HP Touchpad Launch Party, Best Buy Union Square, New York City, June 30, 2011

In the tablet market, there’s no middle path, no way to build a business by knocking off a dollar or feature here or there. Just ask Hewlett-Packard about its unlikeliest overnight hit.

It started Friday night: Just a day after announcing drowning its Touchpad in the bathtub, HP was selling off the $400 (once $500) discontinued corpses for just $99.

Disclosure: I bought one. After reading and writing so much about HP’s transformation, it felt like a duty.

But as the weekend progressed, it increasingly felt like a thing. It’s hard to know exactly how many discounted Touchpads have actually been sold. But as waves of retailers picked up the promotion, then sold out of their stock, double-digit curiosity became doubled-down demand. By the end of the weekend, Best Buy employees were reporting tales of stampedes. This morning, the Touchpad topped electronics sales at Amazon.

Even though I bought a Touchpad myself, I didn’t see it coming. Maybe it’s because I’ve been soaked in tablet market pessimism, or because I sprung the extra $50 for the 32GB model. As ZDNet’s Ricardo Bilton writes, there’s something special about $99:

I don’t know what goes on psychologically, but when the average person sees a $99 price tag, something in their brain clicks. Eyes light up with dollar signs and hearts beat with a certain kind of deal-hungry fervor. The same thing happened to me, which is why I found myself biking all around town in search for a device that I didn’t actually want. There was a thrill, and a mostly irrational lust to save money on something I had no intention of buying hours prior.

It’s what Apple did with 99-cent songs and Amazon has tried to do with $9.99 ebooks. Drop a digit and businesses that looked crazy start to make a lot more sense.

Besides Touchpad mania (aka webOSia), the discount inspired plenty of reflection on where HP went wrong. Here is a short list of common complaints and responses.

This is where we leave morbid HP-rubbernecking behind, and the story actually starts getting interesting.

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