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I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

philmckinney.substack.com

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Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#101

Post by wmf »

jldugger wrote: post #35
potatolicious wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The N900 battery could run down in 30 minutes due to true multitasking (especially when using the true desktop browser).

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#102

Post by mayoff »

kccqzy wrote: post #70
jerf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Prior to true multitasking on iOS, Apple would tell you to tag view controllers for preservation so that when your app launches, the OS will restore the original view controllers, as if the app has been running the whole time. Old documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles... (These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away from an app in a minute and upon switching…

The state preservation API wasn't added until iOS 6.0 in 2012.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro...

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#103

Post by MPSFounder »

msgodel wrote: post #4

The 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.

It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#104

Post by bunderbunder »

MadcapJake wrote: post #72
paxys wrote: post #13

The 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…

I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what…

I suspect that making business mistakes illegal would ultimately cause more harm than the problem such a move is trying to solve.

And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind, "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like, "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies changes to the existing product portfolio.

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#105

Post by phkahler »

ang_cire wrote: post #77

> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill. > SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wo…

>> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed.

There are aspects of management that are independent of the business being managed. But somehow in the 90's CEOs and business schools turned that into something like "management is a generic function independent of the business being run. With an MBA and you can run Coke GM or Intel all the same."

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#106

Post by AnotherGoodName »

If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms.

Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who's developed apps will point out that you shoudn't spend too much time on the tablet version. Just add some borders/sidebars and ship it. The markets not big enough to do more and the tablets are only viable today thanks to re-use of the phone hardware and software ecosystems.

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#107

Post by [deleted] »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #55
paxys wrote: post #13

The 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…

HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been. They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.

[deleted]

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#108

Post by bluGill »

ang_cire wrote: post #77

> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill. > SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wo…

I can find countless examples of this both ways. Some people are great CEOs able to turn around a company/industry they knew nothing about before. However there are a lot of bad CEOs out there. And being in a company/industry for decades is a good way to turn a bad CEO into a mediocre one which is an improvement I guess. Sadly I have no clue how to make a good CEO - and see no evidence anyone else does.

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#109

Post by potatolicious »

RankingMember wrote: post #71
potatolicious wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running. I love this, such a classic hack

So classic they still use it! iOS now offers a lot more multitasking options, but for the most part when you swipe away from an app it's still good ol' Mr. Screenshot.

And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is being done still to make this even more seamless. For example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to define UIs, because rendering such UIs can be done by the OS outside of the app process.

This means you can have an actual live UI while the actual app process is suspended. They literally don't have to wake the process until you tap on a button.

It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can define a much more coarse-grained idea of "alive" without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.

Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it

#110

Post by fisherjeff »

iconara wrote: post #69

> "Then, in late June 2011 […] I faced a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and a eight-week recovery period confined to bed. […] On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0 […] The launch was botched from the start. HP priced the TouchPad at $499 to compete directly with the iPad, but without the app ecosystem or marketing muscle to justify that premium. The device felt rushed to ma…

Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…
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