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HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

finance.yahoo.com

121–130 of 148 posts

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#121
post #22

"Palm’s unparalleled webOS platform" Question: is Palm's web os platform really unparalleled? Or is it quickly falling behind the race that is now dominated by iPhone and android?

Open source packages and linux kernel compiled together - really really unparalleled. No community, no support, no market, just a plain cognitive dissonance.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#122
post #52

HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight. Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon. However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technolo…

I laughed because they were also a major player in the mobile devices market upon the acquisition of Compaq. Remember the iPaq? They were solid devices at the time and sold well. Granted, your emphasis on WebOS is correct. That time, they didn't get control of an OS. Microsoft let WinCE stagnate to some degree over the next few years. We'll see how HP does this time around.

First EDS and now this. HP is just going after mega deals but no real innovation in their own R&D. As an ex-HP employee I can only imagine what all they could do had they invested same in R&D.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#123
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This deal (...) gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple." Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Design.

Apple has been milking the same, tired design cues for the last 10 years. The fact that people still think they have brilliant designers is a testament to the brilliance of their marketing team.

I think you're missing the distinction between design and fashion.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#124
I can't imagine this going well for HP or Palm. Palm has already been passed around 5+ times and it just gets chewed up by bureaucracy worse and worse each time. HP also doesn't really have a strong history of stylish consumer electronics, particularly in the non-business market, which is frankly what the mobile market is all about. It's all about hearts & minds.

With Apple and Android clearly the top players, and Microsoft always being a long-term contender, I don't see how there's any room left in the marketplace for another major player.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#125
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I laughed because they were also a major player in the mobile devices market upon the acquisition of Compaq. Remember the iPaq? They were solid devices at the time and sold well. Granted, your emphasis on WebOS is correct. That time, they didn't get control of an OS. Microsoft let WinCE stagnate to some degree over the next few years. We'll see how HP does this time around.

First EDS and now this. HP is just going after mega deals but no real innovation in their own R&D. As an ex-HP employee I can only imagine what all they could do had they invested same in R&D.

The memristor alone is a gold mine. They've also innovated tremendously in making data centers more energy efficient. I'm not sure what you consider innovation, but because this stuff doesn't make in the news regularly like some pretty phones do, it doesn't mean large companies like IBM and HP aren't innovating every day.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#126
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! I hate that bleepin' message. (I didn't know you could delete it.)

Yeah, it's the default email signature for iPhone and many others and you can change it under Settings->Mail, Contacts-> Signature. I'm not sure who added it first, but I find it obnoxious regardless of what company does it.

I believe the "Sent from my Blackberry" message was responsible for a large part of Blackberry's success, so it makes sense that Apple would want to do the same. It's a lot less obnoxious than the advertisement footers Hotmail adds. Still, I'd change it right away if I had an iPhone.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#127

Dear HP: Please don't mess this up. You're a storied pioneer in tech, but you got massive and lost your sense of direction. You're about to acquire something of a microcosm of yourself—a company that pioneered an industry but lost its way as it grew. The difference is that your new acquisition rediscovered its sense of curiosity and turned itself around, too late to save itself, but brilliantly so nonetheless. You ca…

Actually, HP recently changed their tagline to "Create Amazing". It's a pretty good indication of where HP has gone.

I quit HP early this year (around 18 months after I joined HP in an aquisition). After that experience, I can't believe HP continues to grow at all.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#128
post #20
post #11

I'm an idiot. I've been mulling buying some PALM for a while.

By awhile, I hope you mean less than a month, since they've been in a downward spiral and a month ago were above the $5.70 asking price. 2 months ago they were at $8 and 6 months ago they were at $16 per share. It was a good thing you didn't buy it (unless you purchased December 2008).

I misread it and thought he meant he was considering buying the entire company and was disappointed that HP beat him to it.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#129
post #115
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This deal (...) gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple." Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Design.

Except for a lot of other things, too: iTunes client, App Store with millions of credit card numbers in its database, MobileMe cloud service, a chip design firm in PA Semiconductor, 5% of Akamai, 7% of Disney, a soon to launch iAds, and a soon to launch Game Centre. People seem to forget that Apple owns a chunk of absolutely everything from one end to the other.

MobileMe cloud service

Palm's Synergy works better than MobileMe ever has (including its time back as .Mac). Its free, over the air and automatic. Handles calendars, address book and the like. And I've never had (or heard of) a horror story in which it synced and removed all the contacts on the device.

Re: HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

#130
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This deal (...) gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple." Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Design.

I've used the Pre (I have an iPhone) - it is incredibly solidly designed. Its main problems are twofold: - It's slow. Really slow. If they can get a 2-3x performance improvement overall throughout webOS, they can actually compete with Apple. So far it's just not snappy enough to be a pleasant experience. - The marketing sucked. Seriously, what the hell. It's almost as if they went out of the way to convince you to no…

How long ago was this? Things have gotten a lot faster esp with recent releases.

Plus if you overclock, it's actually faster than the 3GS on the JS benchmarks.

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