That time may be near. The company has three new but as yet unheralded products that point in the direction it is headed. The Media Smart TV is a flat-panel 37-inch liquid-crystal-display TV that automatically pulls in content stored on a PC or other networked devices with a hard drive. It costs US$2,000, a 50 percent premium over its regular 37-inch LCD set.
The US$570 iPaq Travel Companion is a hand-held device that lets users watch videos through a wireless connection to the Internet. And the Media Vault, a storage device, is attached to the home network to store music, movies and photos. It is priced at US$350 to US$500 depending on how much data it stores.
Ahead
"We are about a year ahead of anyone else," Bradley said.
But the products are hard to find in the stores -- in part, company executives concede, because they are pioneering a new category.
"The retailers are adjusting to how to sell the products," Satjiv Chahil, the senior vice president for the PC division's marketing, said.
"When you are doing breakthrough products, the normal distribution doesn't pick it up all the way," he said.
That may change as Apple Computer pushes forward with its own connected TV, the iTV, and as other companies announce similar strategies at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
"The Apple iTV? It's a Media Smart wannabe," Chahil said.
"Steve Jobs is validating a behavioral change and an industry direction. The good news is that we were there a year in advance," he said.
"Consumers keep telling us they want something that is insanely simple," Hurd said, adding that the company believes the new Media Smart TV to be "insanely simple."
The problem for HP is that to keep pace with market changes, the company that Hurd describes as "the world's leading IT infrastructure company" may have to recast the PC part of itself as a consumer electronics company like Sony, Samsung or that other computer maker that has made the shift, Apple. And that will not be an easy thing to do.
"If we want to be a great company, we can't do one thing," Hurd said.
"We need to do multiple things at all times," he said.
RSS