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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

#231

Post by wmf »

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_...

The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.

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

#232

Post by cycomanic »

ang_cire wrote: post #140
phkahler wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

So true. A friend of mine worked as a manager at an ECO diary producer (milk, cheese yoghurt). An investment firm bought the owners who build the company from nothing for a substantial sum. They then brought in a new young executive team who mainly had experience and making online clothes and food retail startups. Initially the owners had a requirement to consult to the business for some amount of time. That was quickly dropped as they didn't want the old owners to "interfere" (essentially telling the exec that they what they wanted to do didn't work). After less than a year my friend and the product manager where the only managers left from before and they had become the "nay sayers" (I.e. telling the boars their ideas and execution don't work in this industry) and where eventually let go. By this time they had lost major costumers, majorly invested into equipment that still didn't work (as the product manager predicted from the get go) and the company was probably worth less than half. I just read the news that 7 years later they sold at 2% of the purchase price. Cases like this should really be mandatory study.

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

#233

Post by wvenable »

IshKebab wrote: post #204
onli wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern software development has proven out this whole idea. If WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't get enough development attention.

Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges to success.

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

#234

Post by pipeline_peak »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #120
whatever1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh you are right, I remembered 4 was released in 2010, and my mind jumped to 5. But they were doing the s cycles back then.

And the first WebOS device launched was not 2011, it was actually the Palm Pre in 2009. The iPhone 3G and the App Store were not even a year old when that Pre launched.

As a high school freshman in 2009, I can confirm that no teen in the Northern VA area wanted that thing lol.

They did however rave about Droid and iPhone.

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

#235

Post by tootie »

renewiltord wrote: post #31

HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be Autonomy.

I remember when that was happening. Autonomy boasted a few flagship products around enterprise search and CMS. Products I was very familiar with as an implementer. Products that well and truly sucked even back in the early days when they didn't have a ton of competition. By 2011 they were losing customers. Even without seeing their balance sheet, the $10B price tag just felt it had to be a huge mistake.

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

#236

Post by bluGill »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #210
bluGill wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.

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

#237

Post by saghm »

wmf wrote: post #231
joecool1029 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_...

The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.

I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.

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

#238

Post by throwanem »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #152
paxys wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this - https://fdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/hp/hp-ipaq-glisten-1.jpg . They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did…

> By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year. They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you hav…

> What's the problem?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/blackberry-revenu...

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

#239

Post by LTL_FTC »

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…

I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of accessories or the Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have their commission structure altered to benefit significantly more from each windows phone sale if this was ever to succeed. This is why iPhone competitors failed initially, the sales people took the path of least resistance and more money, just like most would.

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

#240

Post by scarface_74 »

It wouldn’t matter. By 2010, tge iPhone 4 was out. iOS 4 allowed enough multitasking to be useful as far as most people cared about. Apple had manufacturing capabilities that Palm could only dream about via its Chinese supply chain. It had the app ecosystem. physical Apple stores, carrier relationships, marketing, the iPhone 4 was already a status symbol in China.

If MS couldn’t break into the mobile market, Palm definitely didn’t have a chance.

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