[HN Gopher] I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them ...
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I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 636 points
Date : 2025-06-13 18:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (philmckinney.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (philmckinney.substack.com)
| foobarian wrote:
| > 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.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and
| tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.
| foobarian wrote:
| That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just
| buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll
| be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted
| from that price tag and expected immediate results without
| years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change
| also didn't help apparently.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I'd say this attitude is more common than many realize.
| Some seem to think "being in the game" is the thing. It's
| not just acquisitions - it's half assed investment in
| product lines. You have to win.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I mean, they _were_ in the game. The problem is that they
| immediately folded.
| stahtops wrote:
| It isn't game over, but the path to success clearly wasn't to
| buy another company and release a product (that was probably
| already in the queue) only a year later.
| rjsw wrote:
| HP already had plenty of experience of building handheld
| computers at that point. Their own and from Compaq and Digital.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| That's something but the Post iPhone 1 generation of
| Smartphones was a major leap passed PDA's.
|
| They needed an App store to entice developers and bring about
| killer apps. There was no logical reason to buy an HP Palm,
| it was too expensive even.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| I wonder how many companies had this play out? IBM is another
| famous example of internal rot of engineering excellence in the
| 2000s as the business shell was gives fresh coats of paint and
| varnish.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can
| easily find it using the same button on your android phone
| you used to use for quick access to emergency services.
|
| We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI?
|
| What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you
| use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so
| focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI.
|
| AI.
| msgodel wrote:
| I love looking at Coreweave's long description for their
| stock. It says AI 32x. That's huge AI to price ratio!
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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. Maintainers of HP-UX,
| (former) maker of Itanium servers and caretaker of Cray (but
| also the company that seems to have misplaced the Irix source
| code).
|
| - HP, Maker of shitty printer products and expensive toner.
|
| How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a
| company/companies?
| geodel wrote:
| Well if autonomy bet worked out well they could have
| challenged Google. :)
| harrydehal wrote:
| Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and
| Juniper Networks - not sure how both those networking
| portfolios look like post-acquisition.
| mrweasel wrote:
| True, both are solid networking companies in my opinion.
| Juniper is already slipping on support and pricing though,
| and we'll be replacing all our Juniper gear starting this
| summer.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| HPE wants to buy Juniper. The DOJ has blocked the deal and
| that lawsuit is expected to play out next month.
| eGQjxkKF6fif wrote:
| 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.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| > HPE
|
| Also with one of the worst logos ever. Have you seen
| RECTANGLE? It encapsulates our venerable company in two
| dimensional space. It's at least honest - Three dimensions
| would imply we're solid, and four would imply that we're
| moving anywhere.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Oh shit, that's their logo? I don't exactly know what I
| though it was, but I didn't consider that it might be their
| logo.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| It's so subtle you can't even tell! That's what you get
| when you commission with a blank cheque.
| geodel wrote:
| > How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a
| company/companies?
|
| First slowly and then suddenly.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| didn't they turn down the apple I in the 70s?
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track
| record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he
| was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his
| short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut
| losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an
| establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking
| the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly
| by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying
| company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is
| not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside
| cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It is not specific to HP, but to the top management style of
| that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar
| things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar
| story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software
| and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other
| companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these
| are the companies that are on top today.
|
| There is no much differentiation in the IT services space,
| lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more,
| or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no
| differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die.
| And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > WebOS--true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle
| it
|
| Am I missing something?
| f1shy wrote:
| I must be missing the same, because I had a Palm back in the
| day, and the OS was IMHO absolute crapware
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Palm didn't have a WebOS product on market until 2009 and HP
| acquired them less than a year later.
|
| I don't think HP was remotely interested in the previous
| operating system.
| RajT88 wrote:
| WebOS is not PalmOS based. Your experience is not applicable.
|
| I actually own a discount touchpad. It was snappy as hell,
| promised to at some point have the Android app store, and
| could easily be jail broken by design. The software ecosystem
| was not even bad - my basic needs were all met.
|
| The UI was slick feeling, like an Apple product, but the
| exterior finish was plasticy and more like an Android device.
| Battery life was incredible compared to Android devices of
| the time.
|
| All in all, I really liked it. What might have been!
| fredoralive wrote:
| Are you perhaps thinking of the classic Palm OS on a
| PalmPilot or whatever, which was limited because it was
| designed in the '90s for '90s hardware? That was dead by the
| time HP bought Palm, they were onto Palm WebOS, a modern (for
| the day) Linux / web app based OS on the Palm Pre and Pixi
| devices.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| I remember thinking it was awesome to be able to ssh from my
| palm treo on the go 20 years ago - not all the PalmOS
| (different from WebOS) apps were crap, especially for the
| time!
| fredoralive wrote:
| 3rd party apps couldn't do anything in the background until iOS
| 4, and it's always been a bit limited.
|
| I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a
| nicer task switching UI at first.
| mikepavone wrote:
| Yeah, Android had good support for multi-tasking from the
| start, though at least some early devices did not really have
| enough RAM for it to work well
| onli wrote:
| It had apps as cards to easily switch between them, useful
| animations and a completely working gesture control. It was
| absolutely revolutionary and having to fall back to Android
| after that was a big step down, until Android incorporated
| everything from webOS a few years later.
|
| He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed
| a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by
| the hype around the fire sale and how many people really
| liked them then.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| I thought proper Android task switching didn't come until
| they released the first tablet version (Honeycomb, 2011).
| Interestingly enough this was after they hired away the webOS
| UX lead (Matias Duarte)
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Yeah, I am pretty confident I was able to keep apps running
| in the background on my T-Mobile G1 and some old forum posts
| I found seem to confirm my memory. [1] Multitasking/keeping
| apps in background and copy/paste were the big
| differentiators I remember on the first Android phones
| compared to the iPhone.
|
| The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really
| exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that
| gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at
| all.
|
| [1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/t-mobile-g1-android-
| pho...
| dismalaf wrote:
| When WebOS was released, it had multitasking whereas iOS and
| Android froze background apps?
|
| Dunno, it's a pretty straightforward statement.
|
| WebOS was a legit Linux OS and had a lot of good features...
| jerf wrote:
| Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS
| has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4
| introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1]
| describes it:
|
| "To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button,
| which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your
| previous app, assuming it isn't one of a very limited list of
| apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g.
| iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the
| previous app relaunches it."
|
| "In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without
| sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the
| home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring
| up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen.
| Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and
| you've just "multitasked" in iOS 4."
|
| Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly
| between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose
| context in either app because they restarted. The OS was
| structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state
| easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some
| stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm
| had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.
|
| (In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the
| apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell
| phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops
| of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior
| phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either
| way.)
|
| [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3779/apples-
| ios-4-explored/2
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I think what's confusing things is the underlying operating
| system is multitasking.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Prior to true multitasking on iOS, Apple would tell you to
| tag view controllers for preservation so that when your app
| launches, the OS will restore the original view controllers,
| as if the app has been running the whole time. Old
| documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archi
| ve/featuredarticles...
|
| (These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away
| from an app in a minute and upon switching back I'm back at
| the app's home screen.)
| mayoff wrote:
| The state preservation API wasn't added until iOS 6.0 in
| 2012.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontr
| o...
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's just an improved API introduced in iOS 6.0. Here's
| another earlier API that's available since iOS 2.0: https
| ://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro..
| .
| jerf wrote:
| w.r.t. few apps caring about state, I recently upgraded my
| phone, which I had been using for a while and did not
| realize was a 2021 model, basically solely because at 4GB
| of RAM, I was getting to the point that I couldn't switch
| between any two apps without them all totally restarting on
| every switch because I was out of RAM all the time. I was
| also _just_ starting to notice the battery was going but I
| could have managed that for a while yet... I really
| upgraded just for the RAM.
|
| (Also I had to reset the built-in camera to factory state
| and tell it to stop updating, because it couldn't even
| _start_ with my phone 's RAM anymore. Weird thing is I
| can't tell you what it was doing any better than the stock
| factory version.)
|
| But on, _ahem_ , a "real" phone, it is nice to just assume
| that either I'm still swapped in, or the user doesn't care
| anymore. It's not quite 100% accurate, but it's pretty
| close, and low-effort for the app developer who doesn't
| have to be guessing any more about what state is and is not
| important.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's interesting. Yes, I had assumed, with a kernel, that
| iOS was multitasking -- at least to the degree we've come to
| expect it.
| potatolicious wrote:
| 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 then RAM was in short
| enough supply that more often than not the memory state of the
| process was dumped to disk instead.
|
| 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.
|
| But the app executable was totally suspended during this time.
|
| Whereas on WebOS the UX was oriented around showing multiple
| "Cards"[1] at the same time, but each one represented a live
| running process that was able to interact to the user and
| render new UI.
|
| This was a pretty big deal at the time.
|
| Since then both iOS and Android gained a lot more capability
| and nuance around multitasking.
|
| [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4508/hp-touchpad-review/2
| jldugger wrote:
| The Nokia N900, running Maemo, also supported multitasking in
| 2011. It was just toppled by a similarly dedicated team of
| executive fuckups.
| wmf wrote:
| The N900 battery could run down in 30 minutes due to true
| multitasking (especially when using the true desktop
| browser).
| eloisant wrote:
| To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time
| supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were
| desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little
| adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery
| life were not great.
|
| That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power
| users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that
| "just work".
|
| One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a
| completely different userspace that what we had in desktop
| OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works"
| aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.
| potatolicious wrote:
| +1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but
| personally I don't get it.
|
| Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile
| device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed
| your battery _super_ quickly.
|
| The innovation was in multitasking that _didn 't_ result
| in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get
| there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just
| treated this thing like a desktop".
|
| And it's _still_ not a fully solved problem - there
| continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are
| defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or
| at least give the appearance of concurrency)
| jldugger wrote:
| My recollection was that the N900 battery lasted about a
| full day of normal use. Maybe two but it was a dice roll.
| That was pretty much on par with other smartphones on the
| market. IIRC the main thing android and iOS were doing
| was shutting down apps to save memory. But perhaps I
| saved a ton of battery by not buying a data plan? At the
| time, I had wifi at home and work, and a 100 dollar a
| year prepaid cell plan.
|
| And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all
| the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being
| something close to the home / back on screen button
| android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita
| to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast,
| or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the
| switcher.
|
| But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it
| had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn
| navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store
| launch was so botched that it was basically dead on
| arrival. The microusb port sucks.
| nextos wrote:
| > That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power
| users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that
| "just work".
|
| The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2
| "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've
| ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a
| masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user
| features under the hood.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Windows CE had nothing to do with Windows the desktop OS.
| We're talking entirely different codebases running on
| different kinds of hardware.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| Windows CE is quite internally different than Windows NT.
| It still does support multitasking, but kernel version 5
| (which was on all the CE devices of the late 2000's/early
| 2010's) had a maximum of 32 processes. It was a platform
| specifically for embedded use, though the GUI was styled
| to resemble Windows OSes at the time and of course
| numerous Microsoft things were ported over.
|
| Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to
| 10 were NT based.
|
| Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29.
| 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT
| was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to
| be on an architecture other than x86.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > A significant event for Windows NT to be on an
| architecture other than x86.
|
| Yeah, I too liked to run Windows NT 3.1 initial release
| on my DEC Alpha and MIPS workstations. Wait, what?
|
| (I think you meant to say that the support for _ARM32_
| specifically in Windows RT and the NT-based Windows
| Mobile 8+ was a noteworthy milestone, which I suppose is
| a fair point.)
| hajile wrote:
| Elop refused to launch the Nokia N9 in ANY of their
| primary markets. He refused to advertise the phone AT
| ALL.
|
| Despite that, the phone sold several million devices and
| people were paying huge premiums (often $200-400 over
| price) to get it shipped from these secondary markets to
| where they lived.
|
| The demand was there and Elop decided to kill it anyway.
| He also never released the second phone required by their
| Meego contract with Intel as I recall.
| RankingMember wrote:
| > 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
| potatolicious wrote:
| So classic they still use it! iOS now offers a lot more
| multitasking options, but for the most part when you swipe
| away from an app it's still good ol' Mr. Screenshot.
|
| And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is
| being done still to make this _even more seamless_. For
| example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to
| define UIs, _because_ rendering such UIs can be done by the
| OS outside of the app process.
|
| This means you can have an _actual live UI_ while the
| actual app process is suspended. They literally don 't have
| to wake the process until you tap on a button.
|
| It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz
| runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can
| define a _much_ more coarse-grained idea of "alive"
| without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.
| jldugger wrote:
| Early iOS would pause background apps. Limited multistasking
| was added in iOS 4:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_4#Multitasking
| strangattractor wrote:
| 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.
| nodamage wrote:
| I think the author of the article really misses the point here.
| While "true multitasking" might be a neat technical feature,
| it's not something that the end user really cares about or
| would base a buying decision on, especially if running multiple
| apps in the background at the same time came at the expense of
| battery life. Those early versions of iOS employed a lot of
| tricks to squeeze performance and battery life out of
| underpowered devices.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| 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."
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| That'd imply a bus factor of 1 in most analyses right?
| paxys wrote:
| 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").
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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.
| phonon wrote:
| 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.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the
| iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly
| common since quick ports could be made by checking the
| "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That
| was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit
| since then.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps
| because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying
| notifications or annoying popups to access privacy
| violating features [1], without adding clutter to an
| already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look
| the same, etc.
|
| [1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I
| guess somebody with dementia might...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps
| because, well, they require an internet connection too
| often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators
| to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is
| typically stored on their servers, after all).
|
| With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in
| my comment.
| ianburrell wrote:
| There is a difference between iPad and iPhone apps. The
| former run full screen, and the latter letterboxed.
|
| I don't use iPhone apps on this iPad Mini, they are too
| painful. I use the Instagram and Blue Sky web sites
| instead.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I don't use either of those services so I was unaware. So
| I guess there are still some apps out there without a
| proper iPad interface. I haven't encountered any in at
| least a decade though and they seem to be in the
| minority. Apple has gone to great lengths to make it easy
| to at least make something that _fits_ on the iPad even
| if you don 't try to make it properly native and use the
| screen real estate effectively. So that strikes me as
| laziness on the part of the Instagram and Bluesky app
| developers to not even try.
| Macha wrote:
| Android has unfortunately trended the opposite direction
| - apps that once had tablet UIs dropped them in favour of
| big phone UIs as they did redesigns around 2016-2020. I
| dropped out of the Android tablet world in 2019 for a
| Windows tablet, and most recently went for an iPad this
| year, so maybe Android has recovered ground there, but
| judging by how few Android tablets are actually on the
| market, I wouldn't be hopeful.
| hadlock wrote:
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| The thing with Windows tablets and Android tablets is in
| both cases the software development only has to justify its
| net increase in spend over just doing phone apps, but since
| HP didn't have a good market of phone apps to begin with,
| they'd basically need to justify the entire software
| development cost, on lower sales.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Taking the story at face value, the issue isn't necessarily
| delegation. If the C-suite is making a decision and one of
| their primary people (CTO in this case) is absent, it almost
| doesn't matter who he delegates to. The delegated individual is
| not their peer, so whatever they say will be discounted. I've
| been in that situation (as the delegated individual) several
| times. It's frustrating. Even if they respect you, you don't
| get a vote in the final decision.
| neilv wrote:
| In a company like HP at that moment...
|
| * Might the same decisions have been made, even if the CTO were
| there?
|
| * Would the CTO have one or more (SVP? VP?) people ramped up on
| the technical/product, and able to take a temporary acting-CTO
| role on that?
|
| * Would there have been any sharp-elbow environment reason
| _not_ to elevate subordinates temporarily into one 's role and
| access? (For example, because you might return to find it's
| permanent.)
|
| * What was the influence and involvement of the other execs?
| Surely it wasn't just CTO saying "buy this", CEO saying "OK",
| and then a product and marketing apparatus executing
| indifferently?
| Ologn wrote:
| The book Androids by Chet Haase talks about how the early Android
| team had a lot of ex-Palm people on it.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| mosdl wrote:
| From what I heared (I had some popular webos apps) the touchpad
| hardware was forced by HP onto the webos team.
| Aloha wrote:
| The issues that killed webOS had nothing to do with its
| technical merits (which were many) - it instead was a failure
| of product management.
|
| * The TouchPad was priced too high for a new entrant with
| embryonic app support.
|
| * It probably needed more development time before going to
| market, CTO doesnt really make GTM timing decisions.
|
| * Insult to injury, as this fella pointed out - the
| applications for webOS extended far beyond a tablet, HP threw
| the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| * They tried to make a strategic shift into software and
| services without having a great track record of doing those
| thing, which compounded all of the above, Palm did have some
| expertise there, but it was still tossed away.
| potatolicious wrote:
| Agree. I'm sympathetic to the CTO here, but I remember the
| disaster of the HP TouchPad launch very well - there were
| multiple fatal errors here that don't seem possible to commit
| in an 8-week window.
|
| The hardware had basically ~no app ecosystem. That's not a
| problem that occurs over 8 weeks. The software was also
| _incredibly_ under-baked, and I 'm doubtful that the company
| pivoted from "this needs more time and should release later" to
| "full marketing push, press events, and big launch" in that
| short a time either.
|
| I don't doubt that there was a lot of conflict over strategy
| with the new CEO, but the framing that all of this happened
| while he was on the sidelines doesn't seem very plausible.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I agree.
|
| OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers
| attribute the computers to them. But they don't have a core
| competency in software. And they don't have a core
| competency in the hardest parts of hardware--chip design,
| etc.
|
| Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping
| them, that's all important stuff. They weren't in a
| position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the
| three games Apple plays, almost as well as Apple.
| bluGill wrote:
| HP did have competency in a lot of those areas though.
| They were a large company that did have fingers in a lot
| of different things, both software and hardware. Their
| PCs were visible, but they had lots of other divisions
| doing lots of things.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Which was perhaps their major issue. The HP expertise was
| all over the place with divisions around the globe
| reinventing the wheel. Couple that with a recently
| decimated and outsourced IT department (Such a colossally
| dumb decision) and you could effectively see HP not as
| one company but 100 companies all doing their own thing.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Circa 2005, HP did a licensing deal with Apple to sell
| their own iPod Photo.
| paxys wrote:
| 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).
| phonon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Veer and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Pre_3 could have been
| great, if they had been well supported.
| bluGill wrote:
| In early 2011 when I told people I had an Android they had
| no clue what I was talking about. A well done long term
| investment in other phones could have made a big difference
| - but HP wasn't willing to make it so we will never know.
| (Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again
| killing it before it took off).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again
| killing it before it took off
|
| That 2011 iPAQ has a Windows button. Wikipedia lists them
| as running "Windows Mobile".
| bluGill wrote:
| I may remember my dates wrong... Close enough for this
| discussion though.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, I think you're right. Wikipedia suggests that
| "Windows Phone" (the operating system) came out the
| following year, replacing Windows Mobile.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android
| manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and
| greatest mobile device looked like this
|
| That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem
| supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year.
|
| They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you
| don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the
| full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you have a
| bigger image when watching videos.
| throwanem wrote:
| > What's the problem?
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/blackberry-
| revenu...
| MadcapJake wrote:
| 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.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I suspect that making business mistakes illegal would
| ultimately cause more harm than the problem such a move is
| trying to solve.
|
| And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind,
| "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes
| the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and
| running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the
| opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that
| don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually
| the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like,
| "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems
| with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to
| solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies
| changes to the existing product portfolio.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I actually think if there was anybody who _could_ have competed
| effectively against Apple at this phase -- on branding -- Palm
| was it. It had recognition and association with the kind of
| product. And a patent portfolio, along with it.
|
| I seem to recall there was rumours of the time of Apple
| sniffing around Palm as an acquisition target, even? I get the
| impression HP made this purchase simply on account of a
| strategic move to stop Apple from doing the same, and to get
| the patent portfolio that came out of it.
|
| And the Palm Pre really was a decent phone, and the software
| relatively compelling... they just couldn't keep up on the HW
| manufacturing side.
|
| At the time this was potentially a solvable problem, Apple
| hadn't become the juggernaut it is now.
|
| I also recall that Jobs was famously _pissed_ at Zuckerberg for
| launching Facebook on WebOS before iOS?
|
| EDIT: I'd add to this that Palm had the _talent_ at the time,
| too. Consider Mattias Duarte was the VP at Palm who headed up
| WebOS UX.. and then went on to direct the same thing for
| Android at Google, out of which came Material Design, etc. etc.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| HP had successful lineup of pocket PC devices that is iPAQ, so
| I still believe they could've made WebOS as alternate.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > never in a position to compete with Apple.
|
| I kind of wonder if Apple could pull off something like an
| iphone or an ipad or even an ipod these days, without Steve
| Jobs around.
| Tteriffic wrote:
| Vision Pro, different kind of device but same idea
| throwanem wrote:
| No one wants it, though.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The Apple Watch though is much more successful than the
| iPod ever was.
| al_borland wrote:
| I thought WebOS looked great and thought it was the only real
| chance we ever had for a 3 platform. Much of the UI we take for
| granted in mobile devices today came from WebOS (such as card
| based app switching and swiping to close). I would have loved
| to see what it could become, rather than relegating it to TVs.
| iOS wasn't what it is today back then. It was still pretty new
| itself, and lacking what most would say are very basic features
| today.
|
| I often wonder what HP would look like today had Leo Apotheker
| not been such an awful fit. The damage 1 person can do in less
| than a year is astonishing. He even proposed selling off the PC
| division. WebOS was a fairly new acquisition and very well
| could have been the future, but he couldn't see any vision
| outside of software with his background. HP was built on
| hardware, they did't need to pivot that hard. It seems the
| stockholders agreed.
| nashashmi wrote:
| WebOS should never have tried to compete with Apple. They
| should have been on a slow march to their own definition for
| enterprise services. And then pivot to the consumer development
| market
| lesuorac wrote:
| > 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 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?
| mrpippy wrote:
| The same day they shut down WebOS, all the unsold hardware was
| cut to fire-sale prices. TouchPad was $99, and they sold out
| everywhere at that price.
|
| I bought 2 at the time, sold one and used the other for a
| while. The hardware didn't feel as nice as the iPad 2, but it
| was serviceable. The software was neat and the card metaphor
| arguably is still more sensible than iOS/iPadOS of today. I
| can't see any way that HP could've been more than a distant 3rd
| place behind iOS/Android, but it would've been fun to see them
| try.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It
| was just priced wrongly from the outset
|
| I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was
| demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in
| WebOS. Besides the $499 iPad I don't think there were any
| other 10" tablets around.
|
| People like watching TV and movies on tablets. Not everyone
| has space or wants a bedroom TV. Not everyone wants to watch
| whatever their partner or roommates are watching on a living
| room TV.
|
| A 4:3 ratio screen is also _much_ nicer than a 16:9 ratio
| screen for reading books and PDFs. An A4 /letter paper is
| closer to 3:4 than 9:16 so it's way easier to read even two
| column pages without zooming and panning over a single page
| like you need to do on a 9:16 ratio screen.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there
| was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in
| WebOS.
|
| That's basically what I meant. Albeit that I was
| emphasising that people are also happy with something that
| wasn't iOS / Android if the price was right.
| cwyers wrote:
| Right, but HP hadn't figured out how to make and sell
| profitable $99 10" tablets, they had figured out how to
| wash their hands of unsold inventory of $500 tablets that
| people didn't want. They had no moat in selling cheap
| tablets because as soon as the hardware became affordable
| enough to do it for a profit anyone else could have too.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You say that but HP already have an established and
| mature supply chain for hardware which, isn't common. And
| particularly with portable drives like laptops and PDAs.
| HP were in better position to capitalise than you claim
| with your "anyone" comment.
|
| Their "$500 tablet" could be easily dropped to $100
| because it wasn't a particularly high end device to begin
| with. I mean, it did have some niceties. But there was
| also a hell of a lot of corners cut too.
|
| Ironically, this was the same problem Palm faced with its
| WebOS phones before they sold to HP. Their phones were
| nice but they felt far too sluggish and basic considering
| their price point. I actually wanted a WebOS phone but
| ended up with Android (likely HTC) because you got so
| much more for your money.
|
| Given HP (and Palm) has experience building portable
| devices like PDAs, there really isn't any excuse for
| their failing in price and hardware for the WebOS tablets
| and phones. They already had experience in this market so
| should have really known better.
| e_y_ wrote:
| The Slickdeals comment thread for the HP Touchpad firesale
| has over 285,000 comments
|
| https://slickdeals.net/e/3220862-hp-touchpad-9-7-wifi-
| tablet...
| analyte123 wrote:
| Can't really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and
| WebOS really could've 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 I've had since.
| Aloha wrote:
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| snoman wrote:
| My personal conspiracy theory is that Nokia was an orchestrated
| takedown by MS. Get a leader in there to tank its stock for an
| acquisition.
|
| MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to
| deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Nokia were in a deep shi^W trouble way before Elop's memo.
|
| Sure, MS benefited greatly from this situation but Nokia was
| in the steady downhill _since 2008_.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Nokia had credible mobile OSs for modern phones. Windows
| Phone was not one.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Yeah, we all know that a corrupt person in government is
| often sponsored by a corporation to rip off the government. I
| wonder if sometimes a corrupt person is put into leadership
| at Corporation A who is really on the take from Corporation B
| with the job of wrecking a competitor.
| Not4Hire wrote:
| this does happen: Imagine company B poached staff from A,
| presumaby for'insights' into company A IP, which had
| nothing to do with costly decisions and some missteps of
| unknown causes whereafter A os still in business and B? not
| so much. seems like a plotline by Sun Tsu
| happycube wrote:
| Remember too that from the Nokia board POV selling the phone
| division to MS was a $1B+ dollar exit.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It's not enough to be as good as the competition when they
| already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories.
| To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need
| to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to
| put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is
| why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS
| and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive
| downside.
|
| This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though
| established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered.
| Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged
| them.
| hajile wrote:
| WebOS had a native development kit in addition to the web one.
|
| They were way ahead of the game with stuff like wireless
| charging and the SoC was cutting-edge for its time with fast
| (1.2GHz, but the chip was designed to run at 1.5GHz and
| overclocking to 1.8-2GHz was not too hard) partially OoO dual
| cores and 128-bit SIMD instead of 64-bit like A9 paired with a
| good LCD. The UI as shipped was already ahead of its time and
| if you look around for the cancelled Mocha UI, I think it would
| look pretty modern even today.
|
| The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their
| version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant
| they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS
| performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a
| very rapid pace. The CPU was fast compared to everyone else,
| but it was still slow and they needed to focus on performance a
| bit more.
| renewiltord wrote:
| HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be
| Autonomy.
| tootie wrote:
| I remember when that was happening. Autonomy boasted a few
| flagship products around enterprise search and CMS. Products I
| was very familiar with as an implementer. Products that well
| and truly sucked even back in the early days when they didn't
| have a ton of competition. By 2011 they were losing customers.
| Even without seeing their balance sheet, the $10B price tag
| just felt it had to be a huge mistake.
| stratosgear wrote:
| 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?
| nottorp wrote:
| He took the smaller exit package that was time limited on the
| muzzle to 15 years :)
|
| Or he needed a subject to talk to to sell his "decision
| framework" to which the article switches rather abruptly.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I went from a college dropout waiter to small town successful
| startup founder to Google, and Google somewhere between 3-5x'd
| my comp. I left, after 7 years, due to some nasty stuff.
|
| It's hard to explain and I don't understand fully myself, yet,
| but there's a point where more money isn't worth some sort of
| principle you have, and it's a lot lower than I would have
| thought.*
|
| In their case, I'd imagine having the unencumbered ability to
| talk (i.e. not needing to worry if HP would come crying if he
| got a job at Apple and did an interview for Fortune someday)
| would be worth more than whatever a severance package was on
| top of years and years of 6-7 figure comp.
|
| This would be _especially_ paramount if you felt current
| management was completely misguided on decisions you were
| involved, they were doing the standard corpo forceout maneuver,
| and you couldn 't say anything _yet_ because the #1
| qualification for CXO jobs is a history of placing nice / dumb
| when needed.
|
| * reminder to self: this is also probably the purest answer to
| my Noogler fascination with how high turnover was, given the
| company approximated paradise to my eye at that time
| qualeed wrote:
| He refused the exit package so that he had the _option_ of
| talking about his experience at the company. It 's not like he
| is _compelled_ to.
|
| Maybe he talked about it plenty in private conversations
| immediately afterwards, or semi-publicly throughout the years,
| and you just haven't been privy to those conversations.
|
| Some people, on principle alone, will refuse to sign these
| sorts of NDAs even if they never _plan_ to talk, simply so they
| have _the ability_ to do so if they want to in the future.
| rezmason wrote:
| 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?
| dartharva wrote:
| Author admits he held (and still holds) a lot of HP shares. Had
| he spoken out back then after the fiasco, HP's stock price
| would have tanked further. He'd be cutting down his own wealth
| unnecessarily, in addition to harming his prospects at the peak
| of his career.
|
| Today he is probably past his corporate ambitions, and has a
| good personal relationship with current HP leadership. There is
| little to no harm getting it out now.
| hotsauceror wrote:
| "I nobly refused these golden handcuffs so that well down the
| road I could continue huffing the farts of a company that is a
| shell of its former self. Don't let your eyes deceive you -
| they're still a powerhouse. Buy my book."
|
| Is this what LinkedIn considers radical candor?
| wbsun wrote:
| Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesn't look like the
| board were really convinced as the author believed.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Why would the board buy in the first place if it weren't the
| case?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Seems like the real goal was to kill it so the market could
| consolidate under iPhone. Internal sabotage. Now Apple is
| killing themselves pushing bad UI decisions and getting paid
| off to insert back doors into Messages someone can control
| the public narrative as we enter another war.
| refulgentis wrote:
| 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 X--it 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 mismatch--it was a
| fundamental scale and complexity mismatch" B) "This wasn't about
| buying a struggling phone company--it was our strategic entry
| into the future of computing platforms"
| dwedge wrote:
| At the end he's trying to sell his framework. Using AI for the
| copy isn't surprising
| refulgentis wrote:
| Agreed - I'm not surprised, hell, at this point...it is time
| for me to announce that I have adopted the position that I'm
| surprised and saddened if you _don 't_ use an LLM, at all,
| when putting something out into the world.
|
| When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I
| want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.
| dejobaan wrote:
| The pattern sticks out to me, to the point where I have a
| directive in my LLM conversations, telling it to never to
| use "It's not just X--it's Y." So, I'm with you on this!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Thanks for delving into this! Very helpful.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I found the issue!
|
| ;)
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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.
| jldugger wrote:
| iPhone 4s shipped October 2011.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Oh you are right, I remembered 4 was released in 2010, and my
| mind jumped to 5. But they were doing the s cycles back then.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| And the first WebOS device launched was not 2011, it was
| actually the Palm Pre in 2009. The iPhone 3G and the App
| Store were not even a year old when that Pre launched.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| As a high school freshman in 2009, I can confirm that no
| teen in the Northern VA area wanted that thing lol.
|
| They did however rave about Droid and iPhone.
| resters wrote:
| 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.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| notatoad wrote:
| yeah, this whole post feels super revisionist to me - HP was a
| bad company making bad decisions and awful consumer technology
| products for a long time before the touchpad disaster.
| everybody knew HP buying palm was going to be the death of
| palm.
|
| or at least, everybody except HP knew that.
| jenadine wrote:
| Reminds me also a bit of how Microsoft killed Nokia
| iconara wrote:
| > "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 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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!
| foobiekr wrote:
| No one holds off a launch of a hardware device. Logistics
| production etc are all lined up and underway long before two
| weeks out. Two weeks out you've already shipped boxes to
| retailers a month prior.
| mlinsey wrote:
| It was a hardware device launch, not a web product; pushing
| back the launch date by months or dropping the price in half
| with only two weeks to go (when the launch devices have been
| manufactured, sold to retail partners, and are probably being
| shipped to stores already) would only be done in the event of
| a true catastrophe (something along the lines of a gross
| safety problem), one big enough that leadership should have
| flagged it beforehand.
| Wurdan wrote:
| A CTO shouldn't be "hoping", a CTO should have been
| influencing those decisions (including pricing) all along. If
| he only realized the price was wrong when the product hit the
| shelves (while he was in bed recovering), then he has no
| place in lecturing others on their lack of strategic
| perspective.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I don't think there's a world where you can hold the CTO
| responsible here. I get his colleagues anger and understand
| it. That said, this is IMO as clear cut as you can get for
| a case of absolutely ludicrously poor decisionmaking on the
| part of Apotheker. Bad strategy from bad principles,
| brought in from an unrelated and way smaller company. I
| genuinely can't fathom doing such a radical pivot with a
| business that size that had built a damn near cult
| following off the back of it's hardware to utterly sell
| that hardware business off on the notion of being a
| software company, with NOTHING in the business to back
| that. What in the world did HP _even have for software at
| this time?_
|
| I'm not even saying WebOS was a slam dunk the way the
| author says. Maybe. We'll never know. But it's clear
| Apotheker didn't think the acquisition was worth it, and
| decided to kill WebOS/Palm off from the day he arrived.
| It's the only way the subsequent mishandling makes any
| sense at all, and same for the acquisition he oversaw too,
| which was _also_ written off.
|
| The part that makes my blood boil is this utterly deranged
| course of action probably made Apotheker more money than
| I'll ever see in my lifetime. I wish I could fail up like
| these people do.
| fakedang wrote:
| Apotheker is basically everything wrong with the EU non-
| startup tech scene today. Not him personally per se, but
| you see a lot of characters like him on a much more
| regular basis in EU companies than you will find in US
| companies.
|
| These kinds of folks only seem to fail upwards in the EU,
| whereas in the US, they would have been laughed out.
| impjohn wrote:
| Interesting thought. Do you have any anecdotes regarding
| it? Seems you're basing it off personal experience or
| something you've heard many times, curious to know what
| that is
| fakedang wrote:
| Mostly from personal experience and interacting with a
| lot of them, who form their little boy's clubs. It's
| especially bad in German Europe and Italy where the vast
| majority of leadership of extremely technical companies
| are largely business or law graduates.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I think you've got some "grass is greener on the other
| side" thinking going on there. There's lots of people
| just like him, failing upwards in US tech.
| fakedang wrote:
| Obviously there are. But you still have a higher
| proportion of engineer types leading multinational
| companies, whether they are tech or finance businesses,
| etc. In Europe, except for France (thanks to the Grand
| Ecole system), I have yet to see a large proportion of
| companies where non-founder leadership also has a
| technical or engineering bent.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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 the final Touchpad as being made of "leftover iPad
| parts". Once it was clear that HP wouldn't be able to compete
| with Apple on device build quality, the Palm division wanted
| to subsidize the device and price it at $200 to buy market
| share, but again HP management refused so they had to price
| it at HP's usual margin. It's no surprise it didn't sell at
| $499.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Truth. Every one of these things would have been visible 4-6
| months prior.
| bluGill wrote:
| The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.
| However the real take away is if you want something like this
| to work out you need to invest in to for years. There is
| nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that
| much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It
| isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have
| predicted a range of units sold (and various price points
| having different predicted ranges!).
|
| They didn't have the app ecosystem - no surprise. However the
| only way to get that ecosystem is years of investment. The
| Windows phone failed a couple years latter for similar reasons
| - nice device (or so I'm told), but it wasn't out long enough
| to get a lot of apps before Microsoft gave up on it.
| lukevp wrote:
| Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most
| responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were
| building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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 it. The hard part was getting people to give
| it a try. AT&T also did an awful job at the store too as
| none of their employees knew anything about it.
| klank wrote:
| Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later.
| We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a
| journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving
| mobile computing/devices forward during that time is
| (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required
| to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device.
|
| (I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)
| phatskat wrote:
| I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia -
| snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps.
| Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a
| way that made it a joy to interact with. I'd say iPhone
| is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the
| windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought
| I'd have.
|
| I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when
| I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was
| friends with "the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS".
| We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was
| just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They
| have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public
| years after I thought they would shutter lol
| glenstein wrote:
| I thought it was fascinating, agood value proposition, a
| necessary diversification of the market. I almost wonder
| just looking primarily at Google's example if a major key
| to success is just toughing it out and finding an
| identity and finding a niche in the early years. I feel
| like this could have been something meaningful and like
| the plug was pulled too quick. To keep going back to
| Amazon Prime which played the long long game before
| becoming kind of a flagship offering.
| anonymars wrote:
| I always say that many of the things we take for granted
| today came from Windows Phone
|
| At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at
| a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should
| switch over to the messaging app in question and start a
| new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the
| picture, right now, from the photos app"
|
| Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in
| the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
|
| Pinning access to specific things within an app, for
| example a specific map destination, a specific mail
| folder, weather location info
|
| Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack.
| Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are
| usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks
| into websites themselves too
|
| I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each
| conversation was its own entry in the task switcher,
| instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
| cycomanic wrote:
| While I agree that Windows phone was actually quite nice,
| I wish they didn't have to kill Meego to make it by
| planting a mole CEO at Nokia.
|
| If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen
| the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be
| _made_ in Finland. After that, and the whole brand
| licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones
| were made in China going forward. Such a shame.
| LTL_FTC wrote:
| 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 accessories or the
| Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have
| their commission structure altered to benefit
| significantly more from each windows phone sale if this
| was ever to succeed. This is why iPhone competitors
| failed initially, the sales people took the path of least
| resistance and more money, just like most would.
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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)
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| I bought one cheap at Costco as a travel phone, and I
| enjoyed using it enough to make it a daily driver once I
| got home.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between
| Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was
| a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of
| money porting apps to it over the years as well.
| justrudd wrote:
| This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and
| photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I
| think most of my code never made it into the app because
| being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came
| from building web apps in an org that got shut down to
| writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system.
| My psyche was not prepared.
|
| But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people
| I've ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named
| Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
| cyco130 wrote:
| It also had the best "swipe" text typing mode for Turkish.
| iPhone got it very recently and it's close to useless and
| Android one was meh last I checked.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I'd say for English too. I don't know about non-standard
| keyboards, but WP swiping was better than both the stock
| iOS keyboard and gboard.
| blackguardx wrote:
| My Nokia Lumia 521 running Windows was the best phone I've
| ever owned. But when MS bought Nokia, they pushed out an
| update that made it really slow and buggy.
| jaoane wrote:
| Windows Phone was good if you liked staring at
| "Resuming..." screens all day.
| kalaksi wrote:
| You don't have to be snarky. If you actually have
| something to say, just say it so people can understand
| what you're even talking about.
| jaoane wrote:
| Okay: multitasking in windows phone was rubbish. You
| would see a loading screen all the time when switching
| between apps that lasted seconds. Of course that was
| still better than the pile of garbage that Android
| was/is, so it was your only option if you, like me,
| weren't able to afford an iPhone. But that's doesn't mean
| I'm going to pretend I miss it.
| kalaksi wrote:
| Thanks! I've owned one windows phone (I liked the UI) and
| multiple android phones and don't remember anything like
| that. Maybe it was a problem on some earlier (or cheaper)
| phones since I waited a bit before buying a smartphone.
| wvenable wrote:
| We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a
| few years ago. I had never used one before but I was
| actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of
| the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand
| now what it had it's fans.
|
| Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make
| the platform more than anything else and they botched it so
| badly.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by
| trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to
| publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was
| for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added
| that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't
| going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a
| while instead of eliminating it. When they finally
| realized just how badly they had messed up and removed
| all the fees, most developers had already moved on and
| never gave Windows Phone another look.
|
| It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It
| was removed from MSDN because the product manager said
| developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to
| develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few
| bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to
| being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product
| to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to
| alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
| dabbz wrote:
| I personally point the blame on their constant breaking
| of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so
| many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1
| equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a
| hand in it.
| anonymars wrote:
| Not to mention that when they moved to SDK 8, you could
| only develop from a Windows 8 machine, that famously
| popular OS. So many unforced errors, many seeming to stem
| from denial that Microsoft does not possess the Apple
| Reality Distortion Field
| btown wrote:
| > When they finally realized just how badly they had
| messed up and removed all the fees
|
| Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only
| then as a limited-time promo!
| https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-
| pho...
|
| To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on
| the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comment
| s/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-
| publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But
| it's not the only way to do so.
|
| First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality
| guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that
| suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their
| platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up
| quality guardrails in other way.
| StillBored wrote:
| What I don't understand is all this MBA training and
| everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that
| Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind
| them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with
| obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like
| HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as
| roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash
| and end up just slowing they growth of the app market
| everywhere else.
|
| And it continues to this day, when one looks at the
| QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing
| technology stacks that think they can compete in apples
| playground.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Up until 2011 I was still using one of those Samsung
| phones with the slide out keyboard, maybe an Intensity II
| or something. My first smartphone was a Windows phone, an
| HTC Titan. I really liked the phone and the OS - I
| thought it was very well done. The only problem: the app
| store was complete shit. There were barely any apps and
| the ones that were there were trash barely discernible
| from malware.
|
| After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I had Lumia 950, still my favorite phone.
| goosedragons wrote:
| WebOS was incredible on phones too. Android and iOS
| basically mined the Palm Pre for ideas for years. In 2010 I
| had a phone with touch based gesture navigation, card based
| multitasking, magnetically attached wireless charging that
| displayed a clock when docked.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner
| was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-
| or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.
|
| The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship
| Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after
| being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about
| everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be
| very disappointed with the device.
|
| But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero,
| so I didn't try to talk them out of it.
|
| It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS
| devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or
| in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very
| snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine
| pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for
| smartphones of the time.
|
| Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for
| them to operate that they never asked for me help. And
| since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple
| ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer
| apps available.
|
| Their experience was the polar opposite of what I
| envisioned it would be.
| virtue3 wrote:
| I was a developer for Carrier apps. It was by far the best
| mobile developer experience by a landslide.
|
| Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.
|
| Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a
| better system for frontend development.
| patchtopic wrote:
| A long time ago I was given an Android, Apple, and MS-
| windows phone to evaluate as company phones for the company
| I worked for. the MS-windows phone crashed almost straight
| out of the box. and crashed again. and again.
| yftsui wrote:
| My experience with Windows phone around 2010 was exact
| opposite, very slow and clumsy. I recall I tried a HTC
| phone on WM 6.5, far behind iPhone 3GS
| mardef wrote:
| That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of
| the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand
| new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones.
|
| WP7 was the first of the new OS
| kcb wrote:
| Windows Phone 7 was another OS. Windows Phone 8 was the
| next totally incompatible OS just couple years later.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| > They were building in Android app support when they
| pulled the plug.
|
| That then became WSL1
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I remember doing some apps for Windows Phone and it really
| seemed they hated devs. Constantly breaking small things and
| then the switch to 10 made me give up. It was a nice OS
| though
| codr7 wrote:
| Nokia made some pretty nice phones there for a while, and
| the OS looked pretty usable by Microsloth's standards.
|
| I blame Ballmer, he's like Steve Gate's less intelligent
| but at least as evil brother.
| detourdog wrote:
| What I find interesting about your comment is that iPhone
| launched with out an ecosystem and 4 years later a. App Store
| was tabled stakes.
| detaro wrote:
| The iPhone opened up the smartphone market to many many
| more people.
|
| We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert
| their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people
| who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a
| while, because they had their use cases and workflows on
| them that other smartphones took time to cover).
|
| Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was
| much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users
| that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the
| initial rush that takes much more time to convince people
| to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly
| compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked
| quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to
| buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually
| planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was
| already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)
| ghaff wrote:
| I got a Treo in 2006 mostly because I had a badly broken
| foot and needed an alternative to carrying a computer on
| some trips. Didn't get an iPhone until a 3GS or
| thereabouts in around 2010.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year out
| of 1 billion phones that were sold that year. Jobs himself
| publicly stated his goal was 1% of the cell phone market
| the guest year
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Apples app store was 3 years old at that point and white
| hot. The Samsung Galaxy was 2 years old then. If they
| wanted to go to market with an unpolished product
| differentiated with a few nifty features, they'd need to
| spend months paying loads of money to devs to fill out
| their app store to have a chance.
| timewizard wrote:
| > is years of investment.
|
| Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that
| doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers.
|
| > to get a lot of apps
|
| Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers
| decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury
| their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs.
| They created their own resistance to app development.
| bluGill wrote:
| That open ecosystem needs years of investment to develop. A
| few people will take the risk and make a first app, but a
| lot will wait longer.
| timewizard wrote:
| I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people
| were for phone applications when these devices first came
| on the market.
|
| Developers were absolutely willing to make the
| investment. Billions of devices were about to come
| online.
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware,
| very few apps. It's interesting.
| acdha wrote:
| Most of those developers were looking for revenue,
| though, and there's a really wicked network effect
| rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first
| WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped
| tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too.
| By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there
| just weren't many developers looking to target a user
| base at least an order of magnitude smaller - even
| Android struggled because not as many users were willing
| to actually buy software.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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 to make software that works for the platform.
| timewizard wrote:
| 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 increased your workload if you wanted to
| release on multiple platforms.
|
| So users don't get to use their own device unless a
| corporation can smell money in creating that software for
| them? What a valueless proposition given everything we
| know about the realities of open source.
|
| You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer.
| There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this
| through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed
| from common experience.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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 pricing went all the way
| down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy
| didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen,
| especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price
| tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie
| developers as that indie developers had a very hard time
| making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly
| approaches to selling software.
|
| No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation
| where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the
| revenue comes from effectively gambling.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If every single indie developer disappeared and didn't
| make software for computers - to a first approximation,
| no one would notice a difference.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Clearly you have never actually used a WebOS device. They
| supported app sideloading out of the box and were easy to
| get root on via an officially supported method. There was
| an extremely popular third-party app store called Preware
| that offered all sorts of apps and OS tweaks.
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and
| had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I
| could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint
| style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to
| it.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market
| wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call
| it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing
| should have predicted a range of units sold (and various
| price points having different predicted ranges!).
|
| Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikim
| edia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
| c-linkage wrote:
| Holy cow was that forecast bad!
|
| It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing
| team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that
| this would be great for business. I literally laughed out
| loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no
| one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no
| one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.
|
| Just for some rough math here - I'm currently paying
| around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly
| half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I'd be looking
| at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km
| cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would
| increase my per-km cost by about 60%.
|
| FWIW that's roughly the same per-km cost increase that
| people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in
| North America by buying more expensive cars.
|
| (Though this does apply to personal transportation only,
| the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)
| nicoburns wrote:
| > by buying more expensive cars
|
| Not to mention less efficient cars.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Not to mention, cars.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home
| heating and agriculture
|
| I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from
| gas price increases but I know grocery costs would
| explode
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| Especially if you live were gas cost a buck twenty a
| liter
| Marsymars wrote:
| Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up
| the total price will go up proportionally less than
| places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-
| taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived
| when gas gets expensive.)
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump
| price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky,
| and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear
| relation to crude except in very long timeframes.
| Regional refining capacity is way more important.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump
| price?
|
| I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the
| price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement
| that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And
| broke refining out separately.)
|
| I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly
| reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still
| not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of
| driving.)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump
| price?
|
| Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of
| crude. Divide.
|
| How could you possibly _not_ be able to estimate the
| fraction?
|
| And yeah ideally you use an average number over some
| months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but
| those are minor tweaks.
| Macha wrote:
| That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs,
| transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated
| to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| A) Just calculating the percentage doesn't assume that.
|
| B) They shouldn't correlate by a particularly large
| amount in a competitive environment. For an approximation
| as rough as "half" and assuming no other changes it's not
| a big deal.
| Hojojo wrote:
| The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted
| by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This
| naturally means gas prices will move to match the price
| of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system,
| not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily
| reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.
| wmf wrote:
| The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave
| customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early
| sales projections made sense under that assumption.
| saghm wrote:
| I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just
| not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the
| opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was
| essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of
| the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is
| used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.
| monocasa wrote:
| There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported
| some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused
| off before sending to customers in order to convince
| people to move to Itanium.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-
| intel...
| chasil wrote:
| I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4
| architecture with amd64 capability.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I've still got a couple small business models along these
| lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running
| possibly because I always turn them fully off when not
| using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey
| business.
|
| One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit
| CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will
| also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to
| Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts
| out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of
| bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not
| helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was
| known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".
|
| Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was
| supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the
| same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up
| until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement where they
| pay each other the right to use various IP. One of the
| things Intel pays AMD for is x86_64.
| phonon wrote:
| x86_64 patents have expired by now, so they do not in
| fact pay for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was
| the legitimately better approach. There were certainly
| theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward
| --even if it had never been commercially successful in
| the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from
| x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect
| it was a bit of both and different people at the company
| probably had different perspectives.
| chasil wrote:
| Sophie Wilson (ARM instruction set designer) was very
| enthusiastic over her "Firepath" architecture that had
| VLIW aspects.
|
| It was targeted at DSL modems, and I think the platform
| has faded and is now somewhat obscure.
|
| https://royalsociety.org/people/sophie-wilson-12544/
|
| https://old.hotchips.org/wp-
| content/uploads/hc_archives/hc14...
| StillBored wrote:
| Internal inertia is a powerful thing. This was discussed
| at length on comp.arch in the late 1990's early 2000's by
| insiders like Andy Glew. When OoO started to dominate
| intel should have realized the risk, but they continued
| to cancel internal projects to extend x86 to 64-bits. Of
| which apparently there were multiple. Even then, the day
| that AMD announced 64-bit extensions and a product
| timeline it should have resulted in intel doing an
| internal about face and acknowledging what everyone knew
| (in the late 1990's) and quietly scuttling ia64 while
| pulling a backup x86 out of their pocket. But since they
| had killed them all, they were forced to scramble to
| follow AMD.
|
| Intel has plenty of engineering talent, if the bean
| counters, politicians and board would just get out of the
| way they would come back. But instead you see patently
| stupid/poor execution like then still ongoing avx512
| saga. Lakefield, is a prime example of WTFism showing up
| publicly. The lack of internal leadership is written as
| loud as possible on a product where no one had the
| political power to force the smaller core to emulate
| avx512 during the development cycle, or NAK a product
| where the two cores couldn't even execute the same
| instructions. Its an engineering POC probably being
| shopped to apple or someone else considering an arm
| big.little without understanding how to actually
| implement it in a meaningful way. Compared with the AMD
| approach which seems to even best the arm big.little by
| simply using the same cores process optimized differently
| to the same effect without having to deal with the
| problems of optimizing software for two different
| microarch.
| duskwuff wrote:
| And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...
|
| (This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough
| to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still
| increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict
| that it'll level off any day now...)
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| If they keep predicting that, eventually they'll be
| right!
|
| (It's hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson
| sphere is capable of)
| user_of_the_wek wrote:
| Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent
| recessions, analysts predicted 20.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all
| of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more
| severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when
| the Sun is under the horizon too.
|
| So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for
| just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to
| keep up with the change.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people
| adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the
| IEA just carried on regardless!
| ghaff wrote:
| It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry
| analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they
| (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but,
| hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't
| even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly
| needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and
| I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this
| is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
| jorvi wrote:
| an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
|
| Aside from it not being 64bit initially uh.. did we live
| through the same time period? The Athlons completely blew
| the Intel competition out of the water. If Intel hadn't
| heavily engaged in market manipulation, AMD would have
| taken a huge bite out of their marketshare.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's
| relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part
| of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at
| the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the
| fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch
| of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at
| the time which the big suppliers didn't really care
| about.
| kcb wrote:
| Opteron was a much bigger deal than you're making it
| sound. Market share was up to 25%.
| ghaff wrote:
| But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to
| 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time,
| Intel held back on multi-core because their key software
| partner was extremely nervous about being forced to
| support a multi-core world.
|
| I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event
| when that info was related to me, was partly held for me
| to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit
| wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not
| really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was
| an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond
| with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
| VitalKoshalew wrote:
| > As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel
| held back on multi-core because their key software
| partner was extremely nervous about being forced to
| support a multi-core world.
|
| That's one way to explain it. Alternatively, one might
| say that FSB-based Netburst servers would not benefit
| much from multi-core because the architecture (and
| especially FSB) has hit its limitation. Arguably, Intel
| had no competitive product on the mass server market
| until 2006 and Core-based Xeon 5100 introduction. Only
| enormous market inertia has kept them afloat.
|
| > In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's
| relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part
| of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at
| the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the
| fairly late 2000s.
|
| That was one relatively small (servers number-wise)
| segment of the market. Introduction of Opteron servers
| and Windows Server 2003 64-bit has created a new segment
| of mass 64-bit servers which have very quickly taken over
| entire 32-bit (at that time) mass server market. That was
| the real market that Intel wanted for themselves with
| introduction of proprietary Itanium but failed to acquire
| it because of the compatibility issue. High-end
| mainframe-adjacent market segment indeed belonged to
| Itanium for many years after, but that wasn't the goal of
| Itanium. Intel wanted to be a monopoly on the entire
| PC&server market with no cross-licensing agreements but
| failed and had to cross-license AMD64 instead.
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| 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 compelling story about ROI
| that is a few years in the future to convince them it's
| worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by
| OEMs and software companies, and making them think that
| they need to support Itanium soon could have been a
| necessary condition to make that a reality.
|
| I don't know what factors would make IEA underestimate
| solar adoption.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > I don't know what factors would make IEA underestimate
| solar adoption.
|
| The IEA is an energy industry group from back in the days
| where "energy" primarily meant fossil fuels (i.e. the
| 1970s), and they've never entirely gotten away from that
| mentality.
| immibis wrote:
| There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing
| people not to buy solar panels or other renewable
| sources.
|
| Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone
| invented a free energy machine and the government had to
| cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat
| that the free energy machine only works in direct
| sunlight.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The IEA's purpose is to boost fossil fuels + nuclear?
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| How often are they reality distortion fields vs
| leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops
| and investors? How do you do the second without the
| first?
|
| Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to
| figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a
| leader.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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 publicly
| listed businesses that had low or even negative profit
| margins for many years.
|
| The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit
| margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the
| market cap rankings.
| ashdksnndck wrote:
| The section of my comment you quoted directly addresses
| this! Wall Street can be convinced by a compelling story.
| dylan604 wrote:
| one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how
| similar the colors of each year was making it very
| difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the
| chart was still clear though
| ghaff wrote:
| Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered
| in an HN comment.
|
| https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-
| itanic-...
| chasil wrote:
| 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 am sorry to derail
| this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you
| don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't
| have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations.
| I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that
| way?" He said "No, I did 30 lines of code".
| Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire
| future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated
| code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not
| mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy
| Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to
| reconsider the future of this effort, so let's move on".'
| ghaff wrote:
| There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler
| was a big one from which a number of the other issues
| stemmed.
| mcepl wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I'm
| betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus
| benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still
| remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel's
| compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a
| software vendor and later a computational research lab,
| and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying
| hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of
| times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least
| the equivalent gain back ... or just buy an off-the-shelf
| system which performed well now and do literally anything
| else with your life.
|
| One really interesting related angle is the rise of open
| source software in business IT which was happening
| contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much
| back then because people had tons of code they couldn't
| easily modify whereas later switches like Apple's PPC-x86
| or x86-ARM and Microsoft's recent ARM attempts seem to be
| a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many
| of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think
| Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its
| peak performance but at least you wouldn't have had so
| many frictional costs simply getting code to run
| correctly.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Nice insight, thank you.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think you're right. The combination of open source and
| public clouds has really tended to reduce the dominance
| of specific hardware/software ecosystems, especially
| Wintel. Especially with the decline of CMOS process
| scaling as a performance lever, I expect that we'll see
| more heterogeneous computing in the future.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| This form versus substance issue is a really deeply
| embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting
| worse.
|
| Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X,
| only to find out that the assertion was based only upon
| the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to
| accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable,
| then I'd say fraudulent interpretations.
|
| Promo Packet Princesses are _especially_ prone to getting
| caught out doing this. And as the above story
| illustrates, you better catch and tear down these
| "interpretations" as the risks to the enterprise they
| are, well before they obtain visible executive
| sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.
|
| IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk
| along with a solution, it usually defuses them and
| "prices" their proposals more at a "market clearing rate"
| of the actual risk. They're usually hoping to pass the
| hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle
| sustaining work streams on their "brilliant vision"
| before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.
|
| I'd love to hear others' experiences around this and how
| they defused the risk time bombs.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| We're not living through this again at all with
| generative AI, right?
| brookst wrote:
| A small boardroom locked in groupthink, misled by one
| single individual's weak simulated benchmark, with no
| indication of real world performance or customer demand?
| chasd00 wrote:
| > "You're predicting the entire future of this
| architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?"
|
| It's comforting to know that massively strategic
| decisions based on very little information that may not
| even be correct are made in other organizations and not
| just mine.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Everybody does it. Information only comes because you
| made your strategic decision, never before it.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.
|
| To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that
| would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined
| by their pricing.
|
| For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to
| being more or less a sidegrade from their previous
| generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to
| those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad
| CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the
| AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the
| asking price to your average user that has other options.
|
| Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both
| suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever
| reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded
| and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because
| Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card
| with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.
|
| In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of
| those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better
| deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be
| overlooked.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The major complaint I have with the 5060 is it offers me no
| reason to update my 3060 Ti. It's 2 generations out and is
| somewhere around a 10% performance increase at roughly the
| same power envelope.
|
| It seems like the only trick nVidia has for consumer cards
| is dumping in more power.
| agumonkey wrote:
| To me that was the issue, they wanted a 'me too' product
| without the belief behind to back it.. it was a fine device
| at the time, a little nicer than all the android tablets
| around.
| adastra22 wrote:
| > There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market
| wrong by that much
|
| Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release
| was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being
| sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price
| point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-
| affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.
| microtherion wrote:
| I believe you are mistaken, in several aspects:
|
| 1) Entry level watch models were available for about $400
| right away, which is still more or less the starting point
| (though due to inflation, that's a bit cheaper now, of
| course).
|
| 2) Luxury models (>$1K price) are still available, now
| under the Hermes co-branding.
|
| The one thing that was only available in the initial
| release were the "Edition" models at a >$10K price point,
| but there was speculation that this was more of an
| anchoring message (to place the watch as a premium product)
| and never a segment meant to be sustained.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Watch
| ghaff wrote:
| That comports with my memory. I have no idea what Apple's
| internal sales projections were. But there was a ton of
| nerd and tech press criticism to the effect that young
| people didn't wear watches any longer so obviously this
| was a stupid idea for a product.
|
| Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because
| of the limited battery life, I do have one.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The luxury watch was released in April 2015. The cheaper
| stainless steel model wasn't released until the fall
| event a few months later.
|
| But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if
| that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition"
| models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next
| fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple
| Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it
| shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the
| expensive models in stock.
|
| It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and
| changed their branding for the watch to be about health
| and fitness.
| microtherion wrote:
| Yes, I agree that health and fitness are a much bigger
| part of the branding now than they were initially (but
| the basic features were there right from the beginning --
| I remember sitting in town halls, with "pings" ringing
| out at 10 to the hour, and everybody standing up for a
| minute).
| rurban wrote:
| Entry level watches are available from China for EUR40,
| with everything but Maps. Huawei/Honor Magicwatch 2 e.g.
| microtherion wrote:
| Sure. My point was that entry level APPLE watches never
| changed much in their price point.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Windows phones were out for years, no?
| fakedang wrote:
| There was another reason behind the Windows phone failure and
| the lack of apps - Google blocking Microsoft from using its
| platform native APIs. Microsoft weren't allowed to use, for
| eg, the YouTube API natively, so the "native" Windows OS app
| for YouTube had to use roundabout methods of getting YouTube
| data.
| Joeri wrote:
| I think microsoft made a valiant effort with windows phone.
| They kept it in the market for years and iterated, they threw
| big budgets after it, they made deals with app developers to
| bring over their apps.
|
| You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app
| ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to
| 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems,
| but ultimately none of that mattered.
|
| What killed windows phone was the iron law that app
| developers just weren't willing to invest the effort to
| support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had
| already taken the lead. They could have added android app
| support and almost did, but then what was the point of
| windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but
| without the apps that just didn't matter.
|
| This is what makes apple's current disdain for app developers
| so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers
| that chose and continue to choose to build for their
| platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.
| fisherjeff wrote:
| Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than
| anything else...
| x0x0 wrote:
| Pivoted to shilling halfway down.
|
| And the acquisition was entirely incompetent. These devices
| need a software ecosystem. Purchasing the company without the
| acquirer having a bought-in plan to build that ecosystem was
| just dumb. And that would have required a company willing to
| lose money likely for half a decade minimum.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > But because I wasn't there during the critical 49 days
| when the decision was made to kill WebOS, somehow the
| failure became my responsibility.
|
| Wow, so whiney. He's an executive, a leader. A captain
| doesn't complain if the crew is mad at him, for _any_
| reason.
| fisherjeff wrote:
| Exactly! It _is_ your responsibility, like it or not.
| That's what the money's for!
| okanat wrote:
| ... and it is their job to actually find somebody to
| represent the agreed-on goals and make damn sure that the
| leadership will listen them. If you're as a manager /
| team leader whatnot alone in your skillset and trained
| nobody to represent you and your vision, you did a bad
| job of management.
| scott_w wrote:
| I'm going to stick up for him on this point. It's likely
| there's no way to get the right person in the room to
| argue on his behalf. Much as I think it's not a good
| organisational structure, it's very likely that the CTO
| title was the _only_ thing that got him into
| conversations with the board or C-suite, they wouldn't
| speak to a VP at all, even if he asked them to.
| kylec wrote:
| This is well after the fact though, and it does sound
| like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I
| don't begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.
| lvl155 wrote:
| To be fair, nothing would have been able to compete against
| Apple during that time. It had to have been developed
| completely from ground up and not hampered by Palm legacy.
| hartator wrote:
| Yeah, 8 weeks is nothing.
|
| I feel if he was able to read news about the situation, he
| should probably have reached out to try to salvage the
| situation.
|
| Or he should have people, processes in place, and company
| vision that supports all of this outside of himself.
|
| I remember loving Palm for so long, but they were playing
| catching up after the iPhone. Same fate as blackberry. Both
| should have double down (clean, focused work via stilus) and
| keyboard-based workflow instead of rushing things.
|
| He seems the author wants to talk shit about Leo Apotheker
| while trying to get some traction for his new side business.
| DannyBee wrote:
| (just a note, it's Leo not Leo).
|
| I think this is fair read, but to be also fair, it's easy to
| criticize Leo - the SAP board had literally fired him 6
| months before HP decided he would be a great fit!
| halflife wrote:
| I was working at HP during that time.
|
| They sent a company wide email asking people to develop
| applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free.
|
| I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called
| it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I
| really enjoyed my free Palm Pre.
|
| I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn't find a
| replacement battery after the original died.
| brulard wrote:
| Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the
| situation.
| halflife wrote:
| Wasn't much to it actually. I was working in a team trying
| to create hp's first SAAS offering for workflow management.
|
| I was the "webmaster" specialist at that time, and hearing
| the news that HP bought palmOS which was based on
| JavaScript made me really excited.
|
| However, during that time, HP was notorious for replacing
| its CEO on a yearly basis.
|
| After 1 year working on our project, 30 person team, the
| CEO was replaced and our project was scrapped.
|
| They gave me 2 months to do nothing (actually played gears
| of war in the game room), and then moved me to another team
| where we spent 8 months waiting while the managers argued
| on what we should be doing . After that I quit.
|
| We always knew that the software side of hp provides barely
| 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.
|
| It really wasn't a surprise they failed with the Palm
| purchase.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > We always knew that the software side of hp provides
| barely 10% of the revenue while the rest is printers.
|
| Specifically, the rest is ink used in those printers.
| They pretty much give away the printers
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| This was an offer to non HP folks as well - if you were an
| established developer, you could get a free Pre2. I was a
| recipient of said free device, but I did have several legit
| apps in the store because honestly WebOS was really fun to
| write code for! Their developer relations were excellent
| for a while - it was a really fun community to be part of
| for a bit. Shout out to Chuq, he was great.
| fmorel wrote:
| My parents got a cheap Touchpad when they were getting rid of
| them, and used it for years. Especially after people got AOSP
| running on it.
| utopcell wrote:
| this was my first thought as well.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I agree with this - I was trying to read between the lines
| about what felt like "face saving" from the author, and what
| were really executive leadership failures.
|
| That said, Leo Apotheker was such a complete speed-run,
| unmitigated disaster for HP, that I'm inclined to have a ton of
| sympathy for the author and believe his point of view. I
| thought the author was actually overly generous to Apotheker -
| the Autonomy acquisition was a total failure of leadership and
| due diligence, and if Apotheker was the "software guy" he was
| supposed to be then the Autonomy failure makes him look even
| worse.
| tlogan wrote:
| I worked closely with SAP engineers throughout the 1990s and
| 2000s. In my experience, the company began to significantly
| decline after Leo Apotheker assumed leadership.
|
| While Henning may not have been particularly business-savvy,
| Leo demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of SAP's
| value network and how software should be build. He was just a
| money guy.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Apotheker was the product of HP's incompetent board. The
| board fired Mark Hurd who had rescued the company after Carly
| Fiorina's disastrous tenure. Hurd, was investigated for
| sexual harassment, found innocent, and fired for
| inappropriate expenses.
|
| The board then hired Apotheker whose grand strategy was to
| sell everything including the printer business and buy
| Autonomy a hot British company. The board signed off on this.
| It is the equivalent of selling your farm and tractor for
| some magical beans.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The people at the top are paid a fortune because they're
| indeed the very best.
| EPWN3D wrote:
| 100%. This reads like revisionist history. A well-run hardware
| program would have ironed out the technical deficiencies well
| before the ship date. It wasn't like he was laid up for 6-12
| months.
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| I was at Palm when launched working on the device end user
| software startup experience. The software I think was ready but
| the hardware was far inferior to the current iPad at the time.
| However it's possible that the next iteration could have been
| more competitive, they just had to stick with it. But neither
| the hardware or software mattered because it was the CEO who
| killed it through poor long term judgement As the author noted.
|
| [I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be
| selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs.
| They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining
| market share in the race to the bottom.]
| zubiaur wrote:
| They were learning. The pre 2 was so much better than the
| original.
|
| WebOS felt much more polished than Android was at the time.
|
| The app ecosystem was lacking, but the tooling seemed to be
| constantly improving.
|
| Having had palms since pOS 3, it was sad, but not foreign, to
| see them struggle.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| In fairness -- if you continue reading -- his actual complaint
| seems to be focused on HP canceling the product a few weeks
| later rather than trying to deal properly with the aftermath of
| the launch.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They weren't ever winning because iPad is riding on the massive
| marketing advantage iPhone gave it. It's an iPhone but now
| huge.
|
| The other produce was likely clunky as heck and yes the App
| Store was the other genius stroke
| glenstein wrote:
| >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.
|
| Phil seemed pretty emphatic that it was too early and needed
| more time. It doesn't sound from the article like he would have
| supported that launch timeline.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think he believes that if he weren't recovering from surgery,
| he could have convinced Apotheker to pursue WebOS hardware for
| longer. Every other story I've heard concluded that (in
| hindsight) WebOS was doomed the second Apotheker was made CEO,
| and this article doesn't seem to contradict this.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I once worked on a product that was promising, could have been
| really big. But the people making it priced it twice as high as
| all the competitors. There was never a chance of success, even
| after finding customers, which was hard. The ultimate problem
| wasn't the product (imperfect as it was). It was the leaders
| who were cavalier when they should have been biting their
| nails. Sometimes safety is a curse.
| b0a04gl wrote:
| 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 can't build dev trust in
| 7 weeks. the platform wasn't given time to breathe. this was
| failure of patience more than product
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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 independent of the
| business being managed. But somehow in the 90 's CEOs and
| business schools turned that into something like "management is
| a generic function independent of the business being run. With
| an MBA and you can run Coke GM or Intel all the same."
| ang_cire wrote:
| 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 assertion is rankling anyone, I invite them to look
| up how many private investment firms are failing
| spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g.
| dentists and vets) and running them into the ground, by
| trying to make them operate like SaaS companies.
| technol0gic wrote:
| the old "it's all the same shit" fallacy that i loathe so
| dearly
| cycomanic wrote:
| So true. A friend of mine worked as a manager at an ECO
| diary producer (milk, cheese yoghurt). An investment firm
| bought the owners who build the company from nothing for a
| substantial sum. They then brought in a new young executive
| team who mainly had experience and making online clothes
| and food retail startups. Initially the owners had a
| requirement to consult to the business for some amount of
| time. That was quickly dropped as they didn't want the old
| owners to "interfere" (essentially telling the exec that
| they what they wanted to do didn't work). After less than a
| year my friend and the product manager where the only
| managers left from before and they had become the "nay
| sayers" (I.e. telling the boars their ideas and execution
| don't work in this industry) and where eventually let go.
| By this time they had lost major costumers, majorly
| invested into equipment that still didn't work (as the
| product manager predicted from the get go) and the company
| was probably worth less than half. I just read the news
| that 7 years later they sold at 2% of the purchase price.
| Cases like this should really be mandatory study.
| eszed wrote:
| > 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| > "management is a generic function independent of the
| business being run. With an MBA and you can run Coke GM or
| Intel _into the ground_ all the same. "
|
| I felt it needed a little tweak. You are exactly right
| otherwise IMO.
| mlinhares wrote:
| They were all very successful at doing that. The
| financialization of everything was the death of all these
| businesses.
| trentnix wrote:
| Very well and succinctly put.
|
| When I talk about the same topic with a friend, we say
| variants of "MBAs ruin everything they touch". But what
| we really mean is what you said.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I can only say that it's really refreshing when you talk to a
| CEO who is interested and understands the products the
| company is working on. Unfortunately it's pretty widespread
| to have the top layers of the company only thinking about
| numbers and deadlines, not the product.
| quantified wrote:
| Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported
| this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before
| IBM.
| StillBored wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM
| was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's
| core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of
| "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off
| IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had
| acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and
| converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex
| business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a
| lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of
| the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look
| great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just
| created further long term problems. If IBM could have
| caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25
| years they would have done fine, but for some reason they
| continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in
| the right place at the right time. But it seems they always
| overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the
| market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an
| alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to
| capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning
| disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.
| nradov wrote:
| You can't blame an MBA for this debacle. Leo Apotheker
| studied economics in college and had no formal education in
| management.
| mbesto wrote:
| Drucker would argue you need practice (e.g. actually doing
| the work) rather than an educational background to be a
| good manager.[0] So I would argue he didn't have the
| experience to be a manager at that level.
|
| https://mlari.ciam.edu/peter-drucker-s-vision-of-
| management-...
| roughly wrote:
| Defector had a great piece on roughly this point:
| https://defector.com/how-will-the-golden-age-of-making-it-
| wo...
| Affric wrote:
| You say 90s but sounds suspiciously like John Scully and
| Apple in the 80s
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Was that intended to be similar to the real life movement of
| John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple?
| bluGill wrote:
| I can find countless examples of this both ways. Some people
| are great CEOs able to turn around a company/industry they knew
| nothing about before. However there are a lot of bad CEOs out
| there. And being in a company/industry for decades is a good
| way to turn a bad CEO into a mediocre one which is an
| improvement I guess. Sadly I have no clue how to make a good
| CEO - and see no evidence anyone else does.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Most companies that have been around for decades would be
| absolutely fine with a mediocre CEO.
| klank wrote:
| In my opinion, mediocre is an excellent strategy when
| optimizing for longevity and durability.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| ie Google
| geodel wrote:
| > At some point "management" and "executive management" started
| (falsely) being ...
|
| Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of
| Director and above in technical or related companies.
|
| To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of
| metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance
| (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA,
| development, customer feedback and myriad others are generated
| on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And during _leadership review
| sessions_ teams are asked for _10% improvement_ for next
| quarter.
|
| If these reports and feedback were any good, these companies
| would be operating like Navy seal teams by now.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
| RajT88 wrote:
| I know a guy who held this attitude. He somehow got into a top
| MBA program without any undergrad degree and poor grades.
| (Bribery, one wonders)
|
| Got his MBA, eventually bragged about how he lied his way into
| a CTO position with no tech skills. Lasted about 6 months. No
| longer listed on his LinkedIn.
|
| After all that, somehow still hasn't eaten his humble pie.
| Still believes this idea you don't need to know stuff about
| technology to manage a technology organization.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Oh, it's worse in some ways - Leo didn't leave SAP to take this
| job. Instead, SAP's board chose not to renew his contract in
| Feb, 2010, so he resigned.
|
| SAP board; This guy sucks let's move on
|
| HP: we'll take him!
| tlogan wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Leo Apotheker really did not understand software development
| and all of nuances running a software company.
|
| While Henning may not have been particularly business-savvy,
| Leo demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of SAP's
| value network.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long
| before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to
| start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000
| units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly
| predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not
| sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long
| enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market
| probably wasn't even his job.
|
| I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations
| were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of
| investment to build a platform like this.
| onli wrote:
| The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure
| he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of
| giving it another go. The right decision would have been to
| price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing
| issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser
| reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got
| stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next
| generation, which then would have more apps and less early
| issues to have a better chance at the market.
|
| But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you
| saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the
| lead of webOS was.
| phatskat wrote:
| I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a
| friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of "this
| just needs a little polish", what I would expect for any new
| to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down
| learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I
| was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me.
|
| I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was,
| for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say
| that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the
| way they now handle multiple applications.
|
| The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely
| lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day.
| Very intuitive.
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| Both android and iOS copied their exact multitasking UI
| YEARS after webOS had it lmao.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut.
|
| Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's
| price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/22/hp-
| touchp...
|
| I bought one, and ... honestly even at that low price I
| regretted it. The software was trash. I don't know why WebOS
| got so much praise, it was clearly not fit for purpose.
|
| I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's _still_
| trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web
| technologies for an entire OS is bad.
|
| _That 's_ what really killed it. This guy gushes about how
| amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to
| be - too poor.
| wvenable wrote:
| > I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's
| still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using
| web technologies for an entire OS is bad.
|
| I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern
| software development has proven out this whole idea. If
| WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't
| get enough development attention.
|
| Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to
| hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same
| could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a
| sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges
| to success.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Companies do exist to try and hammer Linux into a good
| desktop/laptop product. I would say that it's just not
| easy to do given the lack of vertical integration. Redhat
| centralizing everything into systemd has probably gone
| the longest way towards improving things. Of course that
| is odds with the perceived benefits of having many
| competing options to perform the job of any given piece
| of software.
| onli wrote:
| > _That 's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how
| amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues
| to be - too poor._
|
| We certainly do have the performance in such devices to run
| an OS application layer with web technology now. Many
| people do anyway, just directly in the browser and with
| electron. Easier on a PC, but completely possible on TVs
| and phones. If webOS is slow now on your TV that's because
| of LG's development capabilities, not because of the
| technology.
|
| I had both a Touchpad and a HP Veer. The performance was
| completely fine, especially after the mod scene provided
| kernel updates with overclocks, plus tunings for the UI.
| Especially compared to common devices of the time. Those
| were very good signs for the cut next hardware iteration.
|
| The great thing about webOS was the usability, just how the
| interface worked was awesome. It's no accident that Android
| copied the card interface a few years later, with Android 5
| I think, and the gestures again a few years later, with
| Android 10 or 11. Probably coming from Palm were also some
| nice ideas about how to integrate apps and core
| functionality.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I distinctly remember the Autumn day of 2011 when we stood
| in the line of the local Best Buy in West Des Moines to
| grab one of these. It was miles ahead of anything that was
| in the market that time. It could do multitasking and had a
| lovely intuitive UI (cards!!). I remember being blown away
| by it. Android and iOS freely stole features from it later.
|
| I still have the device and it's one of my cherished
| vintage devices.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| yeah it was years ahead of apple and android (this was
| and2.3 days if i recall, or 4.3 which typical google was
| worse than 2.3)
|
| and the emulator was better dev experience than anything
| else. but actually putting things on the device that had
| anything more than js was impossible.
|
| and the hardware was garbage. buttons would stuck. I
| don't know what sort of museum you live but mines lasted
| 4 and 2 years before turning to literal bits (used by
| adults)
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I might be lucky because mine's still chugging along.
|
| May horde contains: few old MacBooks running Linux, old
| Kindles running dashboards, Android phones & tablets,
| iPhones from OG era and even a Chumby. All of them are
| still working fine.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| Hey. I wrote some of that trash.
|
| I think this is a bad take because I don't think the core
| issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech.
| The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess
| and challenging user interface (which is actually standard
| today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was
| needed wasn't to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it
| was to kill it before launch.
|
| Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using
| all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship
| stuff that wasn't ready and couldn't be ready with the
| resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have
| taken a good start and given it the space to become great.
| Maybe.
| hajile wrote:
| webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever
| to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to
| optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version
| used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS
| JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system.
|
| That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better
| than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad
| despite the flaws.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of context there that isn't obvious
| from the outside and is behind my feelings that Palm just
| had too little too late. They shouldn't have been
| blindsided by the iPhone, but with that happening they
| really did the best they could. I'll make some brief
| points, but maybe I should write a blog post at some
| point.
|
| - Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm
| folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream
| unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple,
| Chrome, Fuschia)
|
| - Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did
| spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life
| was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if
| Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework
| before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was
| all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time
| for launch.
|
| - The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top
| of an Android-like Java-based platform that never
| launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android
| (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating
| features with Android already live. Booting the Java
| runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.
|
| - We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone
| long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node
| services instead of Java ones. So all those were
| launching too.
|
| - Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My
| memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as
| fast as they would come out (although not as fast as
| chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep
| the thing performant.
|
| - Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm
| surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you
| build apps? We generally provided UI components that were
| the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to
| ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version
| you were on (at least to build an app).
| hajile wrote:
| Boot times for alternative kernels were a lot faster. I
| can't recall exactly (it's been years), but I seem to
| remember that there were some simple config settings in
| the bootloader that could cut boot times by a lot.
|
| Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz
| instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run
| mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery
| life).
|
| Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS
| benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than
| Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with
| things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of
| effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of
| the tablet for quite a while).
|
| I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing
| (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when
| it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but
| that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a
| webOS-specific app.
| RajT88 wrote:
| WebOS LG TV owner, and TouchPad owner here.
|
| As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected
| to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad.
|
| The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but
| still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to
| neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I don't remember the touchpad performance being all that
| bad for the time. Was pretty snappy IIRC.
|
| My LG TV, on the other hand, definitely struggles
| particularly running apps. That might just be due to the
| age of the tv.
| Shog9 wrote:
| My observation, after using LG TVs at countless hotels
| (occasionally internet-connected), AirBnBs (usually
| internet connected) and at home (never internet-
| connected) is that even in quite old TVs the UI is
| blazing fast until you connect it to the 'Net. At that
| point... It spends a painful amount of time waiting on
| requests with no visible feedback and the whole UI starts
| to chug, with some apps becoming almost unusable until
| the thing has been on for long enough for all the
| background stuff to finish.
|
| Granted... If they aren't 'Net-connected, most "apps"
| aren't of much use. But, fast access to settings and
| inputs is sorta nice too.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > but still snappy
|
| It's about the least snappy thing I've ever used, apart
| from cheap Android tablets (we made the mistake of buying
| an Amazon Fire Kids tablet which is the only device I've
| ever used that was _literally_ unusably slow).
|
| I even bought the higher spec version of the TV because
| apparently the cheaper version is even slower. Great
| image quality but I'll definitely never buy another LG TV
| again.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have no explanation of what's going on with your
| touchpad. They really only had one model with different
| storage options. I guess I'd speculate there's something
| wrong with it.
|
| As far as the TV, here's my model number:
|
| OLED77C2AUA
|
| No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife.
| Just the ads and software/features I don't care about.
| (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-
| update disabled for a reason)
| biorach wrote:
| > Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of
| it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge
| cost.
|
| That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes
| you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order
| to build market share.
|
| I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I bought one for 99$ but I can't remember
| if that was directly from HP. I LOVED that thign
| maxsilver wrote:
| (as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a
| day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)
|
| The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed.
| (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check
| out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying
| to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which _no
| one_ could do back at that time.
|
| An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin,
| would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a
| 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed
| slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked
| pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they
| reduced the price)
|
| A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish,
| and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't.
| But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even
| today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad,
| unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market
| (like say, a Surface Pro).
|
| The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect".
| The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this
| market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" --
| and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever
| going to be enough to do that.
|
| Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to
| execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic
| and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I don't think he's saying it went from great to awful, I think
| he's saying they canceled the project because the new CEO
| didn't like it and nobody was there to defend it. He claims the
| underlying tech was good but there was a market/product
| mismatch; instead of taking the information and trying again,
| they just canceled it.
|
| That said, this article really doesn't dwell on the mistakes he
| made. He sort of implies his work was great and it was
| marketing/other departments who messed up.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| nwienert wrote:
| Just want to agree, WebOS was incredibly good, the Palm Pre and
| Pixi were both great. HP 100% killed it.
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm selling OxyContin on my Palm Pixi / man, chicken
| sandwiches, they cost a clam fifty
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I had a WebOS phone in a lot of ways it was better than my
| friend's iPhone at the time. Having a fold out keyboard was
| still the industry standard but he's typing on a screen
| keyboard. Overall, it was faster and more ergonomic, especially
| the on the tiny iPhone screen. I was forced to switch to iPhone
| because of HP's decision.
| kevinsync wrote:
| 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!
| Kneecaps07 wrote:
| I still miss my Palm Pre. I've sat here since it died and
| watched Android and iOS slowly adopt the UI that my Pre had 15
| years ago. We were swapping between apps with cards and swiping
| them away a decade before anyone else.
|
| I had multiple friends end up buying the Pre and the non-slidey
| Pre (I can't remember the name) because they saw what I had
| thought it was so cool.
|
| Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no
| shared code, but who knows.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no
| shared code, but who knows.
|
| Pretty sure it is based on a derivative of the original WebOS
| code! I think the LuneOS folks use some WebOS OSE code:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| Nokia sold millions of N9 despite zero advertising and Elop
| refusing to sell it in any of Nokia's primary markets (people
| were paying big money to import it). Despite that success, he
| refused to allow another non-Windows phone to be released
|
| It absolutely could have been a huge success if Elop hadn't
| gone out of his way to kill it.
| dwedge wrote:
| 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
| liveoneggs wrote:
| 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.
| VinLucero wrote:
| Can confirm. Was an HP Scholar at the time and leadership was
| chaotic.
|
| Good people though.
| mayoff wrote:
| 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.
| dartharva wrote:
| 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...
| akudha wrote:
| _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? Shouldn't 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
| knuckleheadsmif wrote:
| I was there and it's true. Another point that people forget was
| the Head/CEO of Palm (which was an independent subsidiary) at
| the time was Jon Rubinstein who was head of software at NeXT
| and Apple.
|
| I'm pretty sure the decisions were made before he was
| consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low
| opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was
| dysfunctional.
| silent_cal wrote:
| 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.
| hajimuz wrote:
| Palm is the Xerox in mobile era. Back then, It's obviously better
| than Android, which is not a complete OS in any sense of quality
| standard. It's even better than iOS in many technical
| specifications. HP flop could be one of the worst disasters in
| computing history.
| trentnix wrote:
| I'm not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so.
| Maybe it's the "LinkedIn"-friendly prose. Maybe it's the "lessons
| learned" which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it
| isn't 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 "what a bunch of self-
| serving nonsense".
|
| From "they needed me to babysit the CEO and board" to "I still
| believe in HP despite destroying 1.2 billion in value while I was
| on an 8-week break" to "the DECIDE framework", it's 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 later...
|
| > _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_.
|
| That's 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| > "what a bunch of self-serving nonsense"
|
| That is exactly how I felt.
| IntrepidPig wrote:
| Nothing about this makes any sense. We've 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 it's 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?
| mulmen wrote:
| > Can we take this off the front page please?
|
| Don't do this. Engagement is what drives stories to the front
| page. If you don't like it just move on.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I think it is better to be charitable. I think he does
| genuinely believe what he wrote is what happened. His PDF book
| is free and Creative Commons.
|
| There could be many reasons he waited this long. Maybe he
| waited until he was retired and would not face blowback. Maybe
| he just has some free time.
|
| It is very plausible that WebOS could have been an equal peer
| to iOS and Android. CEOs have killed off projects that might
| have been great commercial successes while perusing short term
| gains.
|
| In a decade's time we might hear a story from inside ATI or AMD
| how they killed off their chance of beating CUDA for short term
| gains.
| cibyr wrote:
| 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.
| jrpelkonen wrote:
| Interesting story, but the "DECIDE" framework definitely gave me
| strong "conjoined triangles of success" vibes.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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?
| Hizonner wrote:
| HP... HP...
|
| Wasn't that an old ink company?
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I hate to say this but when I saw this line:
|
| > My continued shareholding isn't just a matter of financial
| confidence--it'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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I need this part explained to me. And it's
| about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went
| wrong.
|
| This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author
| is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical
| skills.
|
| 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.
|
| Because it's been decades since I've ran into new HP kit that
| didn't fall somewhere between awful and unusable. I say that
| without the least exaggeration.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the
| company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company
| that earned their great name.
|
| Your questions though are valid.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having
| a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a
| ridiculous printer feature that costs user's money it was HP.
| bluGill wrote:
| Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were
| born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd
| put the start somewhere around 2000.
| senderista wrote:
| That sounds about right. Just checked and that's when
| Carly's tenure started. Compaq ruined DEC, HP ruined
| Compaq, then HP ruined HP.
| draculero wrote:
| We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back
| in the day. I think that we printed hundred of thousands of
| pages and I aways trusted it.
|
| But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else
| HP now. But HP had a good reputation.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job
| back in the day.
|
| Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it
| being an early software driven laserjet.
|
| I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012
| lasers. They were persnickety because they require a
| software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS
| supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10.
| I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.
|
| But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| You would hardly believe they once made top of the line
| voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators -
| even their printers were once the best.
| senderista wrote:
| And the company was an engineer's paradise--that's why
| Woz was so reluctant to quit.
| nashashmi wrote:
| That is not a bad rep for the shareholder. They were great
| in those terms. And gave lots of market opportunity for
| everyone else but HP dominated the scene.
| senderista wrote:
| I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation
| (including but not limited to their legendary calculators).
| Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once
| got to go to work with him and see one of their giant
| plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid
| all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand
| whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.
| cbsmith wrote:
| When I sold printers in the early 90's, HP Laserjets were
| broadly considered to be the gold standard.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| HP definitely _was_ once a great company. Most longtime
| observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina
| and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and
| Packard 's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some
| old articles you can find their rationale (which I think
| proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina
| essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the
| generally shitty human being she showed she is in later
| years, IMO.
| diegof79 wrote:
| My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s.
| It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best
| consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable
| price/quality balance.
|
| HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-
| RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).
|
| They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions
| like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed.
| It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their
| best products turned into crap.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was
| fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using
| it only to output raster images while developing HP
| LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was
| told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so
| reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an
| epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those
| things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be
| like; I miss those days.
| EasyMark wrote:
| About the time they sold off their test instrumentation
| division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes
| great stuff though.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the
| unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like
| expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as
| profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although
| they have a good enough core that they've launched 2
| successful companies out of that R&D division, which I
| would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So
| give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their
| test equipment division to juice their stock...
| sokoloff wrote:
| TIL that Agilent was still in business. I thought it was
| a straight name-change to Keysight for their electronic
| test equipment business.
| sentientslug wrote:
| Very popular choice for LC/MS
| zrobotics wrote:
| Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were
| making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older
| HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors,
| but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They
| absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear,
| but that division has been split off twice into different
| companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't
| anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| You aren't wrong. 70s and 80s HP scientific gear was the
| gold standard - often because it was pioneered into
| existence.
|
| I was recently fixing a WinNT 4.0 box, attached to a
| daily-used 30yo HP Spectrophotometer. The latter needed
| no service.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| Had a black and white laserjet printer in the late 1980s. Was
| a magnificent device and super reliable.
| stapedium wrote:
| These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These
| should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of
| enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a
| different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap
| compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is
| equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and
| monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and
| managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I
| thought HP...meh...dying company with legendary history of
| innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840
| workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out
| the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores.
| Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At
| least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price.
| For sure not unusable or any where near awful...even 10+ year
| old kit.
|
| Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will
| do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the
| used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s
| has tons of value.
| dcminter wrote:
| I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is
| the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi
| enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of
| cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course),
| has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available
| for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on
| 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.
|
| Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or
| something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but
| so far ... working just fine.
|
| I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the
| Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the
| external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX
| VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to
| whine about.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Their laserjets are fine. It's the inkjets that have all
| the major problems.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine
| is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw"
|
| I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they
| are locked to chipped cartridges.
|
| And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips
| to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement
| the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers
| as they possibly could.
|
| When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage,
| it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies
| too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.
| necovek wrote:
| I have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year,
| scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer
| couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be
| used as a printer anymore either.
|
| It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through
| the second set of toners.
|
| No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a
| 30kg paperweight.
|
| This is why we need all software and firmware to be free
| software.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro
| consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards
| consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's
| ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic,
| but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always
| remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on
| Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both
| excellent, both in terms of support duration and general
| stability.
|
| I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside
| I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem
| to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on
| normal devices.
|
| As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine.
| Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love
| cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better
| specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells
| cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's
| why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and
| Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
| bradfa wrote:
| I have an HP ENVY laptop that's very nice. Amazingly good
| screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1,
| and is quite thin and light for a 15" laptop.
|
| But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to
| use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too
| complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a
| normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent
| engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it's been
| this way for decades.
| mort96 wrote:
| MacBook Airs are marketed towards consumers, and they're
| certainly not trash, are they?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car"
| and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
|
| "Used car" is a wild exaggeration. For many years, people
| have been able to buy MacBook Airs that overperform for 90%
| of consumers for $1,000 (sometimes even less). This device
| will last at least 7 years, if not 10.
|
| https://www.costco.com/macbook-air.html?screen-
| size=13-in+13....
| noisy_boy wrote:
| This is ancient reference but I used to have HP's nx6320[0]
| laptop. The thing was built solid, fantastic keyboard,
| excellent screen - basically an all round solid business
| laptop. I remember dual-booting Windows XP with Ubuntu Dapper
| Drake on it - worked perfectly.
|
| [0]: https://support.hp.com/in-en/product/product-specs/hp-
| compaq...
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent
| and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
|
| The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a
| company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this
| section is him basically waving a white flag at them.
| rsstack wrote:
| > HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never
| see and
|
| It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise".
| He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that
| in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He
| holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the
| same number, but since then there were some splits).
| dpedu wrote:
| HPE sold its software arm to Micro Focus subsequently as well
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I was part of that transition. Great times explaining why
| my job changed 4 times in 18 months.
|
| Startup -> HP -> HPE -> Micro Focus -> new job after I got
| tired of all this corporate deck chair rearranging.
| melbourne_mat wrote:
| > This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old.
| Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and
| analytical skills.
|
| One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a
| single share since he left the company. That would mean he has
| a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing
| in HP.
| zrobotics wrote:
| I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP
| Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to
| school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute
| overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I
| still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a
| week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather
| grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the
| wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting
| company in 2022, so I expect that product line will
| deteriorate.
|
| I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun
| off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now
| keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering
| that is the lineage of what HP was.
|
| The current company is probably the worst tech vendor
| available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba
| than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between
| sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people
| ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three
| times where I recommended a specific model and warned the
| person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer
| besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand
| new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I
| tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have
| engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers
| as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but
| that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011
| is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a
| small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil
| pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives
| in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade
| printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since
| at least the mid-2000s.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Prime
| paxys wrote:
| > When I decided to "retire" from HP, they offered me a
| separation bonus--a 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.
| jxramos wrote:
| > 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?
| yujzgzc wrote:
| 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.
| timschmidt wrote:
| 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.
| hajile wrote:
| Touchpad had rounded edges vs the sharp aluminum ones on the
| ipad. Touchpad was visibly shorter and the corners were much
| more rounded.
|
| If there were a real reason here, it would be that the iPad 2
| launched in March 2011. When Touchpad launched 3-4 months
| later, it was twice as thick with worse battery life and a lot
| fewer apps were available while it had more bugs.
|
| I think this was the real reason.
|
| HP could have overcome all of these issues if they'd just given
| the hardware/software teams more time to finish the software
| and make thinner hardware.
|
| The could have been a big player in the phone, tablet, TV, and
| even laptop market if they'd stuck with it.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Touchpad dimensions: 240mm 190mm 13.7mm
|
| iPad dimensions: 243mm 190mm 13mm
|
| Both had rounded corners as can be seen in the images here:
|
| https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/26850-940/HP-
| Touc...
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IPad-
| WiF...
|
| I know the ipad cases fit the touchpad because I used one on
| my TouchPad for it's entire service life.
|
| Why post incorrect information so authoritatively? Seems
| silly.
| hajile wrote:
| I also owned a touchpad. You are misremembering if you
| think they look the same.
|
| Here's a side-by-side image
|
| https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&fo
| r...
|
| Here's a close-up detail of an ipad on top of a touchpad.
|
| As I stated, you can clearly see sharp, flat edges on the
| ipad where it meets the back of the device while the
| Touchpad has a much more continuous rounded edge. In the
| side-by-side shots, you can also see how the Touchpad
| corners are much more rounded.
|
| Here's some individual shots
|
| Touchpad with side view
|
| https://i0.wp.com/www.seriousinsights.net/wp-
| content/uploads...
|
| https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tablets/HP/TouchPad/_D
| S...
|
| ipad with side view
|
| https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introduct
| i...
|
| https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introduct
| i...
| timschmidt wrote:
| I'm sure whatever differences you see seem important to
| you.
|
| None of them prevented a $15 iPad case from working
| flawlessly with my TouchPad for a half dozen years.
|
| Tapping into Apple's ecosystem in such a way is exactly
| the sort of action Apple dislikes, for obvious reasons.
| hajile wrote:
| Those differences are precisely why suing wouldn't be
| possible. Apple barely won against Samsung and they were
| claiming not only the hardware design (where almost every
| element was ripped off), but also that Samsung copied
| Apple software design too.
|
| In my opinion, Touchpad's different edges, corners, and
| radically different software meant HP wasn't likely to
| get sued.
| timschmidt wrote:
| That's funny because I see it exactly the opposite. Apple
| won against Samsung despite Samsung's phone seeming no
| more similar to Apple's than the Touchpad was to an iPad.
| Industry watchers at the time were flabbergasted that
| anyone would sue over a curved edge, and that Apple who
| had defended itself in lawsuits over similarly trite
| details in the past would do so. Wins tend to embolden.
|
| It's well documented that mobile is a minefield of
| lawsuits seemingly aimed not so much at winning as at
| establishing cross-licensing agreements to mitigate the
| massive patent warchests of established players. A
| practice Apple has proven to be adept at. Just entering
| the mobile space carries a near 100% chance of getting
| sued by everyone else already occupying it.
|
| You can be of the opinion that something isn't worthy of
| a lawsuit. Doesn't mean one won't happen. In my humble
| experience, any pretense can be sufficient. And this one
| has seemed likely to me since 2011.
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| 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.
| stephantul wrote:
| What a hit piece. The only thing the author seemed to have on his
| mind while writing it is revenge. Oh, and he's also selling a
| course btw
| stapedium wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It wouldn't 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 couldn't break into the mobile market, Palm definitely
| didn't have a chance.
| shmerl wrote:
| Stupid strategic decisions ruined good potential. Same happened
| with Nokia's effort for Meego.
| basfo wrote:
| worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important
| companies in the world--comparable 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 didn't work out very well. Later, HP
| acquired Ross Perot's EDS, attempting to enter the services
| business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several
| years.
|
| It was a time of turmoil--every other morning you'd receive an
| email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of
| employees.
|
| Hurd's focus was on increasing the company's share value. He
| aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HP's
| 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 fired--accused of using company funds to give
| gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)--he
| immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HP's 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 months--it clearly wasn't
| working.
|
| Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a
| hardware project called "The Machine," 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)
| plan--since it was clear I'd be laid off sooner or later. Later,
| HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.
|
| It's incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest
| brands in the world--a tech giant and market leader for decades--
| went 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 don't
| think that's true. Amazon, Microsoft, Google--they all do what HP
| did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management.
| As always.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| 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.
| simlan wrote:
| 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.
| jbirer wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| Forget about Palm, BeOS is the real tragedy here.
| swyx wrote:
| > 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I don't get it. Even in the late 80's we had these devices called
| "speaker phones" that facilitated remote meetings.
| itomato wrote:
| 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 shouldn't really have any
| bearing on the colossal failure that lived out in 49 days.
|
| It's a big, ready to fail HP on display.
| worik wrote:
| Shame an interesting post turned into a sales pitch
| zazazx wrote:
| 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.
| denvermullets wrote:
| 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.
| paultopia wrote:
| "Why I still believe in HP"... why would anyone still believe in
| HP? How many decades has it been since they've produced a good
| product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP.
| I'll be it's bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation
| in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned
| obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).
| aurizon wrote:
| 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.
| owenthejumper wrote:
| Apothecary is the guy who acquired Autonomy. Maybe 'stupid' was
| the right word
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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 -- 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 -- 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 -- 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).
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I was there on-site when HP was doing IT consulting (badly) about
| the time the Oprah giveaway led to giant roaming data bills.
| kwanbix wrote:
| 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.
| idkwhattocallme wrote:
| 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.
| iandanforth wrote:
| 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.
| mortsnort wrote:
| 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.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It
| no wonder it failed so miserably
| eqvinox wrote:
| Wait... HP sells software?
|
| (This isn't a joke or sarcasm, I genuinely thought both HP and
| HPE are hardware companies?)
| g8oz wrote:
| 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. Matias Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
| replete wrote:
| After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for
| PS109. 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?
| Isamu wrote:
| 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 don't think the leadership knew how to grow that. I'm sure they
| knew it was important but they didn't take the steps.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| Does anybody have insider details on how HP killed the Memrister?
| I'd be fascinated to read that, too.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| 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.
| goodthink wrote:
| I just want Grafitti
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