HP Fiddles while Apple Innovates

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The paradox of Hewlett-Packard only gets more pronounced with each high-profile product announcement: its TouchPad tablet is the latest head-scratcher. Meanwhile, Apple continues to spit out one stunning product after another.

In practice, HP has kept the garage door locked all of these years.
(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

HP’s paradox is that it sits in the cradle of innovation–Silicon Valley–but fails to innovate. And HP is the original Valley start-up, founded in a garage more than 70 years ago, long before Apple’s legendary start.

Fast forward to the reign of former CEO Carly Fiorina. She talked a lot about going back to the garage but never actually went back. And nothing in device-design innovation changed with her successor, Mark Hurd.

I’m hoping, as always, for change with the current CEO Leo Apotheker. But his focus is still the on the enterprise–which demands design stability–the antithesis of innovation. A profitable segment, yes, but not one that can create an iPod or even a MacBook Air.

And a recent statement by Apotheker doesn’t offer much hope. “If you use a state-of-the-art laptop it is as sleek, as slim as [an iPad],” he said at the D9 conference last month. Really? I have yet to see an HP laptop that comes near the iPad in thinness (0.34 inch) and portability (1.33 pounds). In fact, the only thing that gets close is another Apple product: the 11.6-inch MacBook Air.

He then added as a parenthetical: “There’s a whole new product refresh coming out.” Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. He’s either so disconnected from product design that he believes HP actually has a laptop that rivals the iPad, or he knows about some truly groundbreaking newfangled product in the pipeline. Should we give him the benefit of the doubt?

That brings us to the TouchPad. Probably the first high-profile product to emerge with his imprimatur. In a word, disappointment. I listened to HP’s Jon Rubinstein talk for most of an hour about the virtues of the TouchPad (before it was announced as a shipping product) at a Qualcomm conference in San Diego last month. And I stood with an HP product manager later in the day as he demonstrated the TouchPad (and got some hands-on time, albeit brief, with it, too).