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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

#291

Post by rsstack »

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…

> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and

It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).

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

#292

Post by cogman10 »

bluGill wrote: post #142
bee_rider wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers attribute the computers to them. But they don’t have a core competency in software. And they don’t have a core competency in the hardest parts of hardware—chip design, etc. Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping them, that’s all important stuff. They weren’t in a position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the three ga…

HP did have competency in a lot of those areas though. They were a large company that did have fingers in a lot of different things, both software and hardware. Their PCs were visible, but they had lots of other divisions doing lots of things.

Which was perhaps their major issue. The HP expertise was all over the place with divisions around the globe reinventing the wheel. Couple that with a recently decimated and outsourced IT department (Such a colossally dumb decision) and you could effectively see HP not as one company but 100 companies all doing their own thing.

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

#293

Post by hajile »

jmtulloss wrote: post #265
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…

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 wa…

webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system.

That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.

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

#294

Post by adastra22 »

bluGill wrote: post #99
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…

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

Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.

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

#296

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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 agree with this - I was trying to read between the lines about what felt like "face saving" from the author, and what were really executive leadership failures.

That said, Leo Apotheker was such a complete speed-run, unmitigated disaster for HP, that I'm inclined to have a ton of sympathy for the author and believe his point of view. I thought the author was actually overly generous to Apotheker - the Autonomy acquisition was a total failure of leadership and due diligence, and if Apotheker was the "software guy" he was supposed to be then the Autonomy failure makes him look even worse.

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

#297

Post by codr7 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #159
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…

I remember doing some apps for Windows Phone and it really seemed they hated devs. Constantly breaking small things and then the switch to 10 made me give up. It was a nice OS though

Nokia made some pretty nice phones there for a while, and the OS looked pretty usable by Microsloth's standards.

I blame Ballmer, he's like Steve Gate's less intelligent but at least as evil brother.

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

#298

Post by ndiddy »

timewizard wrote: post #170
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…

> 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.

Clearly you have never actually used a WebOS device. They supported app sideloading out of the box and were easy to get root on via an officially supported method. There was an extremely popular third-party app store called Preware that offered all sorts of apps and OS tweaks.

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

#299

Post by swyx »

> 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 wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.

ouch. this is actually pretty cool though in terms of putting SAP vs HP in perspective, which i've never considered prior.

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

#300

Post by Marsymars »

c-linkage wrote: post #201
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_...

Holy cow was that forecast bad! It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.

> At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.

Just for some rough math here - I’m currently paying around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I’d be looking at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would increase my per-km cost by about 60%.

FWIW that’s roughly the same per-km cost increase that people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in North America by buying more expensive cars.

(Though this does apply to personal transportation only, the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)

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