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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

#181

Post by Macha »

hadlock wrote: post #86
paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The device was always doomed. They launched a direct competitor to the iPad with maybe 10% of the functionality. This article is just hubris on the CTO's part ("if only I had been around for the launch instead of my incompetent team, everything would have worked out").

Had the iPad not launched immediately opposite it, I can envision a world where HP goes through two or three revisions and has a solid device with it's own "personality" much like how Microsoft has their "Surface" line of glued-together tablets and "laptops" which sorta compete with the iPad and Macbook Air even if they hardly market them. The fact that Microsoft eventually succeeded in the space seems to indicate HP…

The thing with Windows tablets and Android tablets is in both cases the software development only has to justify its net increase in spend over just doing phone apps, but since HP didn't have a good market of phone apps to begin with, they'd basically need to justify the entire software development cost, on lower sales.

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

#182

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

I hate to say this but when I saw this line:

> My continued shareholding isn't just a matter of financial confidence—it's a statement of faith in what HP can become when the right leadership applies systematic thinking to innovation decisions.

I strongly felt like it was ChatGPT and suddenly my interest in the article plummeted.

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

#183

Post by maxsilver »

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…

(as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)

The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.

An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)

A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).

The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.

Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.

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

#184

Post by nradov »

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…

You can't blame an MBA for this debacle. Léo Apotheker studied economics in college and had no formal education in management.

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

#185

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> never in a position to compete with Apple.

I kind of wonder if Apple could pull off something like an iphone or an ipad or even an ipod these days, without Steve Jobs around.

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

#186

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

I need this part explained to me.

    And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

The only way that remark makes sense:

    1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
    2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.
Because it's been decades since I've ran into new HP kit that didn't fall somewhere between awful and unusable. I say that without the least exaggeration.

DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.

Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.

Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.

Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....

As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.

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

#187

Post by paxys »

> When I decided to “retire” from HP, they offered me a separation bonus—a significant financial package that would have made my transition easier. But there was a catch: accepting it would have restricted what I could say publicly about my experiences at the company.

> I refused.

Should probably have taken it.

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

#188

Post by KronisLV »

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…

> The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.

To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined by their pricing.

For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to being more or less a sidegrade from their previous generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the asking price to your average user that has other options.

Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.

In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be overlooked.

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

#189

Post by jonny_eh »

x0x0 wrote: post #167
fisherjeff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But because I wasn't there during the critical 49 days when the decision was made to kill WebOS, somehow the failure became my responsibility.

Wow, so whiney. He's an executive, a leader. A captain doesn't complain if the crew is mad at him, for any reason.

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

#190

Post by jxramos »

> On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0. > While Apple was selling 9 million iPads that same quarter, TouchPads were gathering dust on store shelves.

Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?

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