After getting it on a very good sale I used and loved the Touchpad tablet for years despite some shortcomings. Primarily to visit this site actually. WebOS was gorgeous, innovative and smooth. Matías Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
431–440 of 517 posts
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#432[dead]
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.
> How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price?
I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.)
I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed. There are aspects of management that are indepe…
Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just created further long term problems. If IBM could have caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25 years they would have done fine, but for some reason they continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in the right place at the right time. But it seems they always overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a few years ago. I had never used one before but I was actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand now what it had it's fans. Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had…
What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 payin…
Nice insight, thank you.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Especially if you live were gas cost a buck twenty a liter
Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up the total price will go up proportionally less than places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived when gas gets expensive.)
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.
That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted from that price tag and expected immediate results without years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change also didn't help apparently.
I mean, they were in the game. The problem is that they immediately folded.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#439Earlier 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…
Internal inertia is a powerful thing. This was discussed at length on comp.arch in the late 1990's early 2000's by insiders like Andy Glew. When OoO started to dominate intel should have realized the risk, but they continued to cancel internal projects to extend x86 to 64-bits. Of which apparently there were multiple. Even then, the day that AMD announced 64-bit extensions and a product timeline it should have resulted in intel doing an internal about face and acknowledging what everyone knew (in the late 1990's) and quietly scuttling ia64 while pulling a backup x86 out of their pocket. But since they had killed them all, they were forced to scramble to follow AMD.
Intel has plenty of engineering talent, if the bean counters, politicians and board would just get out of the way they would come back. But instead you see patently stupid/poor execution like then still ongoing avx512 saga. Lakefield, is a prime example of WTFism showing up publicly. The lack of internal leadership is written as loud as possible on a product where no one had the political power to force the smaller core to emulate avx512 during the development cycle, or NAK a product where the two cores couldn't even execute the same instructions. Its an engineering POC probably being shopped to apple or someone else considering an arm big.little without understanding how to actually implement it in a meaningful way. Compared with the AMD approach which seems to even best the arm big.little by simply using the same cores process optimized differently to the same effect without having to deal with the problems of optimizing software for two different microarch.
Re: I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and mana…
I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever. Honestly I'm expect…
> I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw"
I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they are locked to chipped cartridges.
And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers as they possibly could.
When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage, it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.