HP’s TouchPad: Ground to Make Up, but Still in Race

After I wrote my last post about the limited commercial horizons of Cisco’s Cius tablet, I was asked to comment on the prospects for HP’s webOS-based TouchPad.

A Tale of Two Tablets

Like Cisco’s Cius, the TouchPad made its market debut this month, a few weeks ahead of its Cisco counterpart. The two tablets also have an enterprise orientation in common. Moreover, like Cisco’s Cius, the TouchPad was greeted with ambivalent early reviews. Actually, I suppose the early reviews for the TouchPad, while not glowing, were warmer than the tepid-to-icy responses occasioned by Cisco’s Cius.

There are other differences between the two tablets. For one, HP’s TouchPad sports its own mobile operating system, whereas Cisco has chosen to ride Google’s Android. There’s nothing wrong with Cisco’s choice, per se, but HP, in buying Palm and its webOS, has a deeper commitment to making its mobile-device strategy work.

As we’ve learned, Cisco is casting the Cius as an entry point — just one more conduit and access device — to its collaboration ecosystem as represented by the likes of WebEx and its Telepresence offerings.

Different Aspirations and Objectives

Put another way, HP clearly sees itself as a player in the tablet wars, while, for Cisco, tablets are incidental, a tactical means to a strategic end, represented by greater adoption of bandwidth-sucking collaboration suites and videoconferencing systems by enterprises worldwide. Consequently, it would come as no surprise to see Cisco bail on the tablet market before the end of this year, but it would come as a genuine shock if HP threw in the towel on webOS (and its associated devices) during the same timeframe.

That won’t happen, of course. HP believes it can carve out a niche for itself as a mobile-device purveyor for enterprise customers. To accomplish that goal, HP will port webOS to PCs and printers as well as to a growing family of tablets and smartphones. It also will license webOS to other vendors of tablets and smartphones — and perhaps to other vendors of PCs, too, presuming such demand materializes. Cisco doesn’t have an OS in the mobile race, so it doesn’t have those sorts of aspirations.

Multiple Devices, Bundling, and Services

Another difference is that HP actually knows how to make money selling client devices with more than a modicum of consumer appeal. That’s still uncharted territory for Cisco. In a period in which “consumerization of IT” is much more than a buzz phrase, it helps that HP has some consumer chops, just as it hurts that Cisco does not. Presuming that HP can generate demand from end users — maybe that’s why it is using the decidedly non-corporate Russell Brand as its TouchPad pitchman — it can then use bundling of webOS-based tablets, smartphones, printers, and PCs to captivate enterprise IT departments.

To top it all off, HP can wrap up the whole package with extensive consulting and integration services.

I’m not saying HP is destined for greatness in the tablet derby — the company will have to persevere and work hard to address perceived weaknesses and to amass application support from the developer community — but I’d wager that HP is better constituted than Cisco to stay the course.

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Limited Horizons for Cisco Cius

Cisco’s Cius Android-based tablet will be available for purchase later this month, but it’s difficult to envision how or why it would be bought by anybody other than hardcore Cisco shops that have made substantial investments in Cisco’s enterprise collaboration and telepresence technologies.

With the Cius, and much else lately, Cisco seems to be predicating its strategy and tactics on an antiquated playbook (pardon the pun). While the world moves toward cost-effective, multivendor technologies and embraces consumerization of IT, Cisco still stubbornly pushes to be a one-stop shop for network infrastructure and much else besides. What’s more, the company is completely disregarding the consumerization wave, failing to recognize that corporate IT bosses and their departments are compelled to find ways to embrace the trend to cut enterprise costs and boost productivity.

It’s Not a Tablet

To make matters worse, Cisco’s Cius runs Android 2.2, not the tablet-optimized Android 2.3. It’s as if Cisco, perhaps under the assumption that its installed base of enterprise collaboration and telepresence customers will follow its lead obediently, couldn’t even be roused to deliver a competitive product. The price, at $750 per unit, also suggests that Cisco thinks its loyal customers will pay a sticker-shock premium for anything that ships with the company logo stamped on the box.

Cisco, for its part, has persuaded some analysts to believe that, appearances to the contrary, it’s not really a tablet vendor, even though it’s about to start shipping what is unquestionably a tablet at the end of July. The Cius, you see, is just, an entry point into Cisco’s collaboration ecosystem.

Counting on the Fans

I suppose that’s as good a way as any for Cisco to attempt to avoid direct comparisons between the price and performance of the seven-inch Cius and those of competing devices, including a new crop of ten-inch Android-based tablets that are about to hit the market as well as the ubiquitous Apple iPads that C-level executives have brought into their enterprises.

Cisco is hoping to use an enterprise app store, AppHQ, and security as hooks that will keep current customers in the fold and bring new ones into its tent. However, in an era of heterogeneous mobile-device management (MDM) suites and equally heterogeneous mobile-security suites — which seem to offer cost and flexibility advantages over the proprietary Cisco alternative in the vast majority of deployment scenarios — Cisco’s Cius market adoption will be limited to the vendor’s most zealous enterprise fan base.