This is My Next's Joshua Topolsky Called the HP TouchPad Firesale

I was just going to post this as an update to my previous post, but this is too good to bury. In the process of catching up on tech podcasts on my drive back home this evening, I started listening to the "this is my next podcast" from 8/12/2011 and realized that Joshua Topolsky called the $99 TouchPad a week before it happened. Now this could imply that HP took a cue from This is my Next to firesale the TouchPad in order to get mass adoption of WebOS and perhaps poise the platform to be #2 on tablets...once again, a wild idea, but start listening at around 18 minutes into the podcast and you'll likely drop your jaw on this.

Here's a snippet (20 minutes in): "So like if they priced it at $100 and sold 10 million of them they would now be the number two tablet. I mean I'm saying like, the price doesn't define what it is. I mean certainly you have to keep it at a certain price, but if they had managed to sell 5 million tablets they would be at a much better position than they are now. People buy $99 tablet; they think they're gonna be cool. What HP should have done is just come out with a $99 TouchPad and completely ruined the industry, completely thrown everybody off. They could've taken a hit, like a few billion." And Nilay Patel's response..."That's such, like, a joker move, like lighting a pile of money on fire to prove that you don't need it." And then Josh follows up with "right, to put them in people's hands, so you would've locked them into the TouchPad. Developers have an audience, and they release a new TouchPad that like $199 that's thinner....I think that would've wrecked the program...for Apple, right? We'll never know now, will we?" Brilliant...for more on the future of WebOS from Josh Topolsky, check out his most recent op-ed at Washington Post. You never know, maybe WebOS will become Amazon's tablet OS, running on Samsung hardware.