Posted on 10/01/2015 4:31:04 PM PDT by Pan_Yan
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Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things.
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If it were a straight deal for HP to include Apple’s software, the fee might have been hundreds of millions of dollars. (Around that time, software companies were paying huge sums to have their products or services preinstalled, since people seldom deleted them and often used the default choices.) Even better, preinstalling iTunes was a way for Apple to stifle Microsoft’s competitor to the iTunes Music Store. As an Apple leader at the time puts it, “This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs. We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. Steve only did this deal because of that.”
One might even argue that since Carly Fiorina wasn’t making much profit from selling computers, each machine her company sold under this deal delivered more value to Apple than it did to HP.
In return, HP got the right to sell iPods. But not in a way that could possibly succeed. Fiorna boasted to me that she would be able to sell the devices in thousands of retail outlets; up to that point Apple mostly sold them online and in its own stores. But by the time in mid-2004 that HP actually began selling its branded iPods, Apple was expanding to multiple retail outlets on its own. And soon after HP began selling iPods, Apple came out with new, improved iPods;leaving HP to sell an obsolete device. Fiorina apparently did not secure the right to sell the most current iPods in a timely fashion, and was able to deliver newer models only months after the Apple versions were widely available.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
Thanks for posting this. I purchased my first iPod on eBay several years ago & it had the HP logo on the back. I never could figure that out, now I know. BTW, it didn’t last long.
I have a 30GB iPod from HP, probably bought it in 2005. Formatted it on my HP PC with Windows, and used it with iTunes on the PC. Still works great ten years later (the iPod, not the HP PC) holding thousands of tunes and photos. The only thing I changed was doing a battery swap, bought off eBay for a few bucks. Great value, indestructible.
One of the other things in the article that doesn't ring true is the claim that "software companies were paying hundreds of millions of dollars to get their software included on PCs" and that Apple got persuaded Carly to include iTunes for free on HP as a way to keep Windows Media Player from being included. Say what? What software companies could afford to pay "hundreds of millions" to each PC manufacturer to include their crap ware on their PCs???? They do pay, but it ain't that much.
I guess we’re all the winner then!
They can't! That's the problem with Windows PCs. Not much installed, so you have to pay an arm and a leg to buy useful software to add to the PC. Sure, you get some crap ware, but it's trial stuff that shortly expires requiring you to pay much to continue the license. On the other hand, an Apple Mac comes preloaded with tons of apps for the price of the Mac. That's one of the reasons my PCs aren't in use much anymore. I got tired of paying so much extra for software, in addition to annual licensing.
As for my HP equipment, the quality is piss poor compared to what they built in the 1970s. I have several programmable HP RPN calculators from that time, still operational, the internals a thing of beauty with gold traces everywhere. The stuff they build now is crap. I got tired of multiple failures on my HP PCs. For instance, several failed HP Personal Media Drives. HP sucks.
even at the program’s peak, it represented no more than about five percent of total iPod sales.
I'd gladly take that, especially when compared with five percent of Zune.
:)
He would make a much better deal, because Steve Jobs didn't respect Carly Fiorina. Jobs would have respected Trump. It would have been the greatest, classiest deal in history. You would have loved it.
Or maybe that's just what he says about everything.
Of that, I'm pretty sure.
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