Despite webOS and PC Market Challenges 57% Beleive HP Making Wrong Move

Majority of Online Opinions Analyzed Reveal Consumers Don’t Agree with HP’s Strategy

Since Thursday, August 18, we have analyzed 84,175 mentions of HP’s decision to drop its PC business and stop creating webOS powered devices.  Of this conversation, there was only 14% irrelevant content. Relevant opinions (70,965) comprise the rest of the conversation.

The conversation was split up by Positive, Negative, and Neutral sentiment. 9% of the total relevant conversation was positive, 57% was negative, and 35% of the relevant conversation was neutral mentions of the HP “event.”

Click on Image to Enlarge (%’s may not total 100 due to rounding)

Being the smallest group at 9%, the positive conversation of the HP event was generally geared toward support for the decision to drop webOS and the Personal Systems Group (PSG) portion of the company (PCs). One particularly spot-on verbatim from this portion of conversation is: “HP+Made+The+Right+Call+Putting+WebOS+Out+Of+Its+Misery”-@PaulBenjou.  Some people in this category expressed sadness, but believed that is was the smartest business move for HP.

Under the Neutral group, there were two categories: Neutral and “License or Open-Source OS.” The Neutral category consisted of a wide range of mentions starting from simple mentions of the event to being intrigued by the decision. This amounted to 26% of the conversation, and the other category, License or Open-Source OS, took 9%. This category consists of mentions that HP should open-source the webOS because it is a good OS system, as well as, HP should license the webOS to other manufacturers.

The largest group was Negative (“Bad move HP”), commanding 57% of the total relevant conversation. This category was split up into several different groups: Generally Negative; Upset that I just bought or was going to buy a HP device; Waste of webOS; Sad to see this happen; and HP is crazy.

The largest category here was “waste of webOS”, making up 18% of the conversation. This category represents the consumers’ opinion that HP wasted the use of webOS and that they should have done better. The next largest category is Generally Negative, which represents the general negative comments on the event, in particular to HP. This conversation took up 11%, while 10% of the total relevant conversation believed that HP is crazy for dropping the webOS and PC business. Both categories were upset about buying or just buying HP devices and “Sad to see this happen,” comprised 9 %. Sad to see this happen focused in on the conversation around being generally upset about what HP is doing and sad that they are discontinuing the products they love. Whereas the other category focuses on consumer reaction to having purchased an HP device recently or was planning to and now being upset that HP is killing the product. This is important because there is conversation that people are worried they will not receive support for their devices.

What do you think about HP’s moves surrounding webOS and its PSG division?  Let us know about your thoughts.

As always, we’ll continue analyzing the space for interesting trends. In the meantime, feel free contact us at [email protected] with questions or to learn how your market, brand or product could benefit from leveraging the Crimson Hexagon ForSight™ platform for social media monitoring and analysis. Want to see the Crimson Hexagon platform in action? Request a Live Online Demo.