HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be Autonomy.
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
31–40 of 517 posts
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#32He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#33The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.
HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft.
Now you have two HPs:
- HPE, pretty much a shell of a company. Maintainers of HP-UX, (former) maker of Itanium servers and caretaker of Cray (but also the company that seems to have misplaced the Irix source code).
- HP, Maker of shitty printer products and expensive toner.
How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#34The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall. WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would s…
The issues that killed webOS had nothing to do with its technical merits (which were many) - it instead was a failure of product management.
* The TouchPad was priced too high for a new entrant with embryonic app support.
* It probably needed more development time before going to market, CTO doesnt really make GTM timing decisions.
* Insult to injury, as this fella pointed out - the applications for webOS extended far beyond a tablet, HP threw the baby out with the bathwater.
* They tried to make a strategic shift into software and services without having a great track record of doing those thing, which compounded all of the above, Palm did have some expertise there, but it was still tossed away.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#35> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
This is true - and WebOS was legitimately innovative here. At the time neither iOS nor Android could run more than one app at the same time. This was both an architectural matter and a UX matter. On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back…
The Nokia N900, running Maemo, also supported multitasking in 2011. It was just toppled by a similarly dedicated team of executive fuckups.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#36The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall. WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would s…
Agree. I'm sympathetic to the CTO here, but I remember the disaster of the HP TouchPad launch very well - there were multiple fatal errors here that don't seem possible to commit in an 8-week window.
The hardware had basically ~no app ecosystem. That's not a problem that occurs over 8 weeks. The software was also incredibly under-baked, and I'm doubtful that the company pivoted from "this needs more time and should release later" to "full marketing push, press events, and big launch" in that short a time either.
I don't doubt that there was a lot of conflict over strategy with the new CEO, but the framing that all of this happened while he was on the sidelines doesn't seem very plausible.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#37> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4 introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1] describes it: "To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can…
I think what’s confusing things is the underlying operating system is multitasking.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#38Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesn’t look like the board were really convinced as the author believed.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#39It's pretty easy to pattern-match LLM writing even when there's been a lot of work put into it, and it wasn't one-shotted by the LLM.
I bring this up because this is a very smart person, with an interesting story I've been waiting to hear for years, and an important point, but I couldn't read it.
Not because LLMs were involved: whatever, that's fine.
First, I'm reading then get an uneasy feeling when I see the "That wasn't X—it was Y.", which is a tell of GPT 4o at chatgpt.com or 4.1 on API. [^1 for sentences that got my attention]
Then, as I'm reading, I keep getting a weird "attention reset" buzz and I find it hard to follow. I note that there are no less than 15 sections, each 3-5 paragraphs. This is / was unnatural in writing. 0 flow.
Tips I'm taking away for myself:
- Actively read for "snappy" sentences from the LLM, and then actively eschew them -- you can't be familiar with every LLM's tells, but here, I'd try to notice the repeat structure in a completely different, and the cadence of the phrase ("snappy", in my verbiage)
- Marketing-type writing is best helped by an LLM if you can get it to give you individual feedback items that you have to address, or at least, a set of suggestions. Code works well with LLMs because the metastructure doesn't communicate meaning to a reader, there isn't "flow": in prose, the way the text was assembled can be betrayed by the structure.
[^1] A) "This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch" B) "This wasn't about buying a struggling phone company—it was our strategic entry into the future of computing platforms"
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#40He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?
He took the smaller exit package that was time limited on the muzzle to 15 years :)
Or he needed a subject to talk to to sell his “decision framework” to which the article switches rather abruptly.