 on to a family member if another company starts running strong with it," Woodruff said.

Despite discontinuing hardware sales, HP said it will continue support and development of the webOS, according to a blog entry earlier this week. Our intent is to enhance our merchandising and presentation of your great products and to continue to build our webOS app ecosystem, said HP's Chuq Von Rospach, in a blog entry on the Palm website.

Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. He sent an email to Steve Jobs and told him that he had accepted a position at Palm, a company that had popularized the personal digital assistant that the iPhone had just revolutionized. Four seconds later, Jobs called Rubinstein.

Are you joking? Palm had a surprisingly strong bench and nothing to lose, and it put all that innovation into a brand new device, the Palm Pre, and operating system, WebOS. As any tech enthusiast of the era will tell you, the Pre was heavily hyped, with impressive hardware that adeptly combined the style of the first generation of smartphones—with a keyboard and a tiny trackball—with the multitouch capabilities of the iPhone.

A multitasking wonder, it had gesture capabilities roughly half a decade before many of its competitors, and was simple to use. And importantly, at a time when Apple was on the prowl for a lawsuit against any company that copied the Apple experience, it brought something new to the model with those gestures.

Palm, despite being minuscule compared to the companies it was taking on, was well-positioned to stick around thanks to a fairly deep patent war chest.

The Palm Pre was a fascinating phone that was very much ahead of its time, and the response to its CES debut is still well-remembered today. But it had a fatal flaw: A bad strategy for an untested product.

But the exclusivity window, which was only six months, slowed down a device that needed some gas behind it. Less than a year after Palm released the Pre, the external pressures on Palm became too much and the company sold to Hewlett-Packard, which was on an acquisition tear at the time. The result was that, a quarter-century after leaving Hewlett-Packard to build supercomputers, Macs, iPods, and smartphones, Rubinstein was back, and he had something good. Unfortunately, the Hewlett Packard of and was not a good place for a company like Palm to land.

But Palm employees that did stay on were tasked with developing a tablet by HP. That became the HP TouchPad. Mark Hurd, the onetime CEO of HP who spearheaded the Palm acquisition, left the company as a result of a high-profile personal scandal.

He later helped lead Oracle. Wikimedia Commons. Mark Hurd, the then-CEO of HP, spoke of using WebOS as an operating system for printers and other devices, allowing for the operating system to take an embedded systems role. But despite the talk about printers, HP got access to a high-potential entrant in the mobile wars for a fairly inexpensive price.

While not a sure thing, the show of support from Hurd offered the company an opening to stand out. Hurd, who publicly was the biggest cheerleader of the deal, left HP as a result of a high-profile scandal less than four months after the deal was announced.

Hurd had been accused of sexual harassment by a contractor, and while an internal investigation cleared him of the harassment charges, investigators found inaccuracies in his expense reports that were designed to hide the relationship.

Hurd, who died last year, left behind a lot of successes but a complicated legacy. But without Hurd, Palm continued to spin forward, albeit with less momentum than before. His strategy for doing so involved acquiring a software services firm, Autonomy. HPE unveils GreenLake services for unified analytics and data protection.

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You also agree to the Terms of Use and acknowledge the data collection and usage practices outlined in our Privacy Policy. In the end, HP could have highlighted how its data centers saved the day even amid TouchPad adversity. HP looks willy nilly. It's no wonder that the news of HP's PC unit spin-off looked rushed.

The inability to handle the e-commerce load for the TouchPad liquidation also highlighted a lack of planning. Don't be surprised if Oracle launches a hostile bid for HP within a year. Now we're sure that Apotheker and HP's board has a well thought out master plan, but it's hard to argue for an IBM moment for the company right now. The problem: HP appears to be winging it.

In business, perception can become reality in a hurry. The TouchPad liquidation is another data point for HP critics to use. Retail partners are going to be wary of HP going forward.

Some outlets went with HP's liquidation pricing right away.