Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently posted pictures and specs about its new Envy desktop PC on its website and caught the attention of Bing Fund partner Rahul Sood. Unfortunately, the VoodooPC founder was less than impressed with the latest addition to the Envy line and posted a rather irritated note to his Facebook network.
Before joining Microsoft, Sood founded VoodooPC, which was acquired by HP including all of its assets, brands and staff in 2006. Sood joined HP as CTO for its gaming PCs, but left the company in late 2010 - and HP killed much of the former VoodooPC product line earlier this year. However, Voodoo's Envy brand lives on and resulted in the most recent ENVY h8-1400t desktop PC model.
Sood, somewhat displeased, reacted to the machine with the following Facebook post:
"Thought I'd seen everything...then I saw the 'HP ENVY H8' desktop... what the heck guys? Is this code for I give up?"
Sure, the PC isn't an industrial design masterpiece -- no one would expect that with a starting price of $650 and the fact that HP is not a boutique PC brand. Packing a third gen Intel Core i5-3330 quad-core CPU (3.0GHz, 6MB shared cache), 6GB of DDR3, a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7450, and a 1TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive, it's a mainstream PC for a mainstream brand. However, Sood apparently did not take issue with the design or the specs, but with the name Envy H8-1400T. The silly numbering aside, someone could easily read the product name as "Envy Hate."
It is unlikely that this is a deliberate move to make sure Voodoo's Envy will die, but we could file this one under brand blunders, right next to Mitsubishi Pajero and Chevrolet Nova.
We reached out to Sood, who told us: "I've always said that brand is so much more than a logo on the box, it starts with culture, which leads to product, which leads to evangelism and community - and all of that becomes the soul of your brand. The HP Way is still one of my favorite business books, and HP is a pioneer in this industry and an icon in the Valley. Let's hope they find the HP Way again."
