Posts tagged discontinue
Microsoft discontinues Zune HD
Oct 3rd
As long suspected, Microsoft is discontinuing its dedicated Zune music players, instead focusing on the Zune music service that runs on Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox. Microsoft will continue to honor warranties on the Zune HD and other models. An update on the Zune site says, ”Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy…we will no longer be producing Zune players.”
Source: Zune.net
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Ford finally retires the Crown Victoria
Aug 25th
After more than 30 years, Ford has finally retired its Crown Victoria sedan, the last traditional rear-wheel-drive, V8-powered, body-on-frame American sedan. Best known through its Police Interceptor variant, which comprises more than 70% of America’s police fleets today, the Crown Victoria offers old domestic mainstays like a soft suspension, front bench seat, and steering column gear shifter. The Panther platform it’s built on dates back to 1979 and also lies under the Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car, which are being retired as well.
Ford stopped consumer sales of the Crown Vic in 2008, but sales to police department and taxi fleets have remained strong. Ford has new police offerings in the works, based on the Taurus sedan and Explorer SUV, but many police departments believe the Crown Vic is still the best option and have driven up sales by stockpiling cars over the last few months. Yet the same sturdy, easy-to-repair body-on-frame construction that makes the Crown Vic the highway patrol’s car of choice also makes it heavy and inefficient (16 mpg city), which Ford can hardly afford in an era of increasingly tight fuel economy requirements (manufacturers must average 35.5 mpg by 2016 and 54.5 mpg by 2025).
The Crown Vic was introduced for police duty in 1983 and became the dominant patrol car in 1996, when its main competitor, the Chevy Caprice, was discontinued. Today, Chevy has a new Caprice (based on an Australian Holden sedan) for the police, and Dodge offers a police-spec Charger sedan. Both are rear-wheel-drive, unlike Ford’s new police offering, the FWD/AWD Taurus. All offer better performance and fuel efficiency than the Crown Vic, but police fleets remain skeptical.
Despite its dominance in the police and taxi markets, the Crown Vic has seen its share of controversy in the last few years. Its vertically-mounted steel gas tank is located between the rear axle and trunk, making it susceptible to puncture in a rear crash and leading to strong and instantaneous fires. Ford faces dozens of lawsuits in the early 2000s following a number of deaths linked to the tank design. The carmaker eventually settled the cases and in 2003 began to install protecting the gas tank from rear-end puncture.
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HP discontinues all webOS devices, may exit PC business altogether
Aug 18th
Just a year after it bought Palm for $1.2 billion, HP has given up and is discontinuing all webOS phones and tablets, including the Pre and TouchPad devices. The strategic turnaround is mentioned in the “other announcements” section of a press release saying HP may spin off its whole Personal Systems Group (PCs, mobile devices, and storage)– itself quite a bombshell:
“In addition, HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.“
It’s unclear what HP plans to do with webOS going forward– license or sell the OS to other phone manufacturers, open source it, or just kill it completely. But by announcing the move this way, HP has pretty much guaranteed that developers and enthusiasts alike will begin to abandon the platform.
These moves are part of CEO Leo Apothekar’s plan to move HP towards an IBM-like model– going from low-margin personal computers and devices into high-margin enterprise software and services. The also confirmed that HP is acquiring Autonomy Corporation plc, another B2B software vendor, for $11.7 billion.
Ultimately, these moves make sense given Apothekar’s past as the head of SAP, a German enterprise software giant– he’s clearly much more comfortable selling software licenses to large companies than competing with the likes of Apple in the consumer space. Yet we can’t help but see the move as severed misguided. HP is the largest seller of PCs in the world and has a deeper supply chain and global distribution network than anyone else in the consumer electronics industry. Further, Apothekar’s inspiration, IBM, has always focused on business first, consumer second, and thus saw the PC business as a diversion from its core, but HP’s history is much more focused on consumers.
HP’s newer PCs, most visibly the Envy line of laptops that resulted from the VoodooPC acquisition, show that the company can successfully compete against Apple in premium computers. The TouchPad tablet has not been an instant success, but the webOS software has received broad acclaim, and who knows– greater investment in hardware and developer engagement, as HP promised a year ago, could have resulted in a viable mobile competitor. HP’s current leadership seems to have a fundamental impatience that is incompatible with success in the consumer space.
Even before this announcement, HP displayed a lack of strategic clarity with webOS, alienating Microsoft by announcing it’d ship webOS on all its Windows PCs and then backpedaling on the decision. While Apothekar thinks the move to abandon webOS will help HP in the enterprise space, credibility is key in that business, and how credible is a company that gave up, after just one year, on a $1.2 billion acquisition whose technology was supposedly critical to the company’s future? Further, the move seems to all but ignore the recent trend of consumerization– even enterprise buying decisions are now being influenced by consumer devices.
Perhaps HP has something magical up its sleeve, but we’re going to join the bandwagon of “#hpfail” posters on Twitter and say that giving up on the entire consumer computing business — PCs, smartphones, tablets, and peripherals (except printers) — would be a sad and serious misstep for one of the world’s strongest consumer electronics brands.
Update: Rahul Sood, founder of VoodooPC, has some interesting thoughts on HP’s move here and here.
Update 2: This graph from AllThingsD indicates a lot of what’s wrong at HP:
Press release after the break.
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Microsoft Kills Kin
Jul 2nd
Microsoft has killed its Kin social phone line just a few weeks after it launched. Gizmodo reports that the company has merged the whole Kin team into the Windows Phone 7 team. Rumors suggest that a mere 500 Kins have been sold to date, and while the figure’s probably higher than that, it might explain such a large project being folded so suddenly.
Kin was accompanied by some strange advertising, but the biggest problem was that Verizon only offered Kin phones with its $30 monthly smartphone data plan. Kin was supposed to be a cheaper, social-oriented alternative to a smartphone, but without a cheaper data plan, it became almost pointless. Even drastic price cuts to just $20/$50 for the Kin One/Two (from $50/100) didn’t help, and Microsoft’s ads promoting Kin as a Windows Phone just caused further confusion.
Read on for the full story behind Kin’s demise.
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