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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

#471

Post by microtherion »

rurban wrote: post #466
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…

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

Sure. My point was that entry level APPLE watches never changed much in their price point.

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

#472

Post by aswegs8 »

geodel wrote: post #241
ang_cire wrote: post #77

> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill. > SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wo…

> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being ... Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of Director and above in technical or related companies. To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA, development, customer feedback and myriad…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

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

#473

Post by replete »

After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for £109. The software was decent for the time, and nowhere near as terrible as other comments make out.

If it had worked out, it might have altered the current landscape in positive ways. For instance, if they contributed significantly back to Qt this might have affected the linux desktop situation?

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

#474

Post by Twirrim »

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.

I think you've got some "grass is greener on the other side" thinking going on there. There's lots of people just like him, failing upwards in US tech.

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

#475

Post by AbstractH24 »

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…

How often are they reality distortion fields vs leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops and investors? How do you do the second without the first?

Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.

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

#476

Post by AbstractH24 »

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…

We're not living through this again at all with generative AI, right?

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

#477

Post by pantalaimon »

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.

> They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.

That then became WSL1

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

#478

Post by anonymars »

dabbz wrote: post #282
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.

Not to mention that when they moved to SDK 8, you could only develop from a Windows 8 machine, that famously popular OS. So many unforced errors, many seeming to stem from denial that Microsoft does not possess the Apple Reality Distortion Field

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

#479

Post by anonymars »

klank wrote: post #176
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…

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 always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone

At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"

Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked

Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info

Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too

I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app

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

#480

Post by justrudd »

7thaccount wrote: post #155
lukevp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.

But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.

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