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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

#41

Post by msgodel »

bigbuppo wrote: post #25
datameta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many companies had this play out? IBM is another famous example of internal rot of engineering excellence in the 2000s as the business shell was gives fresh coats of paint and varnish.

Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can easily find it using the same button on your android phone you used to use for quick access to emergency services. We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI? What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI. AI.

I love looking at Coreweave's long description for their stock. It says AI 32x. That's huge AI to price ratio!

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

#42

Post by snoman »

Zigurd wrote: post #27

This is not to take away from the corporate Vogon tragedy described in the blog post. WebOS could've been a credible competitor to iOS and Android. But the weak spot is right in the name: It's a web UI platform. Look at Google's attempts to make ChromeOS into a tablet OS. While it's less clear cut now, back when HP acquired WebOS, they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS a…

My personal conspiracy theory is that Nokia was an orchestrated takedown by MS. Get a leader in there to tank its stock for an acquisition.

MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

stuff4ben wrote: post #7

If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by refulgentis »

stratosgear wrote: post #32

He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?

I went from a college dropout waiter to small town successful startup founder to Google, and Google somewhere between 3-5x'd my comp. I left, after 7 years, due to some nasty stuff.

It's hard to explain and I don't understand fully myself, yet, but there's a point where more money isn't worth some sort of principle you have, and it's a lot lower than I would have thought.*

In their case, I'd imagine having the unencumbered ability to talk (i.e. not needing to worry if HP would come crying if he got a job at Apple and did an interview for Fortune someday) would be worth more than whatever a severance package was on top of years and years of 6-7 figure comp.

This would be especially paramount if you felt current management was completely misguided on decisions you were involved, they were doing the standard corpo forceout maneuver, and you couldn't say anything yet because the #1 qualification for CXO jobs is a history of placing nice / dumb when needed.

* reminder to self: this is also probably the purest answer to my Noogler fascination with how high turnover was, given the company approximated paradise to my eye at that time

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

#47

Post by qualeed »

stratosgear wrote: post #32

He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?

He refused the exit package so that he had the option of talking about his experience at the company. It's not like he is compelled to.

Maybe he talked about it plenty in private conversations immediately afterwards, or semi-publicly throughout the years, and you just haven't been privy to those conversations.

Some people, on principle alone, will refuse to sign these sorts of NDAs even if they never plan to talk, simply so they have the ability to do so if they want to in the future.

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

#48

Post by onli »

fredoralive wrote: post #15
JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?

3rd party apps couldn't do anything in the background until iOS 4, and it's always been a bit limited. I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a nicer task switching UI at first.

It had apps as cards to easily switch between them, useful animations and a completely working gesture control. It was absolutely revolutionary and having to fall back to Android after that was a big step down, until Android incorporated everything from webOS a few years later.

He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by the hype around the fire sale and how many people really liked them then.

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

#49

Post by whatever1 »

Come on, nothing had a chance to compete with the iPhone in 2011. By then Apple had released iPhone 5 (edit iPhone4S), a slick & snappy device with robust app ecosystem that everyone wanted (but most could not afford). There was no place for high end players.

Regardless of that CTOs ability to integrate HP and Palm, whatever they would build, it would be DOA. Unless if they tried to compete with the cheap android devices and race to the bottom for pennies at scale.

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