I was reading an article by Craig Zarley who wrote a piece in the Var Business magazine, December 2007 edition, in which he described the 10 reasons HP has been successful. What struck me as odd was his #8 reason. “Makes products that don’t burst into flames.” He explains that HP dodged the laptop battery recall bullet and that HP spends a lot of money on R&D. Is this a fair assessment?

We are all familiar with the massive battery recall that happened at the beginning of 2007. It also appeared that Dell suffered the worst of the flaming batteries since some of their models were actually caught on video while in the process of catching fire. But if I recall, wasn’t Sony the manufacture of the faulty batteries? So would the problem be Dell’s lack of R&D that caused the fires or was it that Sony manufactured a bad batch?

Looking at this from an outsiders view, if I was an OEM making laptop computers and one of my folks told me our units were using laptop batteries from Sony, I think my first thoughts would be ‘good choice’. Hasn’t Sony had a very good reputation in the electronics field? Why would one use another vendor instead?

So it would appear that is exactly what HP may have done. Used a different vendor for their batteries and not used Sony. So they should get kudo’s for ‘lucking out’ and avoiding the bad Sony batteries?

What do you think?

Comments welcome.

Tags: var, business, hp, sony, dell, batteries, recall, flames, fires, laptops,