In the two weeks since I guest posted on Ars Technica about the iPad and its role in a phenomenon I’m calling “Curated Computing,” comments have been heated and very interesting. Eliot VanBuskirk frames the debate this way on the Wired Epicenter blog:

“Curation is the positive flip side of Apple’s locked-down approach, decried as a major, negative development in computing by many observers, present company included. Who would have thought that in 2010, so many people would pay good money for a computer that only runs approved software?

It runs counter to the idea, prized by geeks, that computing equals freedom. If it were Microsoft doing this, we’d all be storming the Gates with torches and pitchforks.”

I don’t think that you have to exercise Apple’s level of control (e.g., not letting developers use third-party tools like Flash, not approving apps that threaten your business model, etc.) to create a compelling, curated experience — an experience in which content and functionality are deliberately restricted to serve a new form factor like a touchscreen tablet or a wearable device.

International orders grew 34% for HP . . . not this year but actually back in 1964 when non-US orders accounted for 23 percent of HP’s revenues.  While the growth of non-US tech revenues is in the news today, HP’s international orders first exceeded domestic orders not recently but as far back as 1975.

In my research on market entry and market opportunity assessment (MOA), I recently spoke to strategists at HP about how they evaluate markets.  As I was leaving the building, I stopped in to the HP museum and spent some time with the HP archivist.   The highlights of the visit include seeing the first HP device built in the now famous Palo Alto garage and a calculator that brought back memories of my father in his overstuffed chair “figuring out how to pay for college.”  I was not only impressed by the history embodied in that room but also with the value that HP places on recording and memorializing its “life” as an organization.  Not to sound too sappy but it really brings the company and the industry to life.

I’ve spent the last few weeks reading through some documents on the history of HP’s entry into international markets.  There are valuable lessons to be gleaned from their experiences.   I’ve written about many of those lessons in reports and blog posts but thought I'd draw out a few of them here.

Within 24 hours, InfoWorld published two seemingly unrelated articles. One covered HP's announcement of its intent to acquire Palm, which led people to speculate aloud, "What the heck were they thinking?" The first part of the article spent a couple of paragraphs musing about how this move might or might not help HP's interest in the slate computer market. The path from acquiring Palm to becoming an iPad competitor isn't very clear, however, so maybe the real point has nothing to do with slate computers. We can't get enough of talking about slate computers, but what if Palm's products have some potential connection to HP's existing portfolio? Crazy idea, I know.

The next day, InfoWorld published another article with the acidic headline, "Smartphone management becoming a nightmare":

Smartphones and mobile devices are becoming a nightmare for IT shops to manage, with users carrying multiple types of phones with different operating systems and expecting access to email, video-conferencing, and various types of corporate applications.

In other words, IT departments struggling with these standardization efforts might want to talk to a company that can help. Say, someone with a lot of products and services for solution areas like cloud computing, application transformation, portfolio and asset management. It'd be great if said vendor had mobile technology that factored into these larger IT infrastructure concerns.

Oh, yeah...

HP's acquisition of Palm is all over the twitterverse at the moment. And everyone has an opinion on it, and what it means (which brings to mind one of my favorite movie quotes). There are precious few facts around at present - and only time will tell exactly how the acquisition will pan out. Either way, CIOs should know the following facts about HP and the acquisition of Palm: