HP is building another 100,000-200,000 TouchPads to clear out their supplier inventory and make good on those contracts they signed. They also have some 300,000 employees around the globe. Those two numbers created a perfect storm today as HP opened up their Employee Purchase Program with fresh $99 and $149 TouchPads available as of 9:00AM Pacific Time. And by 9:01AM the store had been brought down by the crushing demand of several thousand employees at once all looking to snag themselves a TouchPad.
We don’t know how many TouchPads HP allocated to the employee store, but we can safely say that however no matter how many they set aside, the sold them all in a matter of hours, if not minutes. All one need do to verify is call the employee store phone purchase line, which one HP employee told us was experiencing “impossible wait lines.” If only somebody could point HP in the direction of a good enterprise services firm that could manage their servers under heavy traffic load.
What does this mean for when these TouchPads eventually make it to the consumer market? Well, we’re hoping that HP learned the lesson of retailers offering fire sale TouchPads last month and set aside a limited number for the EPP store, with the rest to go to consumer sales. There will be a few thousand fewer TouchPads available from the ambiguous 100,00-200,000 units expected to be produced (or already produced?), and given the demand exhibited by just HP employees, we’re expecting similar website crashing next month when they’re made available.
MILLICOM INTL CELLULAR MOBILE TELESYSTEMS NANYA TECHNOLOGY NII HOLDINGS NIKON
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