Bad Market, Good Market

So why is Hewlett-Packard is building a Windows 8 Professional slate first? Some suggest HP and its fellow Windows PC builders are miffed at Microsoft for encroaching on their turf with the Surface tablets. Another potential problem is cost. A recent poll of vendors by at the Computex Taipei trade show reveals that Microsoft is charging its hardware partners about $85 per copy of Windows RT, making it darn near impossible to turn a profit on a sub-$500 consumer slate.

Finally, there's the possibility that a business-oriented tablet is simply a smarter play for HP, which over the past year has refocused its efforts on higher-margin enterprise customers. A Windows 8 tablet with an x86 CPU--one similar to Microsoft's own Surface for Windows 8 Professional--could run standard Windows programs such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, thereby making it more appealing to business users.

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