221–230 of 517 posts
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…
I often wonder what HP would look like today had Léo Apotheker not been such an awful fit. The damage 1 person can do in less than a year is astonishing. He even proposed selling off the PC division. WebOS was a fairly new acquisition and very well could have been the future, but he couldn't see any vision outside of software with his background. HP was built on hardware, they did't need to pivot that hard. It seems the stockholders agreed.
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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…
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.
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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.
We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a while, because they had their use cases and workflows on them that other smartphones took time to cover).
Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the initial rush that takes much more time to convince people to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)
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>> 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…
Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing. The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake. You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA If this asser…
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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…
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.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
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> "management is a generic function independent of the business being run. With an MBA and you can run Coke GM or Intel into the ground all the same." I felt it needed a little tweak. You are exactly right otherwise IMO.
They were all very successful at doing that. The financialization of everything was the death of all these businesses.
When I talk about the same topic with a friend, we say variants of "MBAs ruin everything they touch". But what we really mean is what you said.
> 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.
HP already had plenty of experience of building handheld computers at that point. Their own and from Compaq and Digital.
They needed an App store to entice developers and bring about killer apps. There was no logical reason to buy an HP Palm, it was too expensive even.