Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

philmckinney.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 517 posts

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

#121

Post by eloisant »

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.

To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great.

That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".

One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a completely different userspace that what we had in desktop OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works" aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.

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

#123

Post by mayoff »

When I think about HP as a software & services company, I think about the times I booked Disney vacations in the 2010s. The Disney web site for managing your reservations, looking at park attraction wait times, etc., was usually painfully slow, and the bottom of every page proudly featured the HP logo.

It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.

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

#124

Post by [deleted] »

Jtsummers wrote: post #92
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough t…

> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit…

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by bee_rider »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #80
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been. In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensor…

I agree.

OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers attribute the computers to them. But they don’t have a core competency in software. And they don’t have a core competency in the hardest parts of hardware—chip design, etc.

Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping them, that’s all important stuff. They weren’t in a position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the three games Apple plays, almost as well as Apple.

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

#126

Post by dartharva »

It is amusing how mainstream media's coverage of Apotheker's firing is opposite to what the author says regarding his attitude towards webOS:

> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.

from https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...

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

#127

Post by PaulHoule »

Jtsummers wrote: post #92
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough t…

> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit…

One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying notifications or annoying popups to access privacy violating features [1], without adding clutter to an already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look the same, etc.

[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...

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

#128

Post by freeone3000 »

bluGill wrote: post #108
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.

Most companies that have been around for decades would be absolutely fine with a mediocre CEO.

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

#130

Post by bluGill »

phkahler wrote: post #82

Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and c…

He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000 units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market probably wasn't even his job.

I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of investment to build a platform like this.

Post reply on HN