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HP Ousts Kodak At Wal-Mart; Tweet-Fight A Split DecisionHP Ousts Kodak At Wal-Mart; Tweet-Fight A Split Decision
Hewlett-Packard has won a highly lucrative and bitterly contested battle against Kodak as the printer supplier for photo kiosks in thousands of Wal-Mart stores, giving HP a dynamic and long-lasting revenue stream for its ink, toner, and paper. Kodak's loss inspired its CMO to tweet a message to HP saying, "Shame on your tactics."
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Hewlett-Packard has won a highly lucrative and bitterly contested battle against Kodak as the printer supplier for photo kiosks in thousands of Wal-Mart stores, giving HP a dynamic and long-lasting revenue stream for its ink, toner, and paper. Kodak's loss inspired its CMO to tweet a message to HP saying, "Shame on your tactics."From a Wall Street Journal article:
The H-P kiosk rollout, which Wal-Mart says will be completed by this summer, will dislodge existing photo booths made by Kodak, which has provided its kiosks to Wal-Mart since at least 2006.Wal-Mart has 8,416 retail units under various brand names in 15 countries. . . .
"These kiosks stay installed for nine or 10 years," H-P Chief Executive Mark Hurd told investors at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday morning. H-P gets "100% supplies connect," he said, referring to the sales of the additional printing products.
Not surprisingly, the Kodak folks were less than pleased with Wal-Mart's decision but turned their anger toward competitor HP instead of decision-maker Wal-Mart as Kodak CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett accused HP of cratering its prices on printers while keeping them high on refills, according to the Journal story.
Hey Jeffrey: I won't tweet this, but here's a little news: how the heck do you think the printer business really operates??
During the competition for the Wal-Mart business, HP flexed more than its pricing muscles by doing a little trash-tweeting of its own, according to the Journal article:
"You have a fight you can't possibly win," tweeted Angela LoSasso, the head of social media strategy for H-P's imaging and printing group.
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