HP CEO Meg Whitman: “HP Design Hasn’t Kept Up With Innovation From Apple”

Comparing oneself to Apple is never rarely a flattering task, and when it comes to design, never. Somehow, same way Apple manages to push their design prowess and gadget engineering to new levels with each major product refresh. Their oldest line (Mac) has evolved wonderfully over the years and turned into wonderfully designed pieces of art. Apple has always marketed themselves as a high-end, low-volume manufacturer who puts style and quality hardware over hitting a low-end price point or “affordability”. And a quick check at their stock price this morning seems to indicate that standard they’ve stuck by (despite numerous suggestions by analysts and industry experts to do otherwise) has worked out well for them.

In the Windows PC world of hardware, few companies come close to matching Apple’s design and build quality. Sony gets it right every once in a while. And in recent years , HP has done a decent job of focusing on design, too (despite taking the Samsung approach to design). And now HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman is pushing hard to turn HP around back into a leading Windows hardware manufacturer.

According to the WSJ, HP Meg Whitman notes how HP has done a decent job of making well designed laptops over the last few years, but that they “haven’t kept up with innovation” as of late and that they as a company need to put a much stronger focus on design as a core feature of HP hardware.

Whether or not HP will branch out from their line-walking of creating Mac clones or create something truly unique and HP remains to be seen. If one thing’s for certain, though, it’s that Meg Whitman is a much better CEO (from a consumer standpoint) than Apotheker ever was. Her attention to employee happiness by giving them all a choice between leading smartphones as well as recent chatter of re-entering the smartphone hardware business shows that she certainly has the right topics on her mind. As always, however, execution will be key. If HP can bring pump out truly unique computer hardware and compliment it with a new phone (or line of phones) we could really see a “new” HP.

This holiday season we’ll get our first taste of this new HP as a new line of desktop computers and laptops are due for release, showcasing what could be a very important few years for HP. Hopefully Meg’s walking is as good as her talking.