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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

#191

Post by dejobaan »

refulgentis wrote: post #133
dwedge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pattern sticks out to me, to the point where I have a directive in my LLM conversations, telling it to never to use "It's not just X—it's Y." So, I'm with you on this!

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

#192

Post by bluGill »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #157
bluGill wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again killing it before it took off That 2011 iPAQ has a Windows button. Wikipedia lists them as running "Windows Mobile".

I may remember my dates wrong... Close enough for this discussion though.

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

#193

Post by hotsauceror »

stratosgear wrote: post #32

He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?

"I nobly refused these golden handcuffs so that well down the road I could continue huffing the farts of a company that is a shell of its former self. Don't let your eyes deceive you - they're still a powerhouse. Buy my book."

Is this what LinkedIn considers radical candor?

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

#194

Post by cheema33 »

trentnix wrote: post #156

I’m not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so. Maybe it’s the “LinkedIn”-friendly prose. Maybe it’s the “lessons learned” which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it isn’t this guy at all and is just my general frustration with modern big tech that bleeds its customers and abruptly dismisses products, projects, and employees to buoy its stock price. But my gut reaction after reading was “what…

> “what a bunch of self-serving nonsense”

That is exactly how I felt.

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

#195

Post by yujzgzc »

My dude such systemic problems can't be attributed to you being out of office. If a hurricane had hit hp headquarters you'd have been just about as responsible. Board made a decision, CEO made decisions, were they wrong? Possibly. What can one man do about it? Not much honestly, unless you own the shares.

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

#196

Post by RiverCrochet »

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…

Windows CE is quite internally different than Windows NT. It still does support multitasking, but kernel version 5 (which was on all the CE devices of the late 2000's/early 2010's) had a maximum of 32 processes. It was a platform specifically for embedded use, though the GUI was styled to resemble Windows OSes at the time and of course numerous Microsoft things were ported over.

Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to 10 were NT based.

Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29. 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.

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

#197

Post by timschmidt »

I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could use iPad 1 cases with the TouchPad and everything fit nicely and worked.

Apple sued Samsung over the shape of their phones. I think it's at least plausible that Apple and HP's legal departments had some discussions about the TouchPad which remain under NDA to this day.

WebOS was so far ahead of it's time in terms of usability and features in the default applications that it's hard to imagine someone dense enough to opt out of owning the mobile platform over the next several decades voluntarily.

But I can imagine an emergency operation to avoid all out legal warfare with Cupertino.

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

#198

Post by phatskat »

klank wrote: post #176
7thaccount wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.

I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol

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

#199

Post by bluGill »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #186

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 divi…

HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.

Your questions though are valid.

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

#200

Post by lvl155 »

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…

To be fair, nothing would have been able to compete against Apple during that time. It had to have been developed completely from ground up and not hampered by Palm legacy.
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