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

71–80 of 517 posts

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

#71

Post by RankingMember »

potatolicious wrote: post #26
JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?

This is true - and WebOS was legitimately innovative here. At the time neither iOS nor Android could run more than one app at the same time. This was both an architectural matter and a UX matter. On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back…

> There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.

I love this, such a classic hack

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

#72

Post by MadcapJake »

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…

I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.

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

#73

Post by rezmason »

stratosgear wrote: post #32

He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?

Several reasons to wait 15 years come to mind:

- at first, maybe he wanted to focus on anything else for a while. Shame, stress and anger don't always diminish when you share something on the Internet ;)

- at first, maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his colleagues' careers

- maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his own career

- maybe someone intimidated him

- maybe he didn't have the bandwidth to share this for a while

- maybe he found more fulfillment doing something other than talking about this, and stuck to that for a while

- maybe he was waiting for a good moment to share this message, and decided now was the time

Can you think of a reason why he'd be dishonest that's more likely?

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

#75

Post by AnotherGoodName »

paxys wrote: post #29
stuff4ben wrote: post #7

If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

The device was always doomed. They launched a direct competitor to the iPad with maybe 10% of the functionality. This article is just hubris on the CTO's part ("if only I had been around for the launch instead of my incompetent team, everything would have worked out").

One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough to be independent of the phone ecosystem.

The CTO here proudly says he convinced the board to buy Palm and get into the tablet market but just thinking about this even lightly i'm not sure it was wrong for the CEO (and subsequently CTO) to be kicked out for this move. It's weird there's no hubris on this. A tablet market without re-use of a larger markets app ecosystem seems like poor strategic thinking to me.

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

#76

Post by mvdtnz »

The entire section on bad decision making only deals with the decisions to ultimately kill the product. How would Mr McKinney deal with the decisions that led to releasing a product so rushed and so poorly priced than it initially sold fewer than 10% of the units shipped to retailers? At least some of these decisions (and implementations) must have been made by teams who he had underseen during his extensive due diligence.

There's a lot of buck passing in this article.

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

#77

Post by ang_cire »

> 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 wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.

> This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch that should have been immediately obvious to any functioning board. But nobody asked the right questions about whether Leo's enterprise software background prepared him to evaluate consumer platform technologies such as WebOS, and I wasn't there to provide what my colleagues called "adult supervision."

Yup, sounds about right.

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.

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

#78

Post by buildbot »

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…

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!

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

#79

Post by strangattractor »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #5

> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?

1. WebOS lives on (purchased from HP) or at least a version of it on LG TVs. 2. Matra: End users don't care about the OS. End users don't care the OS. (or most all the technical aspects Engineers value)

End Users only care whether the product does something they want - make toast, listen to music, prevent stds etc. Jobs shipped products that solved actual problems - desktop publishing, listening to music, making a phone call. They solved other problems also but shipping a product that might one day solve a problem is not a product category.

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

#80

Post by FirmwareBurner »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #55
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.

>HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been.

In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensors, medical and the other shit).

>They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.

From where I am, I saw clear as day that markets usually have room for only two large players who will end up owning 90% of the market, with the rest of the players fighting for the scraps. Intel & AMD, Nvidia & AMD, iOS & Android, PlayStation & Xbox, Apple & Samsung, Windows & Mac, etc,

HP was in no position to win against Apple and Google for a podium spot so they left in due time. Even Microsoft couldn't pull it off.

Post reply on HN