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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

#271

Post by Not4Hire »

PaulHoule wrote: post #119
snoman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal conspiracy theory is that Nokia was an orchestrated takedown by MS. Get a leader in there to tank its stock for an acquisition. MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.

Yeah, we all know that a corrupt person in government is often sponsored by a corporation to rip off the government. I wonder if sometimes a corrupt person is put into leadership at Corporation A who is really on the take from Corporation B with the job of wrecking a competitor.

this does happen: Imagine company B poached staff from A, presumaby for'insights' into company A IP, which had nothing to do with costly decisions and some missteps of unknown causes whereafter A os still in business and B? not so much. seems like a plotline by Sun Tsu

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

#272

Post by hartator »

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…

Yeah, 8 weeks is nothing.

I feel if he was able to read news about the situation, he should probably have reached out to try to salvage the situation.

Or he should have people, processes in place, and company vision that supports all of this outside of himself.

I remember loving Palm for so long, but they were playing catching up after the iPhone. Same fate as blackberry. Both should have double down (clean, focused work via stilus) and keyboard-based workflow instead of rushing things.

He seems the author wants to talk shit about Leo Apotheker while trying to get some traction for his new side business.

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

#273

Post by mulmen »

IntrepidPig wrote: post #163

Nothing about this makes any sense. We’ve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and real…

> Can we take this off the front page please?

Don’t do this. Engagement is what drives stories to the front page. If you don’t like it just move on.

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

#274

Post by timewizard »

scarface_74 wrote: post #250
timewizard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is years of investment. Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers. > to get a lot of apps Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs. They created their own resistance to app development.

People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes. Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes. If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops t…

We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.

It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.

So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.

You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.

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

#275

Post by halflife »

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…

I was working at HP during that time.

They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free.

I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre.

I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.

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

#276

Post by dcminter »

stapedium wrote: post #216
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…

These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and mana…

I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.

Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.

I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.

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

#277

Post by simlan »

I remember looking at palm webos devices in 2010 and thinking this is cool. The docs on how things worked were really good for the time. The hardware was sleek palm pre if I remember correctly.

I was not keeping track of who bought whom at the time an why. But was surprised when webos got shut down. Android was gaining traction windows mobile on the way out. I bought an old Nokia e63 around the time because I was short on money and I loved the keyboard. The article gave me some nice nostalgic memories.

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

#278

Post by biorach »

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…

> 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.

That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.

I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_

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

#279

Post by brulard »

halflife wrote: post #275
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…

I was working at HP during that time. They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free. I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre. I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.

Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.

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

#280

Post by utopcell »

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…

this was my first thought as well.
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