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

371–380 of 517 posts

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

#371

Post by hajile »

timschmidt wrote: post #340
hajile wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Seem…

I also owned a touchpad. You are misremembering if you think they look the same.

Here's a side-by-side image

https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&for...

Here's a close-up detail of an ipad on top of a touchpad.

As I stated, you can clearly see sharp, flat edges on the ipad where it meets the back of the device while the Touchpad has a much more continuous rounded edge. In the side-by-side shots, you can also see how the Touchpad corners are much more rounded.

Here's some individual shots

Touchpad with side view

https://i0.wp.com/www.seriousinsights.net/wp-content/uploads...

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tablets/HP/TouchPad/_DS...

ipad with side view

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...

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

#372

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Marsymars wrote: post #300
c-linkage wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home heating and agriculture

I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode

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

#373

Post by chasil »

ghaff wrote: post #368
saghm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was the legitimately better approach. There were certainly theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward--even if it had never been commercially successful in the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect it was a bit of both and different people at the company probably had different persp…

Sophie Wilson (ARM instruction set designer) was very enthusiastic over her "Firepath" architecture that had VLIW aspects.

It was targeted at DSL modems, and I think the platform has faded and is now somewhat obscure.

https://royalsociety.org/people/sophie-wilson-12544/

https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc14...

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

#374

Post by chasil »

monocasa wrote: post #290
saghm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4 architecture with amd64 capability.

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

#375

Post by teruakohatu »

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…

I think it is better to be charitable. I think he does genuinely believe what he wrote is what happened. His PDF book is free and Creative Commons.

There could be many reasons he waited this long. Maybe he waited until he was retired and would not face blowback. Maybe he just has some free time.

It is very plausible that WebOS could have been an equal peer to iOS and Android. CEOs have killed off projects that might have been great commercial successes while perusing short term gains.

In a decade's time we might hear a story from inside ATI or AMD how they killed off their chance of beating CUDA for short term gains.

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

#376

Post by timschmidt »

hajile wrote: post #371
timschmidt wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Seem…

I also owned a touchpad. You are misremembering if you think they look the same. Here's a side-by-side image https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&for... Here's a close-up detail of an ipad on top of a touchpad. As I stated, you can clearly see sharp, flat edges on the ipad where it meets the back of the device while the Touchpad has a much more continuous rounded edge. In the side-by-side shots, y…

I'm sure whatever differences you see seem important to you.

None of them prevented a $15 iPad case from working flawlessly with my TouchPad for a half dozen years.

Tapping into Apple's ecosystem in such a way is exactly the sort of action Apple dislikes, for obvious reasons.

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

#377

Post by diegof79 »

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.

My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.

HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).

They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.

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

#378

Post by idkwhattocallme »

I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.

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

#379

Post by iandanforth »

Failure or not I have to say thank you to this guy. This left Jeff Hawkins with a substantial personal fortune which he went on to use to found Numenta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and none of that would have been possible without that acquisition.

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

#380

Post by kylec »

jonny_eh wrote: post #189
x0x0 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pivoted to shilling halfway down. And the acquisition was entirely incompetent. These devices need a software ecosystem. Purchasing the company without the acquirer having a bought-in plan to build that ecosystem was just dumb. And that would have required a company willing to lose money likely for half a decade minimum.

> But because I wasn't there during the critical 49 days when the decision was made to kill WebOS, somehow the failure became my responsibility. Wow, so whiney. He's an executive, a leader. A captain doesn't complain if the crew is mad at him, for any reason.

This is well after the fact though, and it does sound like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I don’t begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.
Post reply on HN