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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

#51

Post by geodel »

mrweasel wrote: post #33
msgodel wrote: post #4

The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.

HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft. Now you have two HPs: - HPE, pretty much a shell of a company.…

Well if autonomy bet worked out well they could have challenged Google. :)

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

#53

Post by duxup »

msgodel wrote: post #4

The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.

A lot of companies get this process and ideology about how things work ... and that's it, no matter what the business conditions they can't do anything different. Every department and every possible person who would approve or deny something is set in their ways.

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

#55

Post by dec0dedab0de »

paxys wrote: post #13

The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall. WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would s…

HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been. They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.

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

#56

Post by jldugger »

whatever1 wrote: post #49

Come on, nothing had a chance to compete with the iPhone in 2011. By then Apple had released iPhone 5 (edit iPhone4S), a slick & snappy device with robust app ecosystem that everyone wanted (but most could not afford). There was no place for high end players. Regardless of that CTOs ability to integrate HP and Palm, whatever they would build, it would be DOA. Unless if they tried to compete with the cheap android dev…

iPhone 4s shipped October 2011.

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

#58

Post by harrydehal »

mrweasel wrote: post #33
msgodel wrote: post #4

The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.

HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft. Now you have two HPs: - HPE, pretty much a shell of a company.…

Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.

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

#59

Post by eGQjxkKF6fif »

mrweasel wrote: post #33
msgodel wrote: post #4

The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.

HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft. Now you have two HPs: - HPE, pretty much a shell of a company.…

Simple. The execs steal all the innovative IP, start new ventures, drain HP dry with its encredible decision making; completely fuck the Linux devs, use their works and contributions to OSS in the new ventures and then new waves of innovation/competition came about and what was settled upon was whatever looked profitable on quarterlies so servers, and printers.

I'm not saying that's what happened. But, it's a capitalistic type world.

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