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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

#131

Post by onli »

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…

The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next generation, which then would have more apps and less early issues to have a better chance at the market.

But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the lead of webOS was.

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

#132

Post by Zigurd »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #115
snoman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal conspiracy theory is that Nokia was an orchestrated takedown by MS. Get a leader in there to tank its stock for an acquisition. MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.

Nokia were in a deep shi^W trouble way before Elop's memo. Sure, MS benefited greatly from this situation but Nokia was in the steady downhill since 2008 .

Nokia had credible mobile OSs for modern phones. Windows Phone was not one.

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

#133

Post by refulgentis »

dwedge wrote: post #117
refulgentis wrote: post #39

It'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…

At the end he's trying to sell his framework. Using AI for the copy isn't surprising

Agreed - I'm not surprised, hell, at this point...it is time for me to announce that I have adopted the position that I'm surprised and saddened if you don't use an LLM, at all, when putting something out into the world.

When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.

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

#135

Post by bluGill »

paxys wrote: post #85
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.

By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this - https://fdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/hp/hp-ipaq-glisten-1.jpg . They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did…

In early 2011 when I told people I had an Android they had no clue what I was talking about. A well done long term investment in other phones could have made a big difference - but HP wasn't willing to make it so we will never know. (Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again killing it before it took off).

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

#136

Post by potatolicious »

eloisant wrote: post #121
jldugger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it.

Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.

The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".

And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)

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

#137

Post by Jtsummers »

PaulHoule wrote: post #127
Jtsummers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps because, well, they require an internet connection too often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is typically stored on their servers, after all).

With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.

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

#138

Post by klank »

freeone3000 wrote: post #128
bluGill wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my opinion, mediocre is an excellent strategy when optimizing for longevity and durability.

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

#139

Post by nextos »

eloisant wrote: post #121
jldugger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2 "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user features under the hood.

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

#140

Post by ang_cire »

phkahler wrote: post #105
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 indepe…

Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing.

The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake.

You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA

If this assertion is rankling anyone, I invite them to look up how many private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground, by trying to make them operate like SaaS companies.

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