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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

#411

Post by swagmoney1606 »

cogman10 wrote: post #281
phatskat wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of “this just needs a little polish”, what I would expect for any new to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me. I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me,…

It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the way they now handle multiple applications. The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.

Both android and iOS copied their exact multitasking UI YEARS after webOS had it lmao.

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

#412

Post by yftsui »

lukevp wrote: post #112
bluGill wrote: post #99

Earlier 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.

My experience with Windows phone around 2010 was exact opposite, very slow and clumsy. I recall I tried a HTC phone on WM 6.5, far behind iPhone 3GS

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

#413

Post by dylan604 »

halflife wrote: post #326
brulard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.

Wasn’t much to it actually. I was working in a team trying to create hp’s first SAAS offering for workflow management. I was the “webmaster” specialist at that time, and hearing the news that HP bought palmOS which was based on JavaScript made me really excited. However, during that time, HP was notorious for replacing its CEO on a yearly basis. After 1 year working on our project, 30 person team, the CEO was replace…

> We always knew that the software side of hp provides barely 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.

Specifically, the rest is ink used in those printers. They pretty much give away the printers

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

#414

Post by fakedang »

bluGill wrote: post #99
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…

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…

There was another reason behind the Windows phone failure and the lack of apps - Google blocking Microsoft from using its platform native APIs. Microsoft weren't allowed to use, for eg, the YouTube API natively, so the "native" Windows OS app for YouTube had to use roundabout methods of getting YouTube data.

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

#415

Post by glenstein »

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…

>The product was a week or two away from launch when he had to step away. To me it sounds like the bad decisions had already been made.

Phil seemed pretty emphatic that it was too early and needed more time. It doesn't sound from the article like he would have supported that launch timeline.

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

#416

Post by e_y_ »

hnlmorg wrote: post #83
lesuorac wrote: post #14

> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS. Is this actually the case? I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of…

Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards) Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset

The Slickdeals comment thread for the HP Touchpad firesale has over 285,000 comments

https://slickdeals.net/e/3220862-hp-touchpad-9-7-wifi-tablet...

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

#417

Post by acdha »

chasil wrote: post #369
ghaff wrote: post #363

Earlier 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…

I’m curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I’m betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel’s compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a software vendor and later a computational research lab, and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least the equivalent gain back … or just buy an off-the-shelf system which performed well now and do literally anything else with your life.

One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.

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

#418

Post by glenstein »

phatskat wrote: post #198
klank wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later. We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving mobile computing/devices forward during that time is (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device. (I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)

I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have. I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it sem…

I thought it was fascinating, agood value proposition, a necessary diversification of the market. I almost wonder just looking primarily at Google's example if a major key to success is just toughing it out and finding an identity and finding a niche in the early years. I feel like this could have been something meaningful and like the plug was pulled too quick. To keep going back to Amazon Prime which played the long long game before becoming kind of a flagship offering.

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

#419

Post by yourapostasy »

chasil wrote: post #369
ghaff wrote: post #363

Earlier 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…

This form versus substance issue is a really deeply embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting worse.

Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.

Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.

IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.

I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.

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

#420

Post by sokoloff »

EasyMark wrote: post #394
charlieyu1 wrote: post #210

Earlier 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.

TIL that Agilent was still in business. I thought it was a straight name-change to Keysight for their electronic test equipment business.
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