The HP TouchPad Needs Developers, Not Russell Brand

If H.P. wants to succeed in making the TouchPad the go-to tablet for business, it inevitably more developers, and not necessarily a pitch from fame Russell Brand.

The English actor is portion as the spokesperson for Horsepower's webOS tablet, prima in a series of commercials (cobbled together into this YouTube video) that offer a humorous take just about of the stellar features of the tablet. Brand walks users through summaries of the major functionality of the tablet with a counterweight of glowing marketing-verbalise and humor.

The problem here is the equal atomic number 3 with Flange's attack to marketing the PlayBook. Consumers don't care about "true multitasking," "type to plowshare," "synergy," or surfboarding with Split second. Businesses care even less about these things.

What they care about is what they can do with the gimmick. And today, that's defined more thusly by the ecosystem of developers around the device than it is by the manufacturers of the twist itself.

Mechanical man and iOS have largely usurped the smartphone space from RIM aside focusing on making it easy for applications of all kinds–from Angry Birds to SAP. This modulation largely powered the tsunami of the consumerization of IT where new technology products, especially mobile devices, inherit the work with the finish substance abuser and are integrated into the extant IT substructure. That megatrend is one of the a few shaping technology today, and has slaked a good section of what could have been HP's vantage in the tablet blank space for business–the acceptance and buy-in of IT professionals.

Still, HP's got several advantages. It's got loyal customers at complete sizes of business in a range of products, and a huge network of providers that work with small businesses to create full technology solutions. Those two factors alone could make the TouchPad a formidable lin device.

In Video: HP's TouchPad Tablet Isn't Ready for Prime Time

In summation, it's got a webOS in operation system of rules that's well-received, replete of function, and most significantly, should exist easy for developers to progress applications for, arsenic it's based on Linux and Web-standard technologies.

Only if Horsepower, like RIM ahead it, wants to fiddle Orchard apple tree's game of selling sleek consumer products instead of making the tablet completely about business and getting consumers that right smart, it's making a mistake.

I Don't think the company's focus is all off the business chance; indeed, the executives who figure out with its mate base have been powerfully promoting the TouchPad as a patronage production for months, and the company is one of the prototypic to make its products promptly available through the distributors from which its galore resellers buy in products. Chief operating officer Léo Apotheker is perpetually talking up the TouchPad as a business device, and hinting at a large, mist-founded scheme that volition tie together the tablet, applications, and enterprise IT into one neat package.

But equally sesquipedalian as "there's an app for that" iPad and not the TouchPad, it doesn't matter who's promoting the twist, surgery how many Blink Websites are wholly but useless on the iPad.

'tween Apotheker's vision and its own outreach activities with mechanised application developers, there are signs that HP recognizes this, but its competitors aren't session still either.

Bringing Brand name on will for certain give the TouchPad a boost in awareness in the general consumer community, just to take advantage on it consciousness IT has to undergo the applications that consumers– and maybe more importantly, businesses–need and necessitate to lean connected the twist.