Here was an ironic question, asked before the Apple announcement:
Which of these stories is the bigger for the Geekonomy?
- 28.6% – The Google Purchase of Motorola
- 28.6% – HP's refocusing.
- 28.6% – Both.
- 14.3% – Neither
And what did people think in detail? Well, they had a lot to say . . .
- The HP story is extreme, but PC makers have come and gone, been number 1 then fell to last, etc. The Google/Motorola story poses huge potential conflicts with Android in the the future. Google has an Apple-like religious following that HP doesn't have. Those future conflicts could create cracks in the seemingly unstoppable Google brand. "That's just my opinion, I could be wrong." -Dennis Miller
- people still care about HP?
- Both incidents have different impacts in different realms.
- Neither has any immediate effect on what interests geeks.
- Motorola, though the creator of cellphones and the one that popularized Android phones, is merely going through an ownership change. HP, however, is abandoning their core market and going into unknown territory where they have no name value, losing their hardware name value, and going up against four titans of software (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco). HP's move is folly at best, suicide at most.
- Both of these change the world of technology, but in different ways. Both cause shakeups. What people miss is the synergy these two changes could have – two massic, seismic shifts in technology.
- Google's purchase is more to get patents to counter-sue with. HP's new direction could see the end of a major hardware producer, placing it as an also ran in a field that it really doesn't have expertise in.
I'm not going to comment here – there's a lot of good analysis from our regulars.
– Steven Savage