I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It no wonder it failed so miserably
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
401–410 of 517 posts
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#402Earlier 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.
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#403> "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 working at HP during that time. They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free. I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre. I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.
My parents got a cheap Touchpad when they were getting rid of them, and used it for years. Especially after people got AOSP running on it.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#404Earlier 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.
A long time ago I was given an Android, Apple, and MS-windows phone to evaluate as company phones for the company I worked for. the MS-windows phone crashed almost straight out of the box. and crashed again. and again.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#405Earlier 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.
Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement where they pay each other the right to use various IP. One of the things Intel pays AMD for is x86_64.
x86_64 patents have expired by now, so they do not in fact pay for them.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#406Earlier 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.
About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.
Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic... (This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic... (This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how similar the colors of each year was making it very difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the chart was still clear though
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#409Earlier 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.
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.
When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to it.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
That open ecosystem needs years of investment to develop. A few people will take the risk and make a first app, but a lot will wait longer.
I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market. Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.
Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware, very few apps. It's interesting.