Once again, during the span of the last few hours, the tech scene (kind of) dominates the headlines again. HP, a longtime stalwart of the PC business (and personally, a trusted PC brand) is planning to sell off their PC business. Also most notable, they're killing off WebOS devices (although it will be interesting to see what they will do with it next). I won't even bother to link to the various news sources; all tech blogs are churning out article by article about the news, their analysis and so forth. Check out the newsfeed here.
What is interesting to look at, though, that like IBM 6 years before them, they let go of their hardware PC business. A previously fat-margin area has turned into slimmer pickings, due to advances in technology that brought down manufacturing prices, and enabled more players to enter the market with cheaper products. According to Wikipedia, HP is not a small company - 324,000 employees (in 2010), for instance, so their decision to move away from consumer PC is no small feat, either. And following IBM, they will be maintaining their enterprise businesses.
So the 21st century has seen 2 PC giants letting go of their hardware past, while a notably very 21st century internet company actually bought a hardware company. Interesting, right? Who's to say that Google won't buy HP's PC business as well, however unlikely it is?
But here's what we can see already - the post-PC era is definitely here. Naysayers will be silent from this day on. Perhaps HP has stopped making WebOS devices, but it has not let go of WebOS. No way in hell it would.
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