8 ms·

> "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

> "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.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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 1y ago
        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.
- ndiddy 1y ago
  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.
  - guenthert 1y ago
    The build quality wasn't the issue (as far as I can tell). I bought a unit on the secondary market more than a year after the "Fire Sale", it was flawless. It's hardware spec, particularly those obvious to end-users, like weight and thickness matched however the original iPad, not the iPad 2 (promoted for being "thinner") already released by the time of the launch of the TouchPad. That combined with the lack in available software, it's quite clear that whoever set the $499 price didn't want the product (or rather the team behind it) to succeed. Shame really, as WebOs had potential, the TouchPad's sound was pretty good and it's port of Angry Birds (one of the few pre-installed apps) was awesome.
    - ndiddy 1y ago
      Yeah all the fit and finish stuff was what I meant by build quality. Besides the stuff you mentioned, the back of the Touchpad was made of plastic and I was able to flex it by pushing on it, so it definitely didn't feel as premium as the iPad 2. Agreed that WebOS was fantastic from a software standpoint, the UI was years ahead of where iOS/Android were back then. Sadly, developer support dried up after a few years so my Touchpad spent the rest of its life flashed to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
foobiekr 1y ago
Truth. Every one of these things would have been visible 4-6 months prior.
bluGill 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.
  - blackguardx 1y ago
    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.
  - 7thaccount 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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)
fisherjeff 1y ago
Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…
- x0x0 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
      Exactly! It is your responsibility, like it or not. That’s what the money’s for!
    - okanat 1y ago
      ... 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 1y ago
        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.
lvl155 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  (just a note, it's Léo not Leo). I think this is fair read, but to be also fair, it's easy to criticize Léo - the SAP board had literally fired him 6 months before HP decided he would be a great fit!
halflife 1y ago
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 1y ago
  Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.
  - halflife 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      > 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 1y ago
    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.
utopcell 1y ago
this was my first thought as well.
hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    The people at the top are paid a fortune because they're indeed the very best.
EPWN3D 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
>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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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.
etempleton 1y ago
Here is the other problem: By summer 2011 the iPhone 4 had been out 6 months and the iPad for over a year. The iPhone 4 was when the iPhone felt mature from both an hardware and software perspective. Apple was executing at perhaps the highest level they have ever executed at. Palm would have had to execute perfectly and pray that Apple and Google made a colossal mistake. Google did with tablets, but neither Google nor Apple really left much room for others in the Phone space. Ask Microsoft.

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.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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 1y ago
      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 1y ago
        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.
ndiddy 1y ago
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.
- guenthert 1y ago
  The build quality wasn't the issue (as far as I can tell). I bought a unit on the secondary market more than a year after the "Fire Sale", it was flawless. It's hardware spec, particularly those obvious to end-users, like weight and thickness matched however the original iPad, not the iPad 2 (promoted for being "thinner") already released by the time of the launch of the TouchPad. That combined with the lack in available software, it's quite clear that whoever set the $499 price didn't want the product (or rather the team behind it) to succeed. Shame really, as WebOs had potential, the TouchPad's sound was pretty good and it's port of Angry Birds (one of the few pre-installed apps) was awesome.
  - ndiddy 1y ago
    Yeah all the fit and finish stuff was what I meant by build quality. Besides the stuff you mentioned, the back of the Touchpad was made of plastic and I was able to flex it by pushing on it, so it definitely didn't feel as premium as the iPad 2. Agreed that WebOS was fantastic from a software standpoint, the UI was years ahead of where iOS/Android were back then. Sadly, developer support dried up after a few years so my Touchpad spent the rest of its life flashed to Android Ice Cream Sandwich.

foobiekr 1y ago

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

bluGill 1y ago

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 1y ago
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.
- blackguardx 1y ago
  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.
- 7thaccount 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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)

fisherjeff 1y ago

Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…

x0x0 1y ago
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 1y ago
  > 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 1y ago
    Exactly! It is your responsibility, like it or not. That’s what the money’s for!
  - okanat 1y ago
    ... 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 1y ago
      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.

lvl155 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
(just a note, it's Léo not Leo). I think this is fair read, but to be also fair, it's easy to criticize Léo - the SAP board had literally fired him 6 months before HP decided he would be a great fit!

halflife 1y ago

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 1y ago
Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.
- halflife 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    > 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 1y ago
  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.

utopcell 1y ago

this was my first thought as well.

hn_throwaway_99 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  The people at the top are paid a fortune because they're indeed the very best.

EPWN3D 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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 1y ago

>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 1y ago

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 1y ago

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.

etempleton 1y ago

Here is the other problem: By summer 2011 the iPhone 4 had been out 6 months and the iPad for over a year. The iPhone 4 was when the iPhone felt mature from both an hardware and software perspective. Apple was executing at perhaps the highest level they have ever executed at. Palm would have had to execute perfectly and pray that Apple and Google made a colossal mistake. Google did with tablets, but neither Google nor Apple really left much room for others in the Phone space. Ask Microsoft.