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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

#501

Post by mcepl »

ghaff wrote: post #396
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…

There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.

I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.

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

#502

Post by ashdksnndck »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #483
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…

> 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 compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other p…

The section of my comment you quoted directly addresses this! Wall Street can be convinced by a compelling story.

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

#503

Post by eszed »

ang_cire wrote: post #140
phkahler wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed. There are aspects of management that are indepe…

Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing. The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake. You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA If this asser…

> private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground

Absolutely, but (and this depends upon the "financialization of everything" point someone made above) that doesn't matter, because in the meantime they'll have personally made a profit on the deal. Building (or keeping) a sustainable business was never one of their goals. I call it "extractive capitalism", and it's ruining the world.

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

#504

Post by dangus »

socalgal2 wrote: post #89
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.

> HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware HP laptops outsell Apple laptops 2 to 1 Not saying they are better, but HP hasn't lost to Apple in the laptop market.

I would make the argument that they run a much better PC business now than they did back then.

Back then they had a rough reputation on product quality, while now I’d say they are the premier high volume brand with a pretty difficult to beat value proposition. They have a wide range of products where none of them are miserable.

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

#505

Post by ghaff »

mcepl wrote: post #501
ghaff wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.

I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.

Well, yes, the market didn't care all that much for various reasons. (There were reasons beyond technology.) RHEL/GCC supported but, while I wasn't there at the time, I'm not sure how much focus there was. Other companies were hedging their bets on Itanium at the time--e.g. Project Monterey. Aside from Sun, most of the majors were placing Itanium bets to some degree if only to hedge other projects.

Even HP dropped it eventually. And the former CEO of Intel (who was CTO during much of the time Itanium was active) said in a trade press interview that he wished they had just done a more enterprisey Xeon--which happened eventually anyway.

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

#506

Post by 7thaccount »

LTL_FTC wrote: post #239
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…

I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of acce…

Thanks for your story, I had no idea.

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

#507

Post by 7thaccount »

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)

In my case I was a Windows user for work and Linux fanboy at home. I just hated the android experience at the time (phone before my Lumia was the original Galaxy I think which was a piece of garbage) and enjoyed playing with a Lumia at the store.

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

#508

Post by scarface_74 »

timewizard wrote: post #274
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…

We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now. It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increa…

Yes the mountain of open source software is on the server and for developers. Regular users have never cared about open source ur being in control of thier computers.

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

#509

Post by immibis »

scarface_74 wrote: post #449
wat10000 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This did happen and you're right, no one noticed a difference.

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

#510

Post by guenthert »

ndiddy wrote: post #308
buildbot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a little uncharitable I think, you could know all those issues and be hoping that marketing and management will hold off on a launch until things are set. And the pricing made a huge difference - at 250, it would have been a different story I think!

I remember reading an article about the development of the Touchpad. Apotheker wanted the Palm division to be cash neutral. This meant that when they were speccing out the Touchpad, they weren't able to get any of the parts they wanted because Apple kept buying out supplier capacity for the iPad 2 and HP wasn't willing to cough up the money for the suppliers to expand their capacity. I think the engineer described th…

The build quality wasn't the issue (as far as I can tell). I bought a unit on the secondary market more than a year after the "Fire Sale", it was flawless. It's hardware spec, particularly those obvious to end-users, like weight and thickness matched however the original iPad, not the iPad 2 (promoted for being "thinner") already released by the time of the launch of the TouchPad. That combined with the lack in available software, it's quite clear that whoever set the $499 price didn't want the product (or rather the team behind it) to succeed.

Shame really, as WebOs had potential, the TouchPad's sound was pretty good and it's port of Angry Birds (one of the few pre-installed apps) was awesome.

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