Harvey Norman’s head of technology and communications will urge Hewlett Packard to reverse its decision to dump the struggling TouchPad following today’s national feeding frenzy after the retailer drastically dropped its price on the tablet.
Earlier today, Harvey Norman dropped the price of the 16 gigabyte TouchPad from $595 to $98 while dropping the 32GB model to $148.
It followed the retail giant’s decision last week to remove the devices from shelves following Hewlett Packard’s shock move to dump its poor performing tablet and smartphone businesses.
Harvey Norman’s head of computers and communications Ben McIntosh said he was surprised at the speed of the response, which led him to expect all 6000 of the devices in stock nationally to be sold by 3pm today.
By 2.15pm,Harvey Norman’s Chatswood and North Ryde stores in Sydney were sold out.
McIntosh said it inspired him to convince HP not to dump the product; he will call US executives in the next few hours as the country wakes up for business. “I will try to get the company [HP] to reconsider,” he said.
Despite TouchPad's original price being in the range of Apple's iPad 2, McIntosh said the feeding frenzy at Harvey Norman showed that HP had got its prices wrong.
“My message to HP was that we found out what the price needed to be all along.”
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