The Top Seven People To Succeed In A Position Managing HP’S Prices [After Cutting The HP TouchPad's Price Eighty Percent In Seven Weeks, We Look At The Most Likely Figures To Take Over The Slot Managing Such A Clearout]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Friday, 26. August 2011 under: Computers & Computing, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets, xFeatured

It’s been a strange few weeks for HP. Not only did we just watch HP pretty much abandon the dream of being cooler than Apple by dumping a substantial portion of its hardware lineup, but we also got the thrill of a lifetime, watching the prices on HP TouchPads fall to their lowest level ever, a meager $99. But in watching this precipitous drop, it made me wonder: who was in charge of pricing out there, a chimp? Seriously, that price went from $500 at launch to only $99 in the span of about seven weeks. It was one of the fastest price drops I’d seen since shares of Enron. And so, as is so often the standard, I set out to figure out just what figure might be most appropriately in charge of the pricing structures at HP, and here is the result: The Top Seven Candidates For Head Of Pricing At HP.

7. Ken Lay

Well, we’ve got to kick things off just a little realistically, no? And who better to oversee an eighty percent drop in seven weeks than someone who’s already seen an eighty percent drop in value in the form of the stock price of his then-company Enron. Sure, he’s dead, but he still would have made a bang-up choice to oversee the pricing on HP’s product line. Who better than a man who’s already seen it?

6. Carter Burke

Yes, you probably recognize this weaselly little schmuck from Aliens. Weyland Yutani sent him and a bundle of Colonial Marines out to fetch a sample of the Xenomorph (the correct name for the alien species) from LV-426, or Acheron. Naturally, most of the squad dies, including Burke, but he’s about the only person in the Alien saga who’s portrayed as genuinely more evil than the Xenomorphs themselves, leading to Ripley’s immortal quote about how at least the Aliens wouldn’t sell out their own race for a “percentage”. But who better than someone who doesn’t mind using an eight year old girl as a live incubator to smuggle in Aliens to take over an eighty percent price drop in seven weeks?

5. The Mad Hatter

Yes, we’re getting a bit lit’ry on this one, handing over pricing duties for HP products to the thoroughly insane tea party host from Alice in Wonderland. Whether you like him animated or Johnny Depp-style, it doesn’t particularly matter, as the progenitor of the unbirthday, random place changes, and a criminal conviction for the murder of time itself, it’s hard to imagine many more fitting characters to take over the pricing structure at HP, a world where an eighty percent price cut over the course of seven weeks is normal.

4. Gil Gunderson

The hapless, luckless, and thoroughly success-less Gil Gunderson of The Simpsons fame–often referred to by Gil himself in the third person as Ol’Gil–has a long and storied history of selling things nobody wants. He was a Coleco computer salesman as recently as 1998. While performing telemarketing duties, he danced for a potential customer that couldn’t possibly see him do so just to keep them on the line. Gil’s the type of can-do-but-often-doesn’t guy that HP needs handling their prices, because to Ol’Gil, an eighty percent markdown to move product is business as usual.

3. Al Bundy

Perhaps the only man out there more thoroughly luckless than Gil Gunderson, Al Bundy may not be your first pick for a guy to run the pricing structure of HP, but there’s one incident that stands out in my mind that makes him perfect for the job. While Al’s had his share of misadventures over the years, one particular incident had him doing inventory at the shoe store, a task he particularly hated. A mishap during said task left him crashing through a wall, where he discovered a series of crates behind what actually was a false wall. Contained in those crates were boxes and boxes of shoes from the 1970s, which he himself had placed behind said false wall twenty years prior in order to get out of–you guessed it–doing inventory. A man who’s willing to make a false wall to secret hundreds of pairs of old shoes to avoid counting them is just the kind of guy you want behind an eighty percent price drop in seven weeks.

2.Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg

The homicidal, psychopathic head of Zorg Industries from The Fifth Element makes perfect sense to take over the slot of pricing at HP. Not only is he CEO of a major corporation that bears his name, but he’s also got the head for numbers required at HP. Why, when the Earth government approached him about layoffs to cool down the economy, saying they needed a hundred thousand people out of work, Zorg took the ball and ran with it, laying off a million. And it’s just that kind of attention to detail that turns “cut fifty dollars off the price” into “cut four hundred dollars off the price”.

1. Malfunctioning Eddie

Futurama’s car selling robot par excellence, Malfunctioning Eddie is known for two things: his tendency to explode when surprised, and his incredible sales strategy, which includes low, low prices and random explosions. In fact, when approached by a customer who actually wanted to pay sticker price at his car lot, the aptly-named Malfunctioning Eddie’s Rocket Car Emporium, Eddie was so astonished that he, not surprisingly, exploded.

And so, there you have it–the seven most likely candidates to handle pricing duties out at HP. They may never manage to be cooler than Apple thanks to their divestiture of their hardware business, but one thing’s for sure, no one will ever forget that they managed to take a reasonably good quality tablet from $500 to a mere $99 in just seven weeks.

But who do you think could have qualified to handle such a bizarre pricing hatchet job? Who had just the right blend of desperate and evil to take the gig themselves? No matter who you think could have done it, we’d love your suggestions down in the comments section below.