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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

#161

Post by detourdog »

bluGill wrote: post #99
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…

The price was likely too high, though that is debatable. However the real take away is if you want something like this to work out you need to invest in to for years. There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points havi…

What I find interesting about your comment is that iPhone launched with out an ecosystem and 4 years later a. App Store was tabled stakes.

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

#162

Post by AdrianB1 »

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 not specific to HP, but to the top management style of that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these are the companies that are on top today.

There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.

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

#163

Post by IntrepidPig »

Nothing about this makes any sense. We’ve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and realize it’s all a ploy to sell you his fancy new equivalent to a self-help book, which you can tell is legit because its name is a forced acronym. Can we take this off the front page please?

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

#164

Post by cibyr »

I really wanted a Palm Pre back in the day, but they initially didn't offer them at all outside of the US, and later only in a handful of other countries. It seemed like they weren't even trying. The tablet saw wider distribution, but it was a joke - nobody was going to pay iPad prices for a plastic piece of crap.

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

#165

Post by jerf »

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…

w.r.t. few apps caring about state, I recently upgraded my phone, which I had been using for a while and did not realize was a 2021 model, basically solely because at 4GB of RAM, I was getting to the point that I couldn't switch between any two apps without them all totally restarting on every switch because I was out of RAM all the time. I was also just starting to notice the battery was going but I could have managed that for a while yet... I really upgraded just for the RAM.

(Also I had to reset the built-in camera to factory state and tell it to stop updating, because it couldn't even start with my phone's RAM anymore. Weird thing is I can't tell you what it was doing any better than the stock factory version.)

But on, ahem, a "real" phone, it is nice to just assume that either I'm still swapped in, or the user doesn't care anymore. It's not quite 100% accurate, but it's pretty close, and low-effort for the app developer who doesn't have to be guessing any more about what state is and is not important.

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

#167

Post by x0x0 »

fisherjeff wrote: post #110
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…

Pivoted to shilling halfway down.

And the acquisition was entirely incompetent. These devices need a software ecosystem. Purchasing the company without the acquirer having a bought-in plan to build that ecosystem was just dumb. And that would have required a company willing to lose money likely for half a decade minimum.

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

#168

Post by gwbas1c »

I remember the day the WebOS tablet came out. I saw stanchions outside of a mobile phone store, with staff waiting for people to show up. No one was there. I had never heard any buzz about WebOS beforehand, and clearly no one else had either.

I have to agree with the sentiment here that the launch was botched, but I also agree with McKinney's assessment that it was killed prematurely. The market for mobile / tablet is huge, and there was plenty of time to "catch up." Perhaps the tablet was launched prematurely; and instead the launch should have focused on app developers?

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

#169

Post by neilv »

stuff4ben wrote: post #7

If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

In a company like HP at that moment...

* Might the same decisions have been made, even if the CTO were there?

* Would the CTO have one or more (SVP? VP?) people ramped up on the technical/product, and able to take a temporary acting-CTO role on that?

* Would there have been any sharp-elbow environment reason not to elevate subordinates temporarily into one's role and access? (For example, because you might return to find it's permanent.)

* What was the influence and involvement of the other execs? Surely it wasn't just CTO saying "buy this", CEO saying "OK", and then a product and marketing apparatus executing indifferently?

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

#170

Post by timewizard »

bluGill wrote: post #99
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…

The price was likely too high, though that is debatable. However the real take away is if you want something like this to work out you need to invest in to for years. There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points havi…

> is years of investment.

Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers.

> to get a lot of apps

Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs. They created their own resistance to app development.

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