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HP Accidentally Created a Demand for the TouchPad By Killing It

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Despite writing an article saying that no one should buy an HP Touchpad, I found myself looking for one this past weekend.

Why the turnabout? I’d say it’s the $99 discount price! I imagined HP would drop the TouchPad to $300 or maybe even $250, but never to $100.

The marketing move by HP generated a demand for their previously failed tablet and as a result people are buying them on eBay now for $300 or more. You can’t find one at the fire sale price less than 12 hours after it went into effect. People put them up on eBay making more money than HP ever made. In the tech center of the US, San Francisco, both WebOS and Touchpad are trending topics on Twitter.

Touchpad on eBay

The Big “What If?”

Here is the big “What if?” What if HP introduced their tablet for a more reasonable price, like $250 to begin with? Maybe it would have sold. What if they made the Touchpad a value add-on for their printers or PCs. Buy a top of the line printer and get a TouchPad for $100. Buy a computer for more than $500 and get a TouchPad for $100.

Today we would be reading editorials about the success of the Touchpad as an Apple iPad alternative. We’d be talking about the genius of HP using their successful printers and computers as an enticement to sell tablets and vice versa. We also would be hearing about developers working to meet the growing demand for apps that work on the million or more Touchpads now on the market.

HP was too enamored by their product to make it a loss leader and take a hit on the price, but this kind of aggressive marketing will attract buyers and will work against the Apple juggernaut. What we’ve learned: HP arrogance killed the Touchpad, not Apple. Because of this, everyone sees that no one can go head-to-head with the iPad now.

It’s too bad that HP was not smart enough to come up with this genius marketing campaign before announcing the end of the product. At $99 the Touchpad sold like an iPad. Who knows what it would have done at a reasonable price of $300. It does more than the Nook and look how successful the Nook has been at $249.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    08/22/2011 at 1:24 pm

    Hopefully this creates demand for webOS. It’s a great OS consistently stuck on the cheapest feeling, most plasticky, least cool looking hardware ever.

  2. Scotty Braun

    08/22/2011 at 1:47 pm

    I found a 5 minute window on HP small an medium business site last night where the 32gb only, was available for $149.00.  It was only showing availible for a very short time, the server was overloaded as I could barely get the order through.
     I was able to sneak an order in, and it was back to sold out after I got my confirmation!!  Hey for $150, its worth it I guess.. It’ll give me something to play with!

  3. Anonymous

    08/22/2011 at 1:55 pm

    lovetoshopping.org 

  4. Bill Hodder

    08/24/2011 at 10:54 am

    What if the whole killing off of the tablet line was a marketing ploy? Certainly gained them a huge chunk of the market in a very short period of time?

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