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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

#171

Post by quantified »

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…

Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.

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

#172

Post by joecool1029 »

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…

> 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 having different predicted ranges!).

Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...

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

#173

Post by nodamage »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?

I think the author of the article really misses the point here. While "true multitasking" might be a neat technical feature, it's not something that the end user really cares about or would base a buying decision on, especially if running multiple apps in the background at the same time came at the expense of battery life. Those early versions of iOS employed a lot of tricks to squeeze performance and battery life out of underpowered devices.

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

#174

Post by ryukafalz »

Kneecaps07 wrote: post #111
kevinsync wrote: post #94

I was fully "in" on webOS :( Still got a Palm Pre, Pre 2, Pre 3 and TouchPad in a box, and an LG webOS 2.0 OLED that died in the basement. Apps were built sort of like PhoneGap, but intentional and supported rather than a middleware work-around. webOS introduced the card concept that we all use now, along with a very coherent design language, and the devices were cool (to me, albeit a bit flimsy) with full keyboards…

I still miss my Palm Pre. I've sat here since it died and watched Android and iOS slowly adopt the UI that my Pre had 15 years ago. We were swapping between apps with cards and swiping them away a decade before anyone else. I had multiple friends end up buying the Pre and the non-slidey Pre (I can't remember the name) because they saw what I had thought it was so cool. Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the n…

> Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no shared code, but who knows.

Pretty sure it is based on a derivative of the original WebOS code! I think the LuneOS folks use some WebOS OSE code: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS

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

#175

Post by foobarian »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #3
foobarian wrote: post #2

> We knew the computing world was shifting toward mobile, and our traditional PC business faced real threats from tablets and smartphones. We needed to be there. This right here is already game over. Unless they were the ones making the tablets and smartphones and being the threats to everyone else, they had lost at this point one way or another.

That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.

That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted from that price tag and expected immediate results without years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change also didn't help apparently.

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

#176

Post by klank »

7thaccount wrote: post #155
lukevp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.

Upvoted as my experience was similar. I owned 3 windows phones over the years and they were always an absolute joy. The UI was very polished, the call quality was terrific, the camera was awesome, and it did have plenty of apps even if it was a tiny percentage of android or iPhone. To be honest though, I've never been one to care about apps. My experience was anyone who actually took the time to play with one loved i…

Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later. We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving mobile computing/devices forward during that time is (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device.

(I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)

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

#177

Post by Macha »

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…

Android has unfortunately trended the opposite direction - apps that once had tablet UIs dropped them in favour of big phone UIs as they did redesigns around 2016-2020. I dropped out of the Android tablet world in 2019 for a Windows tablet, and most recently went for an iPad this year, so maybe Android has recovered ground there, but judging by how few Android tablets are actually on the market, I wouldn't be hopeful.

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

#178

Post by refulgentis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #158
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…

Thanks for delving into this! Very helpful.

I found the issue!

;)

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

#180

Post by nwienert »

legitster wrote: post #87

I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design. We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind. Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market…

Just want to agree, WebOS was incredibly good, the Palm Pre and Pixi were both great. HP 100% killed it.
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