HP wins in India

WORD ON THE MG Road here in Ole Bangalore is that the rather exciting hardware wars that entertained us so much in the past are over in India.

That means an end to those rather fun stories from the Indian channel press when competitors threatened murder, and incentive warred with invective as the major players wooed and eschewed their favoured disties and resellers.

Alas, according to one experienced IT channel veteran we met in a Guinness pub no really down in the centre of Ole Bangalore, HP seems to have stitched up the entire market and made it all its own, at least as far as the channel is concerned.

It's not just PCs that HP seems to have cornered - it's peripherals like printers and scanners too, putting an end to what seemed to be burgeoning channel conflicts that made our UK ones in the 1990 like people throwing very dainty flowers at each other.

Michael Dell, he said, would find it hard to play catch up, despite the investment the firm is starting in Deep Chennai. The Indian channel isn't concerned about the threat because although Dell was and is entrenched in North America and Western Europe, Asia continues to be a very tough nut to crack indeed.

Judging from the co-op ads between Lenovo and AMD that are here all over the place, the Chinese PC firm thinks it's far from all over on that front. The mischievous might wonder that given HP's strength here, whether it will change its Ts&Cs as regularly as it did in the glory days of the early 1990s.