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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

#201

Post by c-linkage »

joecool1029 wrote: post #172
bluGill wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Holy cow was that forecast bad!

It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.

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

#202

Post by Tteriffic »

commandlinefan wrote: post #185
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.

Vision Pro, different kind of device but same idea

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

#203

Post by phatskat »

onli wrote: post #131
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 meanwhil…

I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of “this just needs a little polish”, what I would expect for any new to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me.

I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.

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

#204

Post by IshKebab »

onli wrote: post #131
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 meanwhil…

> The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut.

Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/22/hp-touchp...

I bought one, and ... honestly even at that low price I regretted it. The software was trash. I don't know why WebOS got so much praise, it was clearly not fit for purpose.

I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.

That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.

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

#205

Post by Retr0id »

I learned about webOS in an unusual way, by writing exploits for a 2019 LG TV.

Something that became apparent even from this vantage point, was that a) the core platform was very solid and nice to work with b) the developers working on product features seemed largely unaware of point a). I assume that when webOS changed hands repeatedly, tons of institutional knowledge about how to actually use it got lost along the way (particularly in the security department). Unfortunate.

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

#206

Post by roughly »

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…

Defector had a great piece on roughly this point: https://defector.com/how-will-the-golden-age-of-making-it-wo...

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

#207

Post by zozbot234 »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #196
eloisant wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.

Yeah, I too liked to run Windows NT 3.1 initial release on my DEC Alpha and MIPS workstations. Wait, what?

(I think you meant to say that the support for ARM32 specifically in Windows RT and the NT-based Windows Mobile 8+ was a noteworthy milestone, which I suppose is a fair point.)

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

#208

Post by bc569a80a344f9c »

harrydehal wrote: post #58
mrweasel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft. Now you have two HPs: - HPE, pretty much a shell of a company.…

Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.

HPE wants to buy Juniper. The DOJ has blocked the deal and that lawsuit is expected to play out next month.

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

#209

Post by giantrobot »

hnlmorg wrote: post #83
lesuorac wrote: post #14

> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS. Is this actually the case? I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of…

Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards) Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset

> Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset

I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS. Besides the $499 iPad I don't think there were any other 10" tablets around.

People like watching TV and movies on tablets. Not everyone has space or wants a bedroom TV. Not everyone wants to watch whatever their partner or roommates are watching on a living room TV.

A 4:3 ratio screen is also much nicer than a 16:9 ratio screen for reading books and PDFs. An A4/letter paper is closer to 3:4 than 9:16 so it's way easier to read even two column pages without zooming and panning over a single page like you need to do on a 9:16 ratio screen.

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

#210

Post by charlieyu1 »

bluGill wrote: post #199
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.

Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
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