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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

#461

Post by immibis »

duskwuff wrote: post #455
ashdksnndck wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing people not to buy solar panels or other renewable sources.

Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.

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

#462

Post by necovek »

dcminter wrote: post #276
stapedium wrote: post #216

Earlier 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 have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year, scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be used as a printer anymore either.

It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.

No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.

This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.

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

#463

Post by fuzzfactor »

chasil wrote: post #374
monocasa wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...

I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4 architecture with amd64 capability.

I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business.

One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".

Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.

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

#464

Post by fakedang »

impjohn wrote: post #459
fakedang wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mostly from personal experience and interacting with a lot of them, who form their little boy's clubs. It's especially bad in German Europe and Italy where the vast majority of leadership of extremely technical companies are largely business or law graduates.

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

#465

Post by hnlmorg »

cwyers wrote: post #399
hnlmorg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS. That’s basically what I meant. Albeit that I was emphasising that people are also happy with something that wasn’t iOS / Android if the price was right.

Right, but HP hadn't figured out how to make and sell profitable $99 10" tablets, they had figured out how to wash their hands of unsold inventory of $500 tablets that people didn't want. They had no moat in selling cheap tablets because as soon as the hardware became affordable enough to do it for a profit anyone else could have too.

You say that but HP already have an established and mature supply chain for hardware which, isn’t common. And particularly with portable drives like laptops and PDAs. HP were in better position to capitalise than you claim with your “anyone” comment.

Their “$500 tablet” could be easily dropped to $100 because it wasn’t a particularly high end device to begin with. I mean, it did have some niceties. But there was also a hell of a lot of corners cut too.

Ironically, this was the same problem Palm faced with its WebOS phones before they sold to HP. Their phones were nice but they felt far too sluggish and basic considering their price point. I actually wanted a WebOS phone but ended up with Android (likely HTC) because you got so much more for your money.

Given HP (and Palm) has experience building portable devices like PDAs, there really isn’t any excuse for their failing in price and hardware for the WebOS tablets and phones. They already had experience in this market so should have really known better.

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

#466

Post by rurban »

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…

Entry level watches are available from China for €40, with everything but Maps. Huawei/Honor Magicwatch 2 e.g.

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

#467

Post by Macha »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #451
andrew_lettuce wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs, transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely

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

#468

Post by ghaff »

kcb wrote: post #442
ghaff wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.

I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.

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

#469

Post by ghaff »

acdha wrote: post #417
chasil wrote: post #369

Earlier 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…

I think you're right. The combination of open source and public clouds has really tended to reduce the dominance of specific hardware/software ecosystems, especially Wintel. Especially with the decline of CMOS process scaling as a performance lever, I expect that we'll see more heterogeneous computing in the future.

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

#470

Post by microtherion »

adastra22 wrote: post #448
microtherion wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Yes, I agree that health and fitness are a much bigger part of the branding now than they were initially (but the basic features were there right from the beginning — I remember sitting in town halls, with "pings" ringing out at 10 to the hour, and everybody standing up for a minute).
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