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

451–460 of 517 posts

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

#451

Post by Dylan16807 »

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #421
Marsymars wrote: post #300

Earlier 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?

Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of crude. Divide.

How could you possibly not be able to estimate the fraction?

And yeah ideally you use an average number over some months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but those are minor tweaks.

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

#452

Post by Joeri »

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…

I think microsoft made a valiant effort with windows phone. They kept it in the market for years and iterated, they threw big budgets after it, they made deals with app developers to bring over their apps.

You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems, but ultimately none of that mattered.

What killed windows phone was the iron law that app developers just weren’t willing to invest the effort to support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had already taken the lead. They could have added android app support and almost did, but then what was the point of windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but without the apps that just didn’t matter.

This is what makes apple’s current disdain for app developers so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers that chose and continue to choose to build for their platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.

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

#453

Post by Hojojo »

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #421
Marsymars wrote: post #300

Earlier 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.

The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This naturally means gas prices will move to match the price of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system, not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.

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

#454

Post by withinboredom »

RajT88 wrote: post #257
7thaccount wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted as my experience was similar. I owned 3 windows phones over the years and they were always an absolute joy. The UI was very polished, the call quality was terrific, the camera was awesome, and it did have plenty of apps even if it was a tiny percentage of android or iPhone. To be honest though, I've never been one to care about apps. My experience was anyone who actually took the time to play with one loved i…

The only Windows Phone people I know either worked for Microsoft, or were Microsoft superfans. (And the one friend who liked to just be a contrarian - this time he was right, but he's usually wrong)

I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of money porting apps to it over the years as well.

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

#455

Post by duskwuff »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #407
melbourne_mat wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compe…

> I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.

The IEA is an energy industry group from back in the days where "energy" primarily meant fossil fuels (i.e. the 1970s), and they've never entirely gotten away from that mentality.

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

#457

Post by neuroelectron »

legitster wrote: post #87

I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design. We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind. Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market…

I had a WebOS phone in a lot of ways it was better than my friend's iPhone at the time. Having a fold out keyboard was still the industry standard but he's typing on a screen keyboard. Overall, it was faster and more ergonomic, especially the on the tiny iPhone screen. I was forced to switch to iPhone because of HP's decision.

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

#458

Post by neuroelectron »

navigate8310 wrote: post #129
wbsun wrote: post #38

Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesn’t look like the board were really convinced as the author believed.

Why would the board buy in the first place if it weren't the case?

Seems like the real goal was to kill it so the market could consolidate under iPhone. Internal sabotage. Now Apple is killing themselves pushing bad UI decisions and getting paid off to insert back doors into Messages someone can control the public narrative as we enter another war.

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

#459

Post by impjohn »

fakedang wrote: post #425
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's a world where you can hold the CTO responsible here. I get his colleagues anger and understand it. That said, this is IMO as clear cut as you can get for a case of absolutely ludicrously poor decisionmaking on the part of Apotheker. Bad strategy from bad principles, brought in from an unrelated and way smaller company. I genuinely can't fathom doing such a radical pivot with a business that size…

Apotheker is basically everything wrong with the EU non-startup tech scene today. Not him personally per se, but you see a lot of characters like him on a much more regular basis in EU companies than you will find in US companies. These kinds of folks only seem to fail upwards in the EU, whereas in the US, they would have been laughed out.

Interesting thought. Do you have any anecdotes regarding it? Seems you're basing it off personal experience or something you've heard many times, curious to know what that is

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

#460

Post by jacobolus »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #407
melbourne_mat wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compe…

The IEA's purpose is to boost fossil fuels + nuclear?
Post reply on HN