Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

philmckinney.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 517 posts

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

#441

Post by notatoad »

resters wrote: post #57

HP had been making bad decision after bad decision for a while long before this happened. HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware, etc. There was clearly nobody who cared about the user experience at all. It made Apple's job very easy.

yeah, this whole post feels super revisionist to me - HP was a bad company making bad decisions and awful consumer technology products for a long time before the touchpad disaster. everybody knew HP buying palm was going to be the death of palm.

or at least, everybody except HP knew that.

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

#442

Post by kcb »

ghaff wrote: post #393
jorvi wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Opteron was a much bigger deal than you're making it sound. Market share was up to 25%.

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

#443

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

draculero wrote: post #242
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.

We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day. I think that we printed hundred of thousands of pages and I aways trusted it. But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else HP now. But HP had a good reputation.

> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.

Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.

I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.

But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.

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

#444

Post by kcb »

mardef wrote: post #429
yftsui wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones. WP7 was the first of the new OS

Windows Phone 7 was another OS. Windows Phone 8 was the next totally incompatible OS just couple years later.

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

#445

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#446

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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…

I once worked on a product that was promising, could have been really big. But the people making it priced it twice as high as all the competitors. There was never a chance of success, even after finding customers, which was hard. The ultimate problem wasn't the product (imperfect as it was). It was the leaders who were cavalier when they should have been biting their nails. Sometimes safety is a curse.

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

#447

Post by user_of_the_wek »

grapesodaaaaa wrote: post #302
duskwuff wrote: post #251

Earlier 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...)

If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right! (It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)

Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.

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

#448

Post by adastra22 »

microtherion wrote: post #359
adastra22 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.

I believe you are mistaken, in several aspects: 1) Entry level watch models were available for about $400 right away, which is still more or less the starting point (though due to inflation, that's a bit cheaper now, of course). 2) Luxury models (>$1K price) are still available, now under the Hermès co-branding. The one thing that was only available in the initial release were the "Edition" models at a >$10K price po…

The luxury watch was released in April 2015. The cheaper stainless steel model wasn't released until the fall event a few months later.

But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition" models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the expensive models in stock.

It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and changed their branding for the watch to be about health and fitness.

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

#449

Post by scarface_74 »

wat10000 wrote: post #332
scarface_74 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes. Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes. If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops t…

That seems like a reversal of cause and effect. Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known. The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and prici…

If every single indie developer disappeared and didn’t make software for computers - to a first approximation, no one would notice a difference.

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

#450

Post by jldugger »

potatolicious wrote: post #136
eloisant wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great. That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work". One of the strength of iOS and Android…

+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it. Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly. The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop". And it's s…

My recollection was that the N900 battery lasted about a full day of normal use. Maybe two but it was a dice roll. That was pretty much on par with other smartphones on the market. IIRC the main thing android and iOS were doing was shutting down apps to save memory. But perhaps I saved a ton of battery by not buying a data plan? At the time, I had wifi at home and work, and a 100 dollar a year prepaid cell plan.

And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being something close to the home / back on screen button android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast, or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the switcher.

But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store launch was so botched that it was basically dead on arrival. The microusb port sucks.

Post reply on HN