It’s been awhile since I blogged on DailyTech. My new role as CTO of HP Gaming has left me almost breathless, thus I have found it difficult to keep up with the blog as of late. I wanted to start this article off to update you on what’s happening lately and I also wanted to speak a bit on the much anticipated HP 20” HDX.
As you may know, at HP we have three master brands, because no brand has endless elasticity and we want to serve multiple markets. We have Compaq, HP, and Voodoo. Compaq has been refreshed and is as lively a brand as ever – check out the new CQ logo, it’s pretty cool. We are witnessing great success in many markets with the Compaq brand. A typical Compaq is an aggressively priced no-nonsense series with straight forward configurations and top quality parts.
HP is positioned slightly higher than Compaq, with more configurability, more personalization, and certainly a broader range of quality devices. You have all probably seen the “Computer is Personal Again” campaign, and you’ll certainly see more of this as time goes on. Voodoo is at the top of the pyramid offering high touch configurations, a high level of personalization, fanatical customer service, and incredible performance.
The Voodoo brand allows us to take real innovations out of HP Labs and elsewhere within HP and integrate them into our devices quicker than normal. This brand positioning will start to make more sense in the coming months. Eight months after the acquisition of Voodoo things are rolling along intensely. Internally we have created a ton of excitement around our yet to be released product lines, and as we continue we are tweaking the business to allow us to move quicker.
These things take time, let’s not forget the official close date of the acquisition was October 1st, and we promise to start launching products in 2007. The best way I can describe this process is when Lamborghini and Audi got together they made some significant changes at both companies. As they leverage each others’ strengths they are creating some of the most fantastic cars in the world.
You guys have probably read the stories on the internet about the upcoming much anticipated HP 20” HDX notebook. I have personally seen this monster mature from when it was a wooden model to after it was born. First let’s start by saying that this notebook is absolutely kick ass, and whether they like it or not it’s going to rip the competitions odd looking 20” a new hole. There is no doubt in my mind that they will be oversold.
The design is lean and very compelling – it was designed for the higher end mainstream space, the unique hinge allows for a more natural feeling when using such a large display. The mechanicals are complex, yet so well designed that it’s somewhat amazing that the team pulled it off! The HP notebook team has done some amazing things in the last few years. Lately they have stepped out of the norm and started to create some extremely compelling designs that meet high form and function together. The HP 20” HDX was originally conceived by the notebook design team before the gaming business units was even setup! So to be clear, the gaming business did not design this notebook, which is pretty wild considering this notebook is perfect for gaming (I should mention that the HP 20” HDX plays games better than 98% of the gaming notebooks on the planet (with MAX MAX MAX settings) and it seems to be priced to compete). Yes, the media speculated, but the bottom line is notebooks take much longer than 8 months to complete.
This should give you a good indication of where we’re going, since the gaming group is fortunate enough to be able to knowledge share with the notebook team.
Since the acquisition we have been provided with resources to allow us to design compelling devices that we feel our customers will fall in love with. As such we are working to create some pretty masterful machines which you will see released in the future. Our systems are somewhat complex – and they are anything but conventional.
We are placing some big bets in this space, and believe me you will know when we launch a product. There will be absolutely no mistaking our creations for anything else. Of course I cannot explain why yet, but dreams will become reality very soon. Yeah I know, “talk talk talk”, but we think it’s better that we remind you that we’re still here – and that’s not going to change.
Rahul Sood
CTO HP Global Gaming
www.rahulsood.com