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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

#81

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.…

> How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?

First slowly and then suddenly.

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

#82

Post by phkahler »

Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and canceling the product too early. Am I missing something? The fact it was rushed to market was on him unless he left out a bunch of story prior to his surgery.

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

#83

Post by hnlmorg »

lesuorac wrote: post #14

> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS. Is this actually the case? I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of…

Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards)

Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset

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

#84

Post by hollerith »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75
paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Your overall point might be correct, but some of your specifics are incorrect:

>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.

None of the apps I am using on my iPad have borders/sidebars.

Gmail and Youtube have long had dedicated iPad apps. DeepSeek has one (a well designed and implemented one) for interacting with its chat service. The last time I checked, Google Gemini had only an iPhone app, but I checked again today and found a full-fledged iPad app.

Even my credit union, which operates only in California and does not have any physical branches in Southern California, has a full-fledged iPad app.

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

#85

Post by paxys »

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.

By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this - https://fdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/hp/hp-ipaq-glisten-1.jpg.

They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did in 2014).

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

#86

Post by hadlock »

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").

Had the iPad not launched immediately opposite it, I can envision a world where HP goes through two or three revisions and has a solid device with it's own "personality" much like how Microsoft has their "Surface" line of glued-together tablets and "laptops" which sorta compete with the iPad and Macbook Air even if they hardly market them. The fact that Microsoft eventually succeeded in the space seems to indicate HP could have as well. I can see the business case where the new CEO isn't interested in rubber stamping a new product line that's going to lose money for him every quarter for the next three years against the glowing sun that is the iPad. There are better ways to burn political capital as a C level.

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

#87

Post by legitster »

I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design.

We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind.

Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market instead of the adoring consumer market that Palm had collected.

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

#88

Post by phonon »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75
paxys wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

HP also shipped two Palm phone devices with webOS, Veer and Pre 3. They would have been more than able to create a complete mobile (and consumer electronic!) ecosystem.

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

#89

Post by socalgal2 »

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.

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

#90

Post by foobiekr »

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…

Truth. Every one of these things would have been visible 4-6 months prior.
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