Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

philmckinney.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 517 posts

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

#261

Post by danielmarkbruce »

foobarian wrote: post #175
jakelazaroff wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.

That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted from that price tag and expected immediate results without years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change also didn't help apparently.

I'd say this attitude is more common than many realize. Some seem to think "being in the game" is the thing. It's not just acquisitions - it's half assed investment in product lines. You have to win.

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

#262

Post by jeroenhd »

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…

I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excellent, both in terms of support duration and general stability.

I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.

As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".

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

#263

Post by RajT88 »

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…

I know a guy who held this attitude. He somehow got into a top MBA program without any undergrad degree and poor grades. (Bribery, one wonders)

Got his MBA, eventually bragged about how he lied his way into a CTO position with no tech skills. Lasted about 6 months. No longer listed on his LinkedIn.

After all that, somehow still hasn't eaten his humble pie. Still believes this idea you don't need to know stuff about technology to manage a technology organization.

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

#264

Post by sundarurfriend »

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…

> This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.

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

#265

Post by jmtulloss »

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…

Hey. I wrote some of that trash.

I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch.

Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship stuff that wasn’t ready and couldn’t be ready with the resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have taken a good start and given it the space to become great. Maybe.

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

#266

Post by cogman10 »

KronisLV wrote: post #188
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…

> 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…

The major complaint I have with the 5060 is it offers me no reason to update my 3060 Ti. It's 2 generations out and is somewhere around a 10% performance increase at roughly the same power envelope.

It seems like the only trick nVidia has for consumer cards is dumping in more power.

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

#267

Post by Lammy »

legitster wrote: post #87

I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design. We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind. Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market…

I'm selling OxyContin on my Palm Pixi / man, chicken sandwiches, they cost a clam fifty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ

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

#268

Post by RajT88 »

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…

WebOS LG TV owner, and TouchPad owner here.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad.

The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.

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

#269

Post by scarface_74 »

Tteriffic wrote: post #202
commandlinefan wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The Apple Watch though is much more successful than the iPod ever was.

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

#270

Post by goosedragons »

lukevp wrote: post #112
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…

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.

WebOS was incredible on phones too. Android and iOS basically mined the Palm Pre for ideas for years. In 2010 I had a phone with touch based gesture navigation, card based multitasking, magnetically attached wireless charging that displayed a clock when docked.
Post reply on HN