Calculadora HP na era do software...

A calculadora 12C é um caso raro de sucesso de produto. São mais de 20 anos praticamente sem nenhuma alteração e basta uma volta por bancos e empresas e lá estará ela. Onipresente.
Agora, a HP dá um lance que deve dar continuidade a essa história: applications para Windows e iPhone (não poderia ser outro). Se é assim, em breve teremos para Android e, porque não, Symbian e outros...

Vejam abaixo do CNET...

HP reincarnates calculators on iPhone, Windows

It looks like a fourth generation of my family is going to be introduced to the ways of reverse Polish notationcalculators.

That's because my three-year-old son, an iPhone fan in his own preschool way, is about to be exposed to Hewlett-Packard's new iPhone application that fully emulates the company's 12c financial calculator. The $14.99 application is accompanied by a $29.99 emulator of the 15c scientific calculator, which is better at handling trigonometry and integration than mortgage payments and net present value.

All that's missing is the pocket protector-like iPhone case, my colleague Ina Fried cracked as she mocked my nerdish tendencies.

In vertical orientation, the calculator app shows a basic set of functions.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The software versions of HP calculators, announced Thursday, are clever applications for HP to sell for a number of reasons.

First, HP attracted a lot of engineers, scientists, real estate agents, and Wall Street brokers with its calculators in years gone by, and the tool is genuinely useful still to those folks. Of course, they're a lot more likely to have their mobile phones with them than their calculators, no matter how pocketable they are, if indeed they still have the calculator at all.

Second, software comes with famously plump profit margins compared with hardware, even when you have to share a cut with Apple. The 12c new costs $80 in its physical incarnation, but HP must pay the cost of making each one. With software--once it's developed--HP gets to sell it over and over for much less extra cost.

Read more here...