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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

#331

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Wurdan wrote: post #220
buildbot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a little uncharitable I think, you could know all those issues and be hoping that marketing and management will hold off on a launch until things are set. And the pricing made a huge difference - at 250, it would have been a different story I think!

A CTO shouldn’t be “hoping”, a CTO should have been influencing those decisions (including pricing) all along. If he only realized the price was wrong when the product hit the shelves (while he was in bed recovering), then he has no place in lecturing others on their lack of strategic perspective.

I don't think there's a world where you can hold the CTO responsible here. I get his colleagues anger and understand it. That said, this is IMO as clear cut as you can get for a case of absolutely ludicrously poor decisionmaking on the part of Apotheker. Bad strategy from bad principles, brought in from an unrelated and way smaller company. I genuinely can't fathom doing such a radical pivot with a business that size that had built a damn near cult following off the back of it's hardware to utterly sell that hardware business off on the notion of being a software company, with NOTHING in the business to back that. What in the world did HP even have for software at this time?

I'm not even saying WebOS was a slam dunk the way the author says. Maybe. We'll never know. But it's clear Apotheker didn't think the acquisition was worth it, and decided to kill WebOS/Palm off from the day he arrived. It's the only way the subsequent mishandling makes any sense at all, and same for the acquisition he oversaw too, which was also written off.

The part that makes my blood boil is this utterly deranged course of action probably made Apotheker more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. I wish I could fail up like these people do.

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

#332

Post by wat10000 »

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…

That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.

Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.

The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.

No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.

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

#333

Post by Affric »

phkahler wrote: post #105
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…

>> 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…

You say 90s but sounds suspiciously like John Scully and Apple in the 80s

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

#334

Post by knuckleheadsmif »

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 at Palm when launched working on the device end user software startup experience. The software I think was ready but the hardware was far inferior to the current iPad at the time. However it’s possible that the next iteration could have been more competitive, they just had to stick with it. But neither the hardware or software mattered because it was the CEO who killed it through poor long term judgement As the author noted.

[I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs. They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining market share in the race to the bottom.]

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

#335

Post by cbsmith »

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.

When I sold printers in the early 90's, HP Laserjets were broadly considered to be the gold standard.

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

#336

Post by sheepscreek »

nicoburns wrote: post #317
Marsymars wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> by buying more expensive cars Not to mention less efficient cars.

Not to mention, cars.

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

#338

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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.

HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.

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

#339

Post by paultopia »

“Why I still believe in HP”… why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since they’ve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. I’ll be it’s bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).

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

#340

Post by timschmidt »

hajile wrote: post #319
timschmidt wrote: post #197

I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could us…

Touchpad had rounded edges vs the sharp aluminum ones on the ipad. Touchpad was visibly shorter and the corners were much more rounded. If there were a real reason here, it would be that the iPad 2 launched in March 2011. When Touchpad launched 3-4 months later, it was twice as thick with worse battery life and a lot fewer apps were available while it had more bugs. I think this was the real reason. HP could have ove…

Touchpad dimensions: 240mm 190mm 13.7mm

iPad dimensions: 243mm 190mm 13mm

Both had rounded corners as can be seen in the images here:

https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/26850-940/HP-Touc...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IPad-WiF...

I know the ipad cases fit the touchpad because I used one on my TouchPad for it's entire service life.

Why post incorrect information so authoritatively? Seems silly.

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