HP’s Todd Bradley Speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt

Image Source: TheNextWeb

At TechCrunch Disrupt, HP’s Executive Vice President of Personal Systems Todd Bradley today addressed questions many of us have been wondering about. The first: HP will not be licensing webOS. Hallelujah! Bradley, whom some have pegged to be a natural successor to former CEO Mark Hurd, when asked if HP was interested in creating a closed ecosystem across multiple devices similarly to Apple, responded…

“…emulating Apple or Dell is not part of our strategy.”

Bradley spoke about HP’s plans for their newly acquired OS:

Bradley says his group, which is in charge of a $40-plus billion revenue stream including PCs, printers and more, was in charge of buying Palm. Bradley’s main goal now, is how to broadly deploy the WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm phones. Next year, for example, Palm will sell 15 million printers that use WebOS. He says that while the smartphone category is growing, tablets are going to be a huge market. He estimates that in the next few years tablets will be a $40 billion market (he also said that the smartphone market is a $100 billion market). HP of course, is looking to be a part of this market with its own iPad competitor.

With their many recent acquisitions, HP seems to have a clear if not apparent vision for their mobile product strategy, as well as leveraging webOS beyond smartphones. Of this Bradley said that HP is innovating through both internal research and acquisitions, stating further:

“HP has dramatically transformed as a company.”

There is certainly no doubt that HP has added a lot of new talent and technology expertise in many different areas with their recent purchases. It will be interesting to see how it is all brought into the fold of such a large and complex corporation. Regardless, there’s no doubt that HP believes in webOS, having just added their name behind it. Now they must execute, execute, execute.

[Source: aboutWebOS, The Next Web, Tech Crunch]