> 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 mismatchâit 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.
I need this part explained to me.
And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
The only way that remark makes sense:
1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.
DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.
Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.
Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.
Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....
As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.
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.
Former Palm employee here. I was a developer advocate working directly with app devs from a couple of months before Palm was acquired until after the shutdown.
I remember Phil and rather liked him. Everything he states in the article is correct as far as I remember it. Yes we were being slammed by the iPad, but we were far and away the #2 tablet that summer. Android tablets really sucked then, and despite Google's push there were more tablet native apps in the TouchPad app store than Android's. In hindsight it should have been cheaper and faster. And it would have been by Christmas (the TouchPad mini was just weeks away from shipping). Given more time and funding it would have been a contender (maybe not "winning" but still having a good run).
I suspect Palm was doomed the moment Apotheker took over. He wanted to turn HP into IBM. HP's plans to use WebOS everywhere (I was able to see prototypes of fascinating future products that I still want today) were well thought out, but didn't fit his vision. If you want to blame someone, blame the board for hiring him.
Ultimately WebOS's destruction was great for the rest of the ecosystem. Some really talented people went to Apple and Google, improving their interfaces at the expense of losing a 3rd way. I still wish I'd kept at Pre3. Modern iPhones and Android devices may be more powerful, but they don't have that elegant simplicity I miss from WebOS.
[Some notes](https://joshondesign.com/2012/06/06/webos-on-the-verge) I wrote shortly after the shutdown.
PS: I wish I'd see this post yesterday and could have responded earlier. I'm happy to answer any questions. email me josh at josh dot earth.
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 simply have meant more money down the drain.
This is not to take away from the corporate Vogon tragedy described in the blog post. WebOS could've been a credible competitor to iOS and Android. But the weak spot is right in the name: It's a web UI platform. Look at Google's attempts to make ChromeOS into a tablet OS.
While it's less clear cut now, back when HP acquired WebOS, they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps. HP had the resources.
We don't have a third or fourth mobile platform mainly because of tragically poor leadership at HP and Nokia. Both were almost killed by CEOs who thought they were the corporate savior.
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.
Nothing about this makes any sense. Weâve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and realize itâs all a ploy to sell you his fancy new equivalent to a self-help book, which you can tell is legit because its name is a forced acronym. Can we take this off the front page please?
They had the whole stack in house. os, hardware, firmware, app store infra, even global retail. nobody external blocking them. and they still killed it in 49 days. you canât build dev trust in 7 weeks. the platform wasn't given time to breathe. this was failure of patience more than product
I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could use iPad 1 cases with the TouchPad and everything fit nicely and worked.
Apple sued Samsung over the shape of their phones. I think it's at least plausible that Apple and HP's legal departments had some discussions about the TouchPad which remain under NDA to this day.
WebOS was so far ahead of it's time in terms of usability and features in the default applications that it's hard to imagine someone dense enough to opt out of owning the mobile platform over the next several decades voluntarily.
But I can imagine an emergency operation to avoid all out legal warfare with Cupertino.
> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011âjust 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 a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
I learned about webOS in an unusual way, by writing exploits for a 2019 LG TV.
Something that became apparent even from this vantage point, was that a) the core platform was very solid and nice to work with b) the developers working on product features seemed largely unaware of point a). I assume that when webOS changed hands repeatedly, tons of institutional knowledge about how to actually use it got lost along the way (particularly in the security department). Unfortunate.
I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.
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.
âWhy I still believe in HPâ⌠why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since theyâve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. Iâll be itâs bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).
I owned and loved a few palm pilots (and a handspring visor) but Palm was a nostalgia brand already by 2010.
In the proto-smartphone years they were competing with blackberry and losing in that "business-phone" use case. (Treo phones, etc) Maybe they got burned by the Palm VIIx! :)
DangerOS (sidekick phones) came out and had killer games and even Windows CE had a few devices out there, with Palm integrations iirc.
The year HP bought palm - 2010 - had the Android Nexus One and the venerable iPhone 4! HP never had a chance.
RIM (blackberry) was the only one who ever had a (distant) chance at a 3rd player in the smartphone universe at that time.
Canât really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really couldâve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV Iâve had since.
Iâm not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so. Maybe itâs the âLinkedInâ-friendly prose. Maybe itâs the âlessons learnedâ which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it isnât this guy at all and is just my general frustration with modern big tech that bleeds its customers and abruptly dismisses products, projects, and employees to buoy its stock price.
But my gut reaction after reading was âwhat a bunch of self-serving nonsenseâ.
From âthey needed me to babysit the CEO and boardâ to âI still believe in HP despite destroying 1.2 billion in value while I was on an 8-week breakâ to âthe DECIDE frameworkâ, itâs a masterclass of modern tech executive bloviation. They are always so confident and convincing as they explain their cognitive dissonance, preaching to audiences stuck in the same reality-distorting game. The tech market is a mess because these same types are utterly paralyzed over the path forward now that LLMs have emerged but full of so many words to explain how they have it all figured out.
But this guy insists it isn't his fault. He was just unlucky that he wasn't there to be the beacon of reason their leadership needed:
> Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision." Think about the implications of that statement. HP's own technical staff, the people closest to our innovation work, believed that senior leadership couldn't be trusted to make sound technology decisions without someone there to provide oversight and guidance. They weren't wrong. The numbers proved it in the most painful way possible.
Hollywood-grade drama and warning sirens all around, but a few paragraphs laterâŚ
> Despite watching the WebOS disaster unfold, despite being blamed for not preventing it, despite everything that went wrong during that period, I still believe in HP as an organization.
Mercy. The author thinks he's provided an apology to explain his culpability in the failures of the Palm acquisition but, instead, he's just made it clear he has awful judgement.
HP is far, far away from the once-great version of itself. For example, once they achieved dominance, HP ensh*ttified their printer business beyond any reasonable tolerance level to squeeze every last dollar out of its customers. They abandoned all pretense of technical excellence or innovation or customer satisfaction and embraced dark patterns to please their MBA masters.
Like so many of their peers, they see their employees as headcount and their customers as vassals.
Thatâs the type of decision-making HP values. That's the type of company HP is. And this guy, his excuses, and his experience are a shining example of why.
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.
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."
I know tech people like to villainize bean counters for ruining tech companies, but this man has zero business sense and needs a good bean counter. It's crazy that he thinks people will read this and feel like he was in the right with his business decisions. There is no timeline where HP tablets beat out iOS, Android, and Windows because WebOS had good multitasking.
webOS very much feels like a path not taken in mobile technology, it really was slick to use, even though as this fella mentioned it wasnt polished in terms of what was released.
Palm is the Xerox in mobile era. Back then, Itâs obviously better than Android, which is not a complete OS in any sense of quality standard. Itâs even better than iOS in many technical specifications. HP flop could be one of the worst disasters in computing history.
HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be Autonomy.
I remember the day the WebOS tablet came out. I saw stanchions outside of a mobile phone store, with staff waiting for people to show up. No one was there. I had never heard any buzz about WebOS beforehand, and clearly no one else had either.
I have to agree with the sentiment here that the launch was botched, but I also agree with McKinney's assessment that it was killed prematurely. The market for mobile / tablet is huge, and there was plenty of time to "catch up." Perhaps the tablet was launched prematurely; and instead the launch should have focused on app developers?
> On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0. > While Apple was selling 9 million iPads that same quarter, TouchPads were gathering dust on store shelves.
Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?
I was fully "in" on webOS :( Still got a Palm Pre, Pre 2, Pre 3 and TouchPad in a box, and an LG webOS 2.0 OLED that died in the basement.
Apps were built sort of like PhoneGap, but intentional and supported rather than a middleware work-around. webOS introduced the card concept that we all use now, along with a very coherent design language, and the devices were cool (to me, albeit a bit flimsy) with full keyboards (I was super sold on that but have long-since changed my mind after switching to iOS).
I came from a long line of "alt" devices though, Sidekick 1, 2, 3, Helio Ocean, etc, so you can see where my sensibilities lie HAHAHA
I would also get freakin' roasted by literally everybody I knew every time they saw it for being a hold-out and not getting an iPhone, but iOS just wasn't there yet as far as I was concerned. Apple/Android hadn't cornered the market yet and it was just a time with a lot of options (Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc).
Anyways, when I heard HP was buying Palm (and AT&T did a deal for Pre 3 exclusivity, I think), I assumed it would be a great thing for the mass adoption of what seemed like a really exciting future for mobile. Then HP poured gasoline on it and killed it with fire.
RIP late-oughts Palm, we barely knew ye!
Interesting story, but the âDECIDEâ framework definitely gave me strong âconjoined triangles of successâ vibes.
worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important companies in the worldâcomparable to what Microsoft or Google are today. A true tech and market leader.
First, HP bought Compaq to gain full ownership of the home computer market. That merger didnât work out very well. Later, HP acquired Ross Perotâs EDS, attempting to enter the services business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several years.
It was a time of turmoilâevery other morning youâd receive an email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of employees.
Hurdâs focus was on increasing the companyâs share value. He aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HPâs strongest traditions), essentially putting HP on life support. For example, HP-UX, which was relevant in the server market at the time, was completely abandoned.
When Mark Hurd was firedâaccused of using company funds to give gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)âhe immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HPâs strongest competitors in the enterprise market at the time. Employees saw him as a traitor to the HP brand. Internally, many people hoped things would finally change.
What came next was completely unexpected. Leo Apotheker, from SAP, took over. He had this idea of transforming HP into a software and services company, essentially abandoning decades of tradition and letting one of the strongest brands in the industry fade away. He lasted only a few monthsâit clearly wasnât working.
Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a hardware project called âThe Machine,â which was supposed to revolutionize the data center by relying on memory instead of CPU power. That was never released. AWS had already emerged, and HP had no way to compete.
Whitman decided to split the company in two: HP (consumer hardware) and HP Enterprise Services (enterprise hardware and services). HP-ES eventually migrated most of its operations to India. Around that time, I accepted a WFR (Workforce Reduction) planâsince it was clear Iâd be laid off sooner or later. Later, HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.
Itâs incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest brands in the worldâa tech giant and market leader for decadesâwent to hell in just three or four years. Bad management, a focus on short-term share price, and a complete lack of vision can bring even the most powerful company to its knees.
At the time, many said HP was simply too big for its own good, that it was impossible to succeed in so many markets. I donât think thatâs true. Amazon, Microsoft, Googleâthey all do what HP did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management. As always.
The top level comments here question his judgement, are incredulous to the 49 days of unraveling, and wonder what relation his emergency surgery had to the fail of launch.
I also wonder how it was possible that the product lacked polish, was priced at XX, lacked an ecosystem, and he was not there to fix any of this in the months that led up to the launch which was immediately after his surgery.
But my insight into his words tells me the following:
1. leadership changed
2. stewardship was out-of-service for 8 weeks
3. new leadership worked on a different vision.
4. new leadership made immediate decisions.
5. new leadership canceled the product because it did not have strong advocacy and stewardship of the product.
6. new leadership did not walk back their cancelation once stewardship returned.
7. momentum for improving the product collapsed.
8. trust for hp collapsed.
9. steward blames leadership! for cancelling the product. talks trash about Leo.
What are the lessons here for this perfect storm? Don't have just one steward.
I hate to say this but when I saw this line:
> My continued shareholding isn't just a matter of financial confidenceâit's a statement of faith in what HP can become when the right leadership applies systematic thinking to innovation decisions.
I strongly felt like it was ChatGPT and suddenly my interest in the article plummeted.
It is amusing how mainstream media's coverage of Apotheker's firing is opposite to what the author says regarding his attitude towards webOS:
> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.
from https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...
> When I decided to âretireâ from HP, they offered me a separation bonusâa significant financial package that would have made my transition easier. But there was a catch: accepting it would have restricted what I could say publicly about my experiences at the company.
> I refused.
Should probably have taken it.
In 2008 or 2009 Palm still had enough relevant legacy apps that they could have convinced me to stay with WebOS, but launching a tablet (no phone) in 2010. Forget it! That shop has sailed and youre not onboard! By 2010, you were either android/java or ios/ObjC. If they really wanted to present an alternative platform they should have been giving away those 200k tablets and a compiler/sdk to cs majors. They werent! It was a half hearted effort. Acquisition was probably to bail out board members with palm stock with a buyout.
> 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.
ouch. this is actually pretty cool though in terms of putting SAP vs HP in perspective, which i've never considered prior.
This guy sounds out of touch on several dimensions... There is something about folks who spend a very long time in a declining business. Their world view seems to diverge from reality.
I remember looking at palm webos devices in 2010 and thinking this is cool. The docs on how things worked were really good for the time. The hardware was sleek palm pre if I remember correctly.
I was not keeping track of who bought whom at the time an why. But was surprised when webos got shut down. Android was gaining traction windows mobile on the way out. I bought an old Nokia e63 around the time because I was short on money and I loved the keyboard. The article gave me some nice nostalgic memories.
49 days on top of the year of him being there, and luckily he didn't sign an NDA so that he can sell his DECIDE framework at the end of the article.
This article got more fishy the more I read it
It wouldnât matter. By 2010, tge iPhone 4 was out. iOS 4 allowed enough multitasking to be useful as far as most people cared about. Apple had manufacturing capabilities that Palm could only dream about via its Chinese supply chain. It had the app ecosystem. physical Apple stores, carrier relationships, marketing, the iPhone 4 was already a status symbol in China.
If MS couldnât break into the mobile market, Palm definitely didnât have a chance.
After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for ÂŁ109. 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?
When I think about HP as a software & services company, I think about the times I booked Disney vacations in the 2010s. The Disney web site for managing your reservations, looking at park attraction wait times, etc., was usually painfully slow, and the bottom of every page proudly featured the HP logo.
It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.
Apotheker had made the discontinuation choice without even informing the Palm team beforehand
Is this how big decisions are made in big companies? Or is this an exception? Shouldnât people in high positions have basic humility to get the opinions of experts, have basic decency to inform before making massive decisions like this? Even if it was the right decision (I have no idea)? sounds insane
What a hit piece. The only thing the author seemed to have on his mind while writing it is revenge. Oh, and heâs also selling a course btw
Does anybody have insider details on how HP killed the Memrister? I'd be fascinated to read that, too.
I developed an in-house app for the Palm and supported it for several years.
The developer support from Palm was very primitive. They did the very minimum and it showed in the lack of software ecosystem.
I donât think the leadership knew how to grow that. Iâm sure they knew it was important but they didnât take the steps.
I really wanted a Palm Pre back in the day, but they initially didn't offer them at all outside of the US, and later only in a handful of other countries. It seemed like they weren't even trying. The tablet saw wider distribution, but it was a joke - nobody was going to pay iPad prices for a plastic piece of crap.
Palm had the worst combination, the monolithic hardware/software approach of Apple but without the branding and services to make that approach a desirable platform.
Imagine using a Motorola Droid without the services and app ecosystem provided by Google Android and oh wait, the sterile corporate branding only a dinosaur like HP could provide.......lovely.
Watching your brainchild deteriorate when there's physically nothing you can do sounds stressful, especially something you believe could've saved your company. At the same time, I don't think he wants to admit that there never really was anything he could've done.
How would a slightly cheaper Palm compete with Android? It would've been like a pretty Zune.
Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesnât look like the board were really convinced as the author believed.
HP specialised in snatching Defeat from the very jaws of Victory, always after the elusive $cow and all they get is hate. They have made some tries at additive printing = high end $$. They have had some success in that far from consumer field - but it does not impinge on me.
The book Androids by Chet Haase talks about how the early Android team had a lot of ex-Palm people on it.
Failure or not I have to say thank you to this guy. This left Jeff Hawkins with a substantial personal fortune which he went on to use to found Numenta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and none of that would have been possible without that acquisition.
> WebOSâtrue multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it
Am I missing something?
After getting it on a very good sale I used and loved the Touchpad tablet for years despite some shortcomings. Primarily to visit this site actually. WebOS was gorgeous, innovative and smooth. MatĂas Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
Seems you were not chasing the launch enough. I've been guilty of that before, missing the development of a demo that was meant to be presented to big clients. You may wanna explore why you lacked commitment and drive for the development.
No sympathy from me. Guy was the CTO, probably making millions a year, and now he's whining about how a $1.2B investment failed on his watch and nothing was his fault? Sorry guy but you are the leader, you are responsible.
Can confirm. Was an HP Scholar at the time and leadership was chaotic.
Good people though.
The fall of WebOS (like BeOS) makes me wonder if the tech world is primed for duopolies. Somehow I feel there are parallels in Windows/Linux, Java/.Net, React/Vue etc.
I bought them on sale, I think it was 99 USD each. I bought two. Moded them at the time, don't remember if I installed android. Nice times.
I don't get it. Even in the late 80's we had these devices called "speaker phones" that facilitated remote meetings.
I was there on-site when HP was doing IT consulting (badly) about the time the Oprah giveaway led to giant roaming data bills.
Wait⌠HP sells software?
(This isn't a joke or sarcasm, I genuinely thought both HP and HPE are hardware companies?)
I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It no wonder it failed so miserably
Stupid strategic decisions ruined good potential. Same happened with Nokia's effort for Meego.
Apothecary is the guy who acquired Autonomy. Maybe âstupidâ was the right word
i loved the touchpad. it was def priced too high and when it dropped i bought some for my family. the OS was really nice and they really should have toughed it out and iterated more.
Shame an interesting post turned into a sales pitch
Reminds me also a bit of how Microsoft killed Nokia
Forget about Palm, BeOS is the real tragedy here.
HP... HP...
Wasn't that an old ink company?
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 devices and race to the bottom for pennies at scale.
Something missing from this article is more depth into the issues of doing a webkit-based os back in the late 2000s/2010s, and this goes back to 2008. From https://web.archive.org/web/20140110095058/https://www.theve... (2012, theverge) :
"The way Simon and Grignon saw it, using pure HTML and JavaScript would have a few key advantages. One, it would allow large chunks of functionality to be implemented very quickly because the underlying standards were simple, straightforward, and widely understood. Two, Duarte was intrigued by the notion that his designers would be able to apply their handicraft to apps, screens, and UI elements without extensive assistance from engineers, all of whom had other things to worry about. And perhaps most appealing, WebKit already existed â Palm just had to port it.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. WebKit simply wasn't created for doing this kind of thing. No one working on the core WebKit project had a mobile device with limited RAM, processor, and battery in mind â certainly not for the entire user interface, anyway. Granted, Nokia and Apple had already ported WebKit for use in their mobile browsers at that point, but what Simon and Grignon were spitballing was a considerably more ambitious idea.
One weekend later, though, the two believed they'd cobbled together enough of a mockup to prove that Matias' vision could indeed be realized using nothing more than a web engine. They took the demo to software boss Mitch Allen; Rubinstein saw it not long after. Allen was impressed enough that Grignon was given approval to peel off ten staff members and crank for a month with the goal of bringing up WebKit and basic functionality on a very early prototype handset called "Floyd," essentially a modified Treo 800w"
[...]
"Prototypes of the original Pre first started showing up in Palm offices around April of 2008. Luna was far from perfect, especially running in just the 256 MB of RAM shipped with the original Pre. The system would regularly exhaust the limited space. To help speed things up, the Luna team had decided to port Google's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine, making Palm the first company to ship V8 on mobile"
[...]
"Mercer was shuffled into a new role looking for ways to optimize WebKit, but sources tell us that it quickly became apparent he was only using it to advance his cause: he'd created benchmark tool after benchmark tool showing that the web "wasn't ready for primetime" on mobile. And in a way, he was right â at that time, it wasn't ready for primetime, but Palm's engineers were on the bleeding edge trying to get it there. "It was obvious that this stuff was the future," one senior-level source told us. As the saying goes, they were trying to skate to where they believed the puck was going; Mercer was trying to skate to where it was."
It still feels wild to think of Palm attempting all this while Apple iOS ecosystem developers were generally writing code in Objective-C (Swift came out in 2014).
I just want Grafitti
My dude such systemic problems can't be attributed to you being out of office. If a hurricane had hit hp headquarters you'd have been just about as responsible. Board made a decision, CEO made decisions, were they wrong? Possibly. What can one man do about it? Not much honestly, unless you own the shares.
He honestly thought UNIX on iphone was something other than multitasking?
A company that bought into the bad premise would be one to be done in by its own successive CEO choices that are legendarily bad.
Sucks to be powerless, but a surgery shouldnât really have any bearing on the colossal failure that lived out in 49 days.
Itâs a big, ready to fail HP on display.
Let me completely absolve myself from my role in destroying a beloved company, unload the blame on everyone else around me, then plug my business framework.
Sounds like a great Silicon Valley episode plot.
It's pretty easy to pattern-match LLM writing even when there's been a lot of work put into it, and it wasn't one-shotted by the LLM.
I bring this up because this is a very smart person, with an interesting story I've been waiting to hear for years, and an important point, but I couldn't read it.
Not because LLMs were involved: whatever, that's fine.
First, I'm reading then get an uneasy feeling when I see the "That wasn't Xâit was Y.", which is a tell of GPT 4o at chatgpt.com or 4.1 on API. [^1 for sentences that got my attention]
Then, as I'm reading, I keep getting a weird "attention reset" buzz and I find it hard to follow. I note that there are no less than 15 sections, each 3-5 paragraphs. This is / was unnatural in writing. 0 flow.
Tips I'm taking away for myself:
- Actively read for "snappy" sentences from the LLM, and then actively eschew them -- you can't be familiar with every LLM's tells, but here, I'd try to notice the repeat structure in a completely different, and the cadence of the phrase ("snappy", in my verbiage)
- Marketing-type writing is best helped by an LLM if you can get it to give you individual feedback items that you have to address, or at least, a set of suggestions. Code works well with LLMs because the metastructure doesn't communicate meaning to a reader, there isn't "flow": in prose, the way the text was assembled can be betrayed by the structure.
[^1] A) "This wasn't just a cultural mismatchâit was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch" B) "This wasn't about buying a struggling phone companyâit was our strategic entry into the future of computing platforms"
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?
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.
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> We knew the computing world was shifting toward mobile, and our traditional PC business faced real threats from tablets and smartphones. We needed to be there.
This right here is already game over. Unless they were the ones making the tablets and smartphones and being the threats to everyone else, they had lost at this point one way or another.
If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms.
Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who's developed apps will point out that you shoudn't spend too much time on the tablet version. Just add some borders/sidebars and ship it. The markets not big enough to do more and the tablets are only viable today thanks to re-use of the phone hardware and software ecosystems.
> "Then, in late June 2011 [âŚ] I faced a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and a eight-week recovery period confined to bed. [âŚ] On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0 [âŚ] 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 market, lacking the polish that could have helped it compete."
He claims to have been working with Palm closely for a year, yet he somehow must have missed how bad things were. The product was a week or two away from launch when he had to step away. To me it sounds like the bad decisions had already been made.