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.
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?
I'm not saying that's what happened. But, it's a capitalistic type world.
Also with one of the worst logos ever. Have you seen RECTANGLE? It encapsulates our venerable company in two dimensional space. It's at least honest - Three dimensions would imply we're solid, and four would imply that we're moving anywhere.
First slowly and then suddenly.
There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
Am I missing something?
I don’t think HP was remotely interested in the previous operating system.
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!
I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a nicer task switching UI at first.
He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by the hype around the fire sale and how many people really liked them then.
The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at all.
[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/t-mobile-g1-android-pho...
Dunno, it's a pretty straightforward statement.
WebOS was a legit Linux OS and had a lot of good features...
"To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g. iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the previous app relaunches it."
"In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and you’ve just “multitasked” in iOS 4."
Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose context in either app because they restarted. The OS was structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.
(In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either way.)
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3779/apples-ios-4-explored/2
(These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away from an app in a minute and upon switching back I'm back at the app's home screen.)
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro...
(Also I had to reset the built-in camera to factory state and tell it to stop updating, because it couldn't even start with my phone's RAM anymore. Weird thing is I can't tell you what it was doing any better than the stock factory version.)
But on, ahem, a "real" phone, it is nice to just assume that either I'm still swapped in, or the user doesn't care anymore. It's not quite 100% accurate, but it's pretty close, and low-effort for the app developer who doesn't have to be guessing any more about what state is and is not important.
On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back then RAM was in short enough supply that more often than not the memory state of the process was dumped to disk instead.
There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.
But the app executable was totally suspended during this time.
Whereas on WebOS the UX was oriented around showing multiple "Cards"[1] at the same time, but each one represented a live running process that was able to interact to the user and render new UI.
This was a pretty big deal at the time.
Since then both iOS and Android gained a lot more capability and nuance around multitasking.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4508/hp-touchpad-review/2
That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".
One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a completely different userspace that what we had in desktop OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works" aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.
Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.
The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".
And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)
And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being something close to the home / back on screen button android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast, or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the switcher.
But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store launch was so botched that it was basically dead on arrival. The microusb port sucks.
The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2 "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user features under the hood.
Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to 10 were NT based.
Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29. 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.
Yeah, I too liked to run Windows NT 3.1 initial release on my DEC Alpha and MIPS workstations. Wait, what?
(I think you meant to say that the support for ARM32 specifically in Windows RT and the NT-based Windows Mobile 8+ was a noteworthy milestone, which I suppose is a fair point.)
Despite that, the phone sold several million devices and people were paying huge premiums (often $200-400 over price) to get it shipped from these secondary markets to where they lived.
The demand was there and Elop decided to kill it anyway. He also never released the second phone required by their Meego contract with Intel as I recall.
I love this, such a classic hack
And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is being done still to make this even more seamless. For example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to define UIs, because rendering such UIs can be done by the OS outside of the app process.
This means you can have an actual live UI while the actual app process is suspended. They literally don't have to wake the process until you tap on a button.
It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can define a much more coarse-grained idea of "alive" without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.
End Users only care whether the product does something they want - make toast, listen to music, prevent stds etc. Jobs shipped products that solved actual problems - desktop publishing, listening to music, making a phone call. They solved other problems also but shipping a product that might one day solve a problem is not a product category.
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.
>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.
What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit since then.
[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...
With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.
I don’t use iPhone apps on this iPad Mini, they are too painful. I use the Instagram and Blue Sky web sites instead.
* Might the same decisions have been made, even if the CTO were there?
* Would the CTO have one or more (SVP? VP?) people ramped up on the technical/product, and able to take a temporary acting-CTO role on that?
* Would there have been any sharp-elbow environment reason not to elevate subordinates temporarily into one's role and access? (For example, because you might return to find it's permanent.)
* What was the influence and involvement of the other execs? Surely it wasn't just CTO saying "buy this", CEO saying "OK", and then a product and marketing apparatus executing indifferently?
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.
* 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.
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.
In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensors, medical and the other shit).
>They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.
From where I am, I saw clear as day that markets usually have room for only two large players who will end up owning 90% of the market, with the rest of the players fighting for the scraps. Intel & AMD, Nvidia & AMD, iOS & Android, PlayStation & Xbox, Apple & Samsung, Windows & Mac, etc,
HP was in no position to win against Apple and Google for a podium spot so they left in due time. Even Microsoft couldn't pull it off.
OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers attribute the computers to them. But they don’t have a core competency in software. And they don’t have a core competency in the hardest parts of hardware—chip design, etc.
Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping them, that’s all important stuff. They weren’t in a position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the three games Apple plays, almost as well as Apple.
They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did in 2014).
That 2011 iPAQ has a Windows button. Wikipedia lists them as running "Windows Mobile".
That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year.
They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you have a bigger image when watching videos.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/blackberry-revenu...
And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind, "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like, "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies changes to the existing product portfolio.
I seem to recall there was rumours of the time of Apple sniffing around Palm as an acquisition target, even? I get the impression HP made this purchase simply on account of a strategic move to stop Apple from doing the same, and to get the patent portfolio that came out of it.
And the Palm Pre really was a decent phone, and the software relatively compelling... they just couldn't keep up on the HW manufacturing side.
At the time this was potentially a solvable problem, Apple hadn't become the juggernaut it is now.
I also recall that Jobs was famously pissed at Zuckerberg for launching Facebook on WebOS before iOS?
EDIT: I'd add to this that Palm had the talent at the time, too. Consider Mattias Duarte was the VP at Palm who headed up WebOS UX.. and then went on to direct the same thing for Android at Google, out of which came Material Design, etc. etc.
I kind of wonder if Apple could pull off something like an iphone or an ipad or even an ipod these days, without Steve Jobs around.
I often wonder what HP would look like today had Léo Apotheker not been such an awful fit. The damage 1 person can do in less than a year is astonishing. He even proposed selling off the PC division. WebOS was a fairly new acquisition and very well could have been the future, but he couldn't see any vision outside of software with his background. HP was built on hardware, they did't need to pivot that hard. It seems the stockholders agreed.
Is this actually the case?
I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
I 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.
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.
That’s basically what I meant. Albeit that I was emphasising that people are also happy with something that wasn’t iOS / Android if the price was right.
Their “$500 tablet” could be easily dropped to $100 because it wasn’t a particularly high end device to begin with. I mean, it did have some niceties. But there was also a hell of a lot of corners cut too.
Ironically, this was the same problem Palm faced with its WebOS phones before they sold to HP. Their phones were nice but they felt far too sluggish and basic considering their price point. I actually wanted a WebOS phone but ended up with Android (likely HTC) because you got so much more for your money.
Given HP (and Palm) has experience building portable devices like PDAs, there really isn’t any excuse for their failing in price and hardware for the WebOS tablets and phones. They already had experience in this market so should have really known better.
https://slickdeals.net/e/3220862-hp-touchpad-9-7-wifi-tablet...
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.
MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.
Sure, MS benefited greatly from this situation but Nokia was in the steady downhill since 2008.
It’s not enough to be as good as the competition when they already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories. To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive downside.
This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered. Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged them.
They were way ahead of the game with stuff like wireless charging and the SoC was cutting-edge for its time with fast (1.2GHz, but the chip was designed to run at 1.5GHz and overclocking to 1.8-2GHz was not too hard) partially OoO dual cores and 128-bit SIMD instead of 64-bit like A9 paired with a good LCD. The UI as shipped was already ahead of its time and if you look around for the cancelled Mocha UI, I think it would look pretty modern even today.
The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a very rapid pace. The CPU was fast compared to everyone else, but it was still slow and they needed to focus on performance a bit more.
Or he needed a subject to talk to to sell his “decision framework” to which the article switches rather abruptly.
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
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.
- at first, maybe he wanted to focus on anything else for a while. Shame, stress and anger don't always diminish when you share something on the Internet ;)
- at first, maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his colleagues' careers
- maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his own career
- maybe someone intimidated him
- maybe he didn't have the bandwidth to share this for a while
- maybe he found more fulfillment doing something other than talking about this, and stuck to that for a while
- maybe he was waiting for a good moment to share this message, and decided now was the time
Can you think of a reason why he'd be dishonest that's more likely?
Today he is probably past his corporate ambitions, and has a good personal relationship with current HP leadership. There is little to no harm getting it out now.
Is this what LinkedIn considers radical candor?
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"
When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.
;)
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.
They did however rave about Droid and iPhone.
HP laptops outsell Apple laptops 2 to 1
Not saying they are better, but HP hasn't lost to Apple in the laptop market.
or at least, everybody except HP knew that.
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.
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.
These kinds of folks only seem to fail upwards in the EU, whereas in the US, they would have been laughed out.
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.
(I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)
I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"
Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info
Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too
I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.
But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...
To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.
First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.
As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.
The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be very disappointed with the device.
But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero, so I didn't try to talk them out of it.
It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for smartphones of the time.
Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for them to operate that they never asked for me help. And since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer apps available.
Their experience was the polar opposite of what I envisioned it would be.
Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.
Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a better system for frontend development.
WP7 was the first of the new OS
That then became WSL1
I blame Ballmer, he's like Steve Gate's less intelligent but at least as evil brother.
We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a while, because they had their use cases and workflows on them that other smartphones took time to cover).
Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the initial rush that takes much more time to convince people to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)
Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers.
> to get a lot of apps
Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs. They created their own resistance to app development.
Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.
Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes.
If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops to make software that works for the platform.
It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.
So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.
You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.
Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.
The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.
No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.
Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.
Just for some rough math here - I’m currently paying around $1.20/L for gas, and crude oil cost is roughly half of that, so if crude went up by 6x, I’d be looking at $5/L for gas. Gas is currently about 20% of my per-km cost of driving, so that price increase at the pump would increase my per-km cost by about 60%.
FWIW that’s roughly the same per-km cost increase that people have voluntarily taken on over the past decade in North America by buying more expensive cars.
(Though this does apply to personal transportation only, the math on e.g. transport trucks is different)
Not to mention less efficient cars.
I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode
I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.)
I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of crude. Divide.
How could you possibly not be able to estimate the fraction?
And yeah ideally you use an average number over some months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but those are minor tweaks.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...
One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".
Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
It was targeted at DSL modems, and I think the platform has faded and is now somewhat obscure.
https://royalsociety.org/people/sophie-wilson-12544/
https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc14...
Intel has plenty of engineering talent, if the bean counters, politicians and board would just get out of the way they would come back. But instead you see patently stupid/poor execution like then still ongoing avx512 saga. Lakefield, is a prime example of WTFism showing up publicly. The lack of internal leadership is written as loud as possible on a product where no one had the political power to force the smaller core to emulate avx512 during the development cycle, or NAK a product where the two cores couldn't even execute the same instructions. Its an engineering POC probably being shopped to apple or someone else considering an arm big.little without understanding how to actually implement it in a meaningful way. Compared with the AMD approach which seems to even best the arm big.little by simply using the same cores process optimized differently to the same effect without having to deal with the problems of optimizing software for two different microarch.
(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
The IEA is an energy industry group from back in the days where "energy" primarily meant fossil fuels (i.e. the 1970s), and they've never entirely gotten away from that mentality.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.
https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf
'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.
Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.
Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.
IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.
I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.
It’s comforting to know that massively strategic decisions based on very little information that may not even be correct are made in other organizations and not just mine.
To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined by their pricing.
For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to being more or less a sidegrade from their previous generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the asking price to your average user that has other options.
Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.
In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be overlooked.
It seems like the only trick nVidia has for consumer cards is dumping in more power.
Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.
1) Entry level watch models were available for about $400 right away, which is still more or less the starting point (though due to inflation, that's a bit cheaper now, of course).
2) Luxury models (>$1K price) are still available, now under the Hermès co-branding.
The one thing that was only available in the initial release were the "Edition" models at a >$10K price point, but there was speculation that this was more of an anchoring message (to place the watch as a premium product) and never a segment meant to be sustained.
Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because of the limited battery life, I do have one.
But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition" models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the expensive models in stock.
It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and changed their branding for the watch to be about health and fitness.
You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems, but ultimately none of that mattered.
What killed windows phone was the iron law that app developers just weren’t willing to invest the effort to support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had already taken the lead. They could have added android app support and almost did, but then what was the point of windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but without the apps that just didn’t matter.
This is what makes apple’s current disdain for app developers so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers that chose and continue to choose to build for their platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.
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.
Wow, so whiney. He's an executive, a leader. A captain doesn't complain if the crew is mad at him, for any reason.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Specifically, the rest is ink used in those printers. They pretty much give away the printers
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.
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.
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.
[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.]
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.
The other produce was likely clunky as heck and yes the App Store was the other genius stroke
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.
There's a lot of buck passing in this article.
> 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.
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."
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.
I felt it needed a little tweak. You are exactly right otherwise IMO.
When I talk about the same topic with a friend, we say variants of "MBAs ruin everything they touch". But what we really mean is what you said.
https://mlari.ciam.edu/peter-drucker-s-vision-of-management-...
Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of Director and above in technical or related companies.
To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA, development, customer feedback and myriad others are generated on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And during leadership review sessions teams are asked for 10% improvement for next quarter.
If these reports and feedback were any good, these companies would be operating like Navy seal teams by now.
Got his MBA, eventually bragged about how he lied his way into a CTO position with no tech skills. Lasted about 6 months. No longer listed on his LinkedIn.
After all that, somehow still hasn't eaten his humble pie. Still believes this idea you don't need to know stuff about technology to manage a technology organization.
SAP board; This guy sucks let's move on
HP: we'll take him!
Leo Apotheker really did not understand software development and all of nuances running a software company.
While Henning may not have been particularly business-savvy, Leo demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of SAP’s value network.
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.
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.
I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.
The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.
Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/22/hp-touchp...
I bought one, and ... honestly even at that low price I regretted it. The software was trash. I don't know why WebOS got so much praise, it was clearly not fit for purpose.
I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.
That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.
I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern software development has proven out this whole idea. If WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't get enough development attention.
Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges to success.
We certainly do have the performance in such devices to run an OS application layer with web technology now. Many people do anyway, just directly in the browser and with electron. Easier on a PC, but completely possible on TVs and phones. If webOS is slow now on your TV that's because of LG's development capabilities, not because of the technology.
I had both a Touchpad and a HP Veer. The performance was completely fine, especially after the mod scene provided kernel updates with overclocks, plus tunings for the UI. Especially compared to common devices of the time. Those were very good signs for the cut next hardware iteration.
The great thing about webOS was the usability, just how the interface worked was awesome. It's no accident that Android copied the card interface a few years later, with Android 5 I think, and the gestures again a few years later, with Android 10 or 11. Probably coming from Palm were also some nice ideas about how to integrate apps and core functionality.
I still have the device and it’s one of my cherished vintage devices.
and the emulator was better dev experience than anything else. but actually putting things on the device that had anything more than js was impossible.
and the hardware was garbage. buttons would stuck. I don't know what sort of museum you live but mines lasted 4 and 2 years before turning to literal bits (used by adults)
May horde contains: few old MacBooks running Linux, old Kindles running dashboards, Android phones & tablets, iPhones from OG era and even a Chumby. All of them are still working fine.
I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch.
Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship stuff that wasn’t ready and couldn’t be ready with the resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have taken a good start and given it the space to become great. Maybe.
That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.
- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)
- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.
- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.
- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.
- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.
- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).
Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery life).
Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of the tablet for quite a while).
I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a webOS-specific app.
As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad.
The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.
My LG TV, on the other hand, definitely struggles particularly running apps. That might just be due to the age of the tv.
Granted... If they aren't 'Net-connected, most "apps" aren't of much use. But, fast access to settings and inputs is sorta nice too.
It's about the least snappy thing I've ever used, apart from cheap Android tablets (we made the mistake of buying an Amazon Fire Kids tablet which is the only device I've ever used that was literally unusably slow).
I even bought the higher spec version of the TV because apparently the cheaper version is even slower. Great image quality but I'll definitely never buy another LG TV again.
As far as the TV, here's my model number:
OLED77C2AUA
No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife. Just the ads and software/features I don't care about. (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-update disabled for a reason)
That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.
I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_
The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.
An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)
A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).
The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.
Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.
That said, this article really doesn't dwell on the mistakes he made. He sort of implies his work was great and it was marketing/other departments who messed up.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
It absolutely could have been a huge success if Elop hadn't gone out of his way to kill it.
This article got more fishy the more I read it
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.
Good people though.
It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.
> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.
from https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...
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
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.
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.
That is exactly how I felt.
Don’t do this. Engagement is what drives stories to the front page. If you don’t like it just move on.
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.
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?
Wasn't that an old ink company?
> 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.
And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
The only way that remark makes sense:
1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.
DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.
Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.
Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.
Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....
As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.
Your questions though are valid.
But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else HP now. But HP had a good reputation.
Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.
I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.
But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).
They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.
Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.
Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.
I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.
I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they are locked to chipped cartridges.
And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers as they possibly could.
When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage, it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.
It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.
No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.
This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.
I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.
As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it’s been this way for decades.
“Used car” is a wild exaggeration. For many years, people have been able to buy MacBook Airs that overperform for 90% of consumers for $1,000 (sometimes even less). This device will last at least 7 years, if not 10.
https://www.costco.com/macbook-air.html?screen-size=13-in+13....
[0]: https://support.hp.com/in-en/product/product-specs/hp-compaq...
The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.
It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).
Startup -> HP -> HPE -> Micro Focus -> new job after I got tired of all this corporate deck chair rearranging.
One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a single share since he left the company. That would mean he has a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing in HP.
I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.
The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.
> I refused.
Should probably have taken it.
Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?
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.
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.
iPad dimensions: 243mm 190mm 13mm
Both had rounded corners as can be seen in the images here:
https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/26850-940/HP-Touc...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IPad-WiF...
I know the ipad cases fit the touchpad because I used one on my TouchPad for it's entire service life.
Why post incorrect information so authoritatively? Seems silly.
Here's a side-by-side image
https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&for...
Here's a close-up detail of an ipad on top of a touchpad.
As I stated, you can clearly see sharp, flat edges on the ipad where it meets the back of the device while the Touchpad has a much more continuous rounded edge. In the side-by-side shots, you can also see how the Touchpad corners are much more rounded.
Here's some individual shots
Touchpad with side view
https://i0.wp.com/www.seriousinsights.net/wp-content/uploads...
https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tablets/HP/TouchPad/_DS...
ipad with side view
https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...
https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...
None of them prevented a $15 iPad case from working flawlessly with my TouchPad for a half dozen years.
Tapping into Apple's ecosystem in such a way is exactly the sort of action Apple dislikes, for obvious reasons.
In my opinion, Touchpad's different edges, corners, and radically different software meant HP wasn't likely to get sued.
It's well documented that mobile is a minefield of lawsuits seemingly aimed not so much at winning as at establishing cross-licensing agreements to mitigate the massive patent warchests of established players. A practice Apple has proven to be adept at. Just entering the mobile space carries a near 100% chance of getting sued by everyone else already occupying it.
You can be of the opinion that something isn't worthy of a lawsuit. Doesn't mean one won't happen. In my humble experience, any pretense can be sufficient. And this one has seemed likely to me since 2011.
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.
If MS couldn’t break into the mobile market, Palm definitely didn’t have a chance.
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.
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.
ouch. this is actually pretty cool though in terms of putting SAP vs HP in perspective, which i've never considered prior.
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.
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.
Sounds like a great Silicon Valley episode plot.
"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).
(This isn't a joke or sarcasm, I genuinely thought both HP and HPE are hardware companies?)
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?
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.
foobarian•21h ago
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•21h ago
foobarian•20h ago
danielmarkbruce•19h ago
jakelazaroff•11h ago
stahtops•21h ago
rjsw•21h ago
pipeline_peak•19h ago
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.