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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

#281

Post by cogman10 »

phatskat wrote: post #203
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…

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,…

It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the way they now handle multiple applications.

The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.

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

#282

Post by dabbz »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #259
wvenable wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a few years ago. I had never used one before but I was actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand now what it had it's fans. Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.

They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had…

I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.

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

#283

Post by DannyBee »

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…

Oh, it's worse in some ways - Leo didn't leave SAP to take this job. Instead, SAP's board chose not to renew his contract in Feb, 2010, so he resigned.

SAP board; This guy sucks let's move on

HP: we'll take him!

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

#285

Post by TheAmazingRace »

cycomanic wrote: post #212
7thaccount wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree that Windows phone was actually quite nice, I wish they didn't have to kill Meego to make it by planting a mole CEO at Nokia. If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.

The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be made in Finland. After that, and the whole brand licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones were made in China going forward. Such a shame.

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

#286

Post by xeromal »

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'm pretty sure I bought one for 99$ but I can't remember if that was directly from HP. I LOVED that thign

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

#287

Post by cogman10 »

RajT88 wrote: post #268
IshKebab wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't remember the touchpad performance being all that bad for the time. Was pretty snappy IIRC.

My LG TV, on the other hand, definitely struggles particularly running apps. That might just be due to the age of the tv.

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

#288

Post by timewizard »

bluGill wrote: post #247
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.

That open ecosystem needs years of investment to develop. A few people will take the risk and make a first app, but a lot will wait longer.

I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market.

Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.

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

#289

Post by DannyBee »

hartator wrote: post #272
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…

(just a note, it's Léo not Leo).

I think this is fair read, but to be also fair, it's easy to criticize Léo - the SAP board had literally fired him 6 months before HP decided he would be a great fit!

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

#290

Post by monocasa »

saghm wrote: post #237
wmf wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...

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