Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Mark Hurd told investors on the company’s fiscal Q2 conference call this afternoon that he expects HP to leverage the Palm (PALM) Web OS software beyond smart phones into other form factors such as “slates” and web-connected printers.
Asked about the logic of the pending Palm deal, Hurd responded that “it really has more to do with the intellectual property and the fact that when you look across the HP ecosystem of interconnected devices, it is a large family of devices and we think of printers, you’ve now got a whole series of web connected printers and as they connect to the web, [they] need an OS.”
Hurd adds that HP prefers to own the OS to “control the customer experience” as it always has in printing.
The HP chief said you can make the same case for smaller form-factor mobile products, like slates. He said the company’s relationship with Microsoft remains “extremely important to us.” However, he adds that buying Palm “isn’t precisely” a smart phone play, and instead is a “strategically broader” purchase.
In late trading, HPQ is up $1.156, or 2.5%, to $47.95.
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