Hewlett Packard has announced that it is responding to an increasingly commodified desktop PC market by bundling “premium” support services with PC purchases.
According to ITWorld, the company intends to differentiate its “Elite PC” products by offering customers the option of a single contact person for prioritised tech support, and offering business customers the ability to schedule support calls at a time of their choice.
The latest strategy comes after HP CEO Meg Whitman reversed a decision by the company to sell off its PC division in October last year.
Offering commodity software as a free, open source download and then charging users for support has become an increasingly common business model for webserver software (particularly among Linux vendors), although how successfully the same business model can be applied to hardware remains to be seen.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
