I know tech people like to villainize bean counters for ruining tech companies, but this man has zero business sense and needs a good bean counter. It's crazy that he thinks people will read this and feel like he was in the right with his business decisions. There is no timeline where HP tablets beat out iOS, Android, and Windows because WebOS had good multitasking.
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
391–400 of 517 posts
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Those differences are precisely why suing wouldn't be possible. Apple barely won against Samsung and they were claiming not only the hardware design (where almost every element was ripped off), but also that Samsung copied Apple software design too. In my opinion, Touchpad's different edges, corners, and radically different software meant HP wasn't likely to get sued.
That's funny because I see it exactly the opposite. Apple won against Samsung despite Samsung's phone seeming no more similar to Apple's than the Touchpad was to an iPad. Industry watchers at the time were flabbergasted that anyone would sue over a curved edge, and that Apple who had defended itself in lawsuits over similarly trite details in the past would do so. Wins tend to embolden.
It's well documented that mobile is a minefield of lawsuits seemingly aimed not so much at winning as at establishing cross-licensing agreements to mitigate the massive patent warchests of established players. A practice Apple has proven to be adept at. Just entering the mobile space carries a near 100% chance of getting sued by everyone else already occupying it.
You can be of the opinion that something isn't worthy of a lawsuit. Doesn't mean one won't happen. In my humble experience, any pretense can be sufficient. And this one has seemed likely to me since 2011.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earl…
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar Aside from it not being 64bit initially uh.. did we live through the same time period? The Athlons completely blew the Intel competition out of the water. If Intel hadn't heavily engaged in market manipulation, AMD would have taken a huge bite out of their marketshare.
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#394Earlier 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.
About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#395I 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…
I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excel…
I have an HP ENVY laptop that’s very nice. Amazingly good screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1, and is quite thin and light for a 15” laptop.
But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it’s been this way for decades.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment. https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis. https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf 'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I a…
There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#397Earlier 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…
Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
I was a developer for Carrier apps. It was by far the best mobile developer experience by a landslide.
Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.
Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a better system for frontend development.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 I…
I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS. Besides the $499 iPad I don't think there were any other 10" tablets around. People like watching TV and movies on tablets. Not everyone has space or wants a bedroom TV. Not everyone wants to watc…
> I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS. That’s basically what I meant. Albeit that I was emphasising that people are also happy with something that wasn’t iOS / Android if the price was right.
Right, but HP hadn't figured out how to make and sell profitable $99 10" tablets, they had figured out how to wash their hands of unsold inventory of $500 tablets that people didn't want. They had no moat in selling cheap tablets because as soon as the hardware became affordable enough to do it for a profit anyone else could have too.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#400I 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…
I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.
I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.
The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.