People have been saying this for more than a year, just around the time when HTC started to release phone after phone, that this strategy is not going to work for long, and not only will it make their own customers angry because they feel they get ripped off when a slightly better version of their phones comes out just a few weeks later, but it will also start to hurt HTC financially, because of the increased complexity and costs.
But HTC’s lead in UK, Phil Roberson, has confirmed that HTC will try to release only a few models in 2012, and instead try to make every phone special. HTC will try to get back innovation, instead of focusing more on squeezing an extra percent of the market by releasing an almost identical model, just for the sake of being a new model, that would hopefully bring them more sales.
Instead, just like Samsung before them with the Galaxy S models, and soon Motorola who will have the same strategy in 2012, they’ll try to impress millions of potential customers with blockbuster devices that will sell themselves because of how amazing they will be! Or so HTC hopes.
Here’s what he had to say exactly:
We have to get back to focusing on what made us great – amazing hardware and a great customer experience. We ended 2011 with far more products than we started out with. We tried to do too much.
So 2012 is about giving our customers something special. We need to make sure we do not go so far down the line that we segment our products by launching lots of different SKUs.
He also said that HTC will cut back from their focus on tablets, and try to focus on what they know to do best – smartphones. I can’t say I blame them. HTC and Motorola haven’t exactly been wizards of the tablet market. They’ve always entered the market with a tablet that is much more expensive than users are going to pay for it, and they also weren’t terribly impressive.
So this whole focus thing might actually be good for HTC’s business in 2012, as long as we see some amazing smartphones coming out soon.