12 ms·

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

• wbsun 1y ago
  Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesn’t look like the board were really convinced as the author believed.
  • navigate8310 1y ago
    Why would the board buy in the first place if it weren't the case?
    • neuroelectron 1y ago
      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.
• foobarian 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.
    • foobarian 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        I mean, they were in the game. The problem is that they immediately folded.
  • stahtops 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    HP already had plenty of experience of building handheld computers at that point. Their own and from Compaq and Digital.
    • pipeline_peak 1y ago
      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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        I love looking at Coreweave's long description for their stock. It says AI 32x. That's huge AI to price ratio!
  • mrweasel 1y ago
    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?
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  > WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it Am I missing something?
  • f1shy 1y ago
    I must be missing the same, because I had a Palm back in the day, and the OS was IMHO absolute crapware
    • kayodelycaon 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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 Pré and Pixi devices.
    • myvoiceismypass 1y ago
      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!
  • deleted 1y ago
• stuff4ben 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    That'd imply a bus factor of 1 in most analyses right?
  • paxys 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
• Ologn 1y ago
  The book Androids by Chet Haase talks about how the early Android team had a lot of ex-Palm people on it.
• paxys 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    From what I heared (I had some popular webos apps) the touchpad hardware was forced by HP onto the webos team.
  • Aloha 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
• lesuorac 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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.
• analyte123 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        Nokia had credible mobile OSs for modern phones. Windows Phone was not one.
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      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 1y ago
• renewiltord 1y ago
  HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be Autonomy.
  • tootie 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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.
• refulgentis 1y ago
  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"
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • dwedge 1y ago
    At the end he's trying to sell his framework. Using AI for the copy isn't surprising
    • refulgentis 1y ago
      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.
• owenversteeg 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• whatever1 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    iPhone 4s shipped October 2011.
    • whatever1 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
          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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  Reminds me also a bit of how Microsoft killed Nokia
• iconara 1y ago
  > "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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
      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.
• b0a04gl 1y ago
  [dead]
• mvdtnz 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    >> 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 1y ago
      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.
• phkahler 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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.
• legitster 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    Just want to agree, WebOS was incredibly good, the Palm Pre and Pixi were both great. HP 100% killed it.
  • Lammy 1y ago
    I'm selling OxyContin on my Palm Pixi / man, chicken sandwiches, they cost a clam fifty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ
  • neuroelectron 1y ago
    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.
• VinLucero 1y ago
  Can confirm. Was an HP Scholar at the time and leadership was chaotic. Good people though.
• kevinsync 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
• pipeline_peak 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
• mayoff 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...
• deleted 1y ago
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• akudha 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
• IntrepidPig 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Interesting story, but the “DECIDE” framework definitely gave me strong “conjoined triangles of success” vibes.
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  HP... HP... Wasn't that an old ink company?
• KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
• paxys 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  > 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) 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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-TouchPad.jpg https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/26850-940/HP-Touc... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IPad-WiFi-1stGen.jpg 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.
• Retr0id 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Stupid strategic decisions ruined good potential. Same happened with Nokia's effort for Meego.
• basfo 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Forget about Palm, BeOS is the real tragedy here.
• swyx 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
  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.
• itomato 1y ago
  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.
• CodeWriter23 1y ago
  I don't get it. Even in the late 80's we had these devices called "speaker phones" that facilitated remote meetings.
• worik 1y ago
  Shame an interesting post turned into a sales pitch
• zazazx 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  “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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Apothecary is the guy who acquired Autonomy. Maybe ‘stupid’ was the right word
• seltzered_ 1y ago
  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.theverge.com/2012/6/5/3062611/palm-webos-hp-inside-story-pre-postmortem 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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.
• deleted 1y ago
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• mortsnort 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It no wonder it failed so miserably
• eqvinox 1y ago
  Wait… HP sells software? (This isn't a joke or sarcasm, I genuinely thought both HP and HPE are hardware companies?)
• g8oz 1y ago
  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. Matías Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
• curtisszmania 1y ago
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• deleted 1y ago
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• replete 1y ago
  After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for £109. 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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  Does anybody have insider details on how HP killed the Memrister? I'd be fascinated to read that, too.
• joshmarinacci 1y ago
  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 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 1y ago
  I just want Grafitti