Exclusive: HP creates Mobility division to focus on consumer tablets
We've just been tipped to a memo circulated internally by HP's Todd Bradley — who runs the company's recently-merged Printing and Personal Systems Group …
Context & Ripple Effects
The new division is the second big org move inside HP's March 2012 merger of its printer and PC groups: Todd Bradley, who runs the combined Printing and Personal Systems Group, is carving consumer tablets out into a dedicated Mobility unit rather than leaving them buried in the PC business.
The timing matters because HP arrives at this without an operating system of its own. Palm has been absorbed into near-anonymity, webOS's future collapsed under HP ownership, and the Enyo framework team decamped for Google in May 2012 — after earlier efforts like the tabled Android tablet of 2010 and the promised-but-troubled webOS tablet slipped to Q1 2011. The company still leads worldwide PC shipments even as its volumes fell 12%, which is precisely the squeeze a standalone mobility push is meant to address.
First-order effects
- Consumer tablet work at HP now reports up through Todd Bradley's Printing and Personal Systems Group via a named Mobility division, giving tablets organizational priority and budget instead of competing inside the PC line.
- The division launches with no in-house OS: with webOS collapsed and Palm's hardware program gone, any consumer tablet HP ships will run someone else's platform.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in consumer tablets — Apple, Amazon, and Google's partners — face a deep-pocketed PC incumbent re-entering a market where HP previously stumbled, raising the bar on price and distribution for Windows-based tablet entrants.
- Microsoft gains a motivated large-scale hardware partner for its tablet push just as Windows 8 lands, since HP's mobility ambitions now depend entirely on third-party platforms it does not control.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major PC makers will keep splitting legacy PC businesses from dedicated mobility units — a structural admission that tablets are not a PC subcategory but a separate fight requiring separate leadership.
- Hardware vendors that lose their own software stacks (as HP did with webOS) become platform tenants, shifting long-run power toward whoever owns the mobile OS layer.
The trend: PC incumbents are standing up dedicated mobility divisions as tablet growth pulls the industry's center of gravity away from the PC business they still lead by volume.