> "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.
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.
> 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!).
(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...)
Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too.
So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
Aside from it not being 64bit initially uh.. did we live through the same time period? The Athlons completely blew the Intel competition out of the water. If Intel hadn't heavily engaged in market manipulation, AMD would have taken a huge bite out of their marketshare.
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
> As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
That's one way to explain it. Alternatively, one might say that FSB-based Netburst servers would not benefit much from multi-core because the architecture (and especially FSB) has hit its limitation. Arguably, Intel had no competitive product on the mass server market until 2006 and Core-based Xeon 5100 introduction. Only enormous market inertia has kept them afloat.
> In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s.
That was one relatively small (servers number-wise) segment of the market. Introduction of Opteron servers and Windows Server 2003 64-bit has created a new segment of mass 64-bit servers which have very quickly taken over entire 32-bit (at that time) mass server market. That was the real market that Intel wanted for themselves with introduction of proprietary Itanium but failed to acquire it because of the compatibility issue. High-end mainframe-adjacent market segment indeed belonged to Itanium for many years after, but that wasn't the goal of Itanium. Intel wanted to be a monopoly on the entire PC&server market with no cross-licensing agreements but failed and had to cross-license AMD64 instead.
It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
> 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.
There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing people not to buy solar panels or other renewable sources.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
How often are they reality distortion fields vs leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops and investors? How do you do the second without the first?
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
> Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.
one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how similar the colors of each year was making it very difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the chart was still clear though
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.
> 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)
How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.
The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This naturally means gas prices will move to match the price of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system, not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.
> How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price?
I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.)
I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs, transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely
A) Just calculating the percentage doesn't assume that.
B) They shouldn't correlate by a particularly large amount in a competitive environment. For an approximation as rough as "half" and assuming no other changes it's not a big deal.
Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up the total price will go up proportionally less than places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived when gas gets expensive.)
'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".'
I’m curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I’m betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel’s compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a software vendor and later a computational research lab, and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least the equivalent gain back … or just buy an off-the-shelf system which performed well now and do literally anything else with your life.
One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.
I think you're right. The combination of open source and public clouds has really tended to reduce the dominance of specific hardware/software ecosystems, especially Wintel. Especially with the decline of CMOS process scaling as a performance lever, I expect that we'll see more heterogeneous computing in the future.
> “You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?"
It’s comforting to know that massively strategic decisions based on very little information that may not even be correct are made in other organizations and not just mine.
I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.
Well, yes, the market didn't care all that much for various reasons. (There were reasons beyond technology.) RHEL/GCC supported but, while I wasn't there at the time, I'm not sure how much focus there was. Other companies were hedging their bets on Itanium at the time--e.g. Project Monterey. Aside from Sun, most of the majors were placing Itanium bets to some degree if only to hedge other projects.
Even HP dropped it eventually. And the former CEO of Intel (who was CTO during much of the time Itanium was active) said in a trade press interview that he wished they had just done a more enterprisey Xeon--which happened eventually anyway.
A small boardroom locked in groupthink, misled by one single individual’s weak simulated benchmark, with no indication of real world performance or customer demand?
This form versus substance issue is a really deeply embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting worse.
Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.
Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.
IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.
I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.
The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.
I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.
There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium.
I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business.
One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".
Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was the legitimately better approach. There were certainly theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward--even if it had never been commercially successful in the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect it was a bit of both and different people at the company probably had different perspectives.
Internal inertia is a powerful thing. This was discussed at length on comp.arch in the late 1990's early 2000's by insiders like Andy Glew. When OoO started to dominate intel should have realized the risk, but they continued to cancel internal projects to extend x86 to 64-bits. Of which apparently there were multiple. Even then, the day that AMD announced 64-bit extensions and a product timeline it should have resulted in intel doing an internal about face and acknowledging what everyone knew (in the late 1990's) and quietly scuttling ia64 while pulling a backup x86 out of their pocket. But since they had killed them all, they were forced to scramble to follow AMD.
Intel has plenty of engineering talent, if the bean counters, politicians and board would just get out of the way they would come back. But instead you see patently stupid/poor execution like then still ongoing avx512 saga. Lakefield, is a prime example of WTFism showing up publicly. The lack of internal leadership is written as loud as possible on a product where no one had the political power to force the smaller core to emulate avx512 during the development cycle, or NAK a product where the two cores couldn't even execute the same instructions. Its an engineering POC probably being shopped to apple or someone else considering an arm big.little without understanding how to actually implement it in a meaningful way. Compared with the AMD approach which seems to even best the arm big.little by simply using the same cores process optimized differently to the same effect without having to deal with the problems of optimizing software for two different microarch.
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.
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.
I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of accessories or the Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have their commission structure altered to benefit significantly more from each windows phone sale if this was ever to succeed.
This is why iPhone competitors failed initially, the sales people took the path of least resistance and more money, just like most would.
The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be made in Finland. After that, and the whole brand licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones were made in China going forward. Such a shame.
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)
I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.
I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
I thought it was fascinating, agood value proposition, a necessary diversification of the market. I almost wonder just looking primarily at Google's example if a major key to success is just toughing it out and finding an identity and finding a niche in the early years. I feel like this could have been something meaningful and like the plug was pulled too quick. To keep going back to Amazon Prime which played the long long game before becoming kind of a flagship offering.
I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone
At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"
Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info
Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too
I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.
But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
The only Windows Phone people I know either worked for Microsoft, or were Microsoft superfans. (And the one friend who liked to just be a contrarian - this time he was right, but he's usually wrong)
I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of money porting apps to it over the years as well.
In my case I was a Windows user for work and Linux fanboy at home. I just hated the android experience at the time (phone before my Lumia was the original Galaxy I think which was a piece of garbage) and enjoyed playing with a Lumia at the store.
We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a few years ago. I had never used one before but I was actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand now what it had it's fans.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees, most developers had already moved on and never gave Windows Phone another look.
It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
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.
I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.
Not to mention that when they moved to SDK 8, you could only develop from a Windows 8 machine, that famously popular OS. So many unforced errors, many seeming to stem from denial that Microsoft does not possess the Apple Reality Distortion Field
What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
Up until 2011 I was still using one of those Samsung phones with the slide out keyboard, maybe an Intensity II or something. My first smartphone was a Windows phone, an HTC Titan. I really liked the phone and the OS - I thought it was very well done. The only problem: the app store was complete shit. There were barely any apps and the ones that were there were trash barely discernible from malware.
WebOS was incredible on phones too. Android and iOS basically mined the Palm Pre for ideas for years. In 2010 I had a phone with touch based gesture navigation, card based multitasking, magnetically attached wireless charging that displayed a clock when docked.
A long time ago I was given an Android, Apple, and MS-windows phone to evaluate as company phones for the company I worked for. the MS-windows phone crashed almost straight out of the box. and crashed again. and again.
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.
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.
That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones.
It also had the best “swipe” text typing mode for Turkish. iPhone got it very recently and it’s close to useless and Android one was meh last I checked.
Okay: multitasking in windows phone was rubbish. You would see a loading screen all the time when switching between apps that lasted seconds. Of course that was still better than the pile of garbage that Android was/is, so it was your only option if you, like me, weren’t able to afford an iPhone. But that’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I miss it.
Thanks! I've owned one windows phone (I liked the UI) and multiple android phones and don't remember anything like that. Maybe it was a problem on some earlier (or cheaper) phones since I waited a bit before buying a smartphone.
> The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.
To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined by their pricing.
For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to being more or less a sidegrade from their previous generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the asking price to your average user that has other options.
Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.
In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be overlooked.
The major complaint I have with the 5060 is it offers me no reason to update my 3060 Ti. It's 2 generations out and is somewhere around a 10% performance increase at roughly the same power envelope.
It seems like the only trick nVidia has for consumer cards is dumping in more power.
I remember doing some apps for Windows Phone and it really seemed they hated devs. Constantly breaking small things and then the switch to 10 made me give up. It was a nice OS though
> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much
Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.
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.
The luxury watch was released in April 2015. The cheaper stainless steel model wasn't released until the fall event a few months later.
But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition" models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the expensive models in stock.
It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and changed their branding for the watch to be about health and fitness.
Yes, I agree that health and fitness are a much bigger part of the branding now than they were initially (but the basic features were there right from the beginning — I remember sitting in town halls, with "pings" ringing out at 10 to the hour, and everybody standing up for a minute).
That comports with my memory. I have no idea what Apple's internal sales projections were. But there was a ton of nerd and tech press criticism to the effect that young people didn't wear watches any longer so obviously this was a stupid idea for a product.
Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because of the limited battery life, I do have one.
To me that was the issue, they wanted a 'me too' product without the belief behind to back it.. it was a fine device at the time, a little nicer than all the android tablets around.
The iPhone opened up the smartphone market to many many more people.
We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a while, because they had their use cases and workflows on them that other smartphones took time to cover).
Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the initial rush that takes much more time to convince people to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)
I got a Treo in 2006 mostly because I had a badly broken foot and needed an alternative to carrying a computer on some trips. Didn't get an iPhone until a 3GS or thereabouts in around 2010.
Apples app store was 3 years old at that point and white hot. The Samsung Galaxy was 2 years old then. If they wanted to go to market with an unpolished product differentiated with a few nifty features, they'd need to spend months paying loads of money to devs to fill out their app store to have a chance.
And Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year out of 1 billion phones that were sold that year. Jobs himself publicly stated his goal was 1% of the cell phone market the guest year
I think microsoft made a valiant effort with windows phone. They kept it in the market for years and iterated, they threw big budgets after it, they made deals with app developers to bring over their apps.
You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems, but ultimately none of that mattered.
What killed windows phone was the iron law that app developers just weren’t willing to invest the effort to support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had already taken the lead. They could have added android app support and almost did, but then what was the point of windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but without the apps that just didn’t matter.
This is what makes apple’s current disdain for app developers so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers that chose and continue to choose to build for their platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.
There was another reason behind the Windows phone failure and the lack of apps - Google blocking Microsoft from using its platform native APIs. Microsoft weren't allowed to use, for eg, the YouTube API natively, so the "native" Windows OS app for YouTube had to use roundabout methods of getting YouTube data.
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.
Clearly you have never actually used a WebOS device. They supported app sideloading out of the box and were easy to get root on via an officially supported method. There was an extremely popular third-party app store called Preware that offered all sorts of apps and OS tweaks.
When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to it.
Most of those developers were looking for revenue, though, and there’s a really wicked network effect rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too. By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there just weren’t many developers looking to target a user base at least an order of magnitude smaller – even Android struggled because not as many users were willing to actually buy software.
People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes.
Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes.
If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops to make software that works for the platform.
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.
We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.
It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.
So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.
You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you've got some "grass is greener on the other side" thinking going on there. There's lots of people just like him, failing upwards in US tech.
Obviously there are. But you still have a higher proportion of engineer types leading multinational companies, whether they are tech or finance businesses, etc. In Europe, except for France (thanks to the Grand Ecole system), I have yet to see a large proportion of companies where non-founder leadership also has a technical or engineering bent.
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
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.
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.
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.
This is well after the fact though, and it does sound like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I don’t begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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!
> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill.
> SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.
> This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch that should have been immediately obvious to any functioning board. But nobody asked the right questions about whether Leo's enterprise software background prepared him to evaluate consumer platform technologies such as WebOS, and I wasn't there to provide what my colleagues called "adult supervision."
Yup, sounds about right.
At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed.
>> 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."
Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing.
The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake.
You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA
If this assertion is rankling anyone, I invite them to look up how many private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground, by trying to make them operate like SaaS companies.
So true. A friend of mine worked as a manager at an ECO diary producer (milk, cheese yoghurt). An investment firm bought the owners who build the company from nothing for a substantial sum. They then brought in a new young executive team who mainly had experience and making online clothes and food retail startups. Initially the owners had a requirement to consult to the business for some amount of time. That was quickly dropped as they didn't want the old owners to "interfere" (essentially telling the exec that they what they wanted to do didn't work). After less than a year my friend and the product manager where the only managers left from before and they had become the "nay sayers" (I.e. telling the boars their ideas and execution don't work in this industry) and where eventually let go. By this time they had lost major costumers, majorly invested into equipment that still didn't work (as the product manager predicted from the get go) and the company was probably worth less than half. I just read the news that 7 years later they sold at 2% of the purchase price. Cases like this should really be mandatory study.
> private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground
Absolutely, but (and this depends upon the "financialization of everything" point someone made above) that doesn't matter, because in the meantime they'll have personally made a profit on the deal. Building (or keeping) a sustainable business was never one of their goals. I call it "extractive capitalism", and it's ruining the world.
Drucker would argue you need practice (e.g. actually doing the work) rather than an educational background to be a good manager.[0] So I would argue he didn't have the experience to be a manager at that level.
I can only say that it's really refreshing when you talk to a CEO who is interested and understands the products the company is working on. Unfortunately it's pretty widespread to have the top layers of the company only thinking about numbers and deadlines, not the product.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just created further long term problems. If IBM could have caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25 years they would have done fine, but for some reason they continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in the right place at the right time. But it seems they always overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.
> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being ...
Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of Director and above in technical or related companies.
To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA, development, customer feedback and myriad others are generated on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And during leadership review sessions teams are asked for 10% improvement for next quarter.
If these reports and feedback were any good, these companies would be operating like Navy seal teams by now.
Oh, it's worse in some ways - Leo didn't leave SAP to take this job.
Instead, SAP's board chose not to renew his contract in Feb, 2010, so he resigned.
I can find countless examples of this both ways. Some people are great CEOs able to turn around a company/industry they knew nothing about before. However there are a lot of bad CEOs out there. And being in a company/industry for decades is a good way to turn a bad CEO into a mediocre one which is an improvement I guess. Sadly I have no clue how to make a good CEO - and see no evidence anyone else does.
I know a guy who held this attitude. He somehow got into a top MBA program without any undergrad degree and poor grades. (Bribery, one wonders)
Got his MBA, eventually bragged about how he lied his way into a CTO position with no tech skills. Lasted about 6 months. No longer listed on his LinkedIn.
After all that, somehow still hasn't eaten his humble pie. Still believes this idea you don't need to know stuff about technology to manage a technology organization.
And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
The only way that remark makes sense:
1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.
Because it's been decades since I've ran into new HP kit that didn't fall somewhere between awful and unusable. I say that without the least exaggeration.
DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.
Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.
Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.
Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....
As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.
I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excellent, both in terms of support duration and general stability.
I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.
As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
I have an HP ENVY laptop that’s very nice. Amazingly good screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1, and is quite thin and light for a 15” laptop.
But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it’s been this way for decades.
This is ancient reference but I used to have HP's nx6320[0] laptop. The thing was built solid, fantastic keyboard, excellent screen - basically an all round solid business laptop. I remember dual-booting Windows XP with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it - worked perfectly.
> It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
“Used car” is a wild exaggeration. For many years, people have been able to buy MacBook Airs that overperform for 90% of consumers for $1,000 (sometimes even less). This device will last at least 7 years, if not 10.
> This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.
HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.
Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.
HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).
They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.
The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be like; I miss those days.
I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.
HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.
You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.
Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.
> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.
Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.
I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.
But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation (including but not limited to their legendary calculators). Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once got to go to work with him and see one of their giant plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.
That is not a bad rep for the shareholder. They were great in those terms. And gave lots of market opportunity for everyone else but HP dominated the scene.
> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).
> This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a single share since he left the company. That would mean he has a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing in HP.
These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years.
PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line.
Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem.
So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s.
Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells.
At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.
Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.
I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.
Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.
I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.
> I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw"
I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they are locked to chipped cartridges.
And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers as they possibly could.
When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage, it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.
I have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year, scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be used as a printer anymore either.
It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.
No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.
This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.
I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.
I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.
The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.
Former Palm employee here. I was a developer advocate working directly with app devs from a couple of months before Palm was acquired until after the shutdown.
I remember Phil and rather liked him. Everything he states in the article is correct as far as I remember it. Yes we were being slammed by the iPad, but we were far and away the #2 tablet that summer. Android tablets really sucked then, and despite Google's push there were more tablet native apps in the TouchPad app store than Android's. In hindsight it should have been cheaper and faster. And it would have been by Christmas (the TouchPad mini was just weeks away from shipping). Given more time and funding it would have been a contender (maybe not "winning" but still having a good run).
I suspect Palm was doomed the moment Apotheker took over. He wanted to turn HP into IBM. HP's plans to use WebOS everywhere (I was able to see prototypes of fascinating future products that I still want today) were well thought out, but didn't fit his vision. If you want to blame someone, blame the board for hiring him.
Ultimately WebOS's destruction was great for the rest of the ecosystem. Some really talented people went to Apple and Google, improving their interfaces at the expense of losing a 3rd way. I still wish I'd kept at Pre3. Modern iPhones and Android devices may be more powerful, but they don't have that elegant simplicity I miss from WebOS.
Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and canceling the product too early. Am I missing something? The fact it was rushed to market was on him unless he left out a bunch of story prior to his surgery.
The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next generation, which then would have more apps and less early issues to have a better chance at the market.
But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the lead of webOS was.
I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of “this just needs a little polish”, what I would expect for any new to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me.
I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.
It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the way they now handle multiple applications.
The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.
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 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.
webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system.
That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.
Yeah, there's a lot of context there that isn't obvious from the outside and is behind my feelings that Palm just had too little too late. They shouldn't have been blindsided by the iPhone, but with that happening they really did the best they could. I'll make some brief points, but maybe I should write a blog post at some point.
- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)
- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.
- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.
- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.
- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.
- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).
Boot times for alternative kernels were a lot faster. I can't recall exactly (it's been years), but I seem to remember that there were some simple config settings in the bootloader that could cut boot times by a lot.
Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery life).
Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of the tablet for quite a while).
I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a webOS-specific app.
I distinctly remember the Autumn day of 2011 when we stood in the line of the local Best Buy in West Des Moines to grab one of these. It was miles ahead of anything that was in the market that time. It could do multitasking and had a lovely intuitive UI (cards!!). I remember being blown away by it. Android and iOS freely stole features from it later.
I still have the device and it’s one of my cherished vintage devices.
yeah it was years ahead of apple and android (this was and2.3 days if i recall, or 4.3 which typical google was worse than 2.3)
and the emulator was better dev experience than anything else. but actually putting things on the device that had anything more than js was impossible.
and the hardware was garbage. buttons would stuck. I don't know what sort of museum you live but mines lasted 4 and 2 years before turning to literal bits (used by adults)
I might be lucky because mine’s still chugging along.
May horde contains: few old MacBooks running Linux, old Kindles running dashboards, Android phones & tablets, iPhones from OG era and even a Chumby. All of them are still working fine.
> I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.
I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern software development has proven out this whole idea. If WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't get enough development attention.
Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges to success.
Companies do exist to try and hammer Linux into a good desktop/laptop product. I would say that it's just not easy to do given the lack of vertical integration. Redhat centralizing everything into systemd has probably gone the longest way towards improving things. Of course that is odds with the perceived benefits of having many competing options to perform the job of any given piece of software.
> That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.
We certainly do have the performance in such devices to run an OS application layer with web technology now. Many people do anyway, just directly in the browser and with electron. Easier on a PC, but completely possible on TVs and phones. If webOS is slow now on your TV that's because of LG's development capabilities, not because of the technology.
I had both a Touchpad and a HP Veer. The performance was completely fine, especially after the mod scene provided kernel updates with overclocks, plus tunings for the UI. Especially compared to common devices of the time. Those were very good signs for the cut next hardware iteration.
The great thing about webOS was the usability, just how the interface worked was awesome. It's no accident that Android copied the card interface a few years later, with Android 5 I think, and the gestures again a few years later, with Android 10 or 11. Probably coming from Palm were also some nice ideas about how to integrate apps and core functionality.
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 observation, after using LG TVs at countless hotels (occasionally internet-connected), AirBnBs (usually internet connected) and at home (never internet-connected) is that even in quite old TVs the UI is blazing fast until you connect it to the 'Net. At that point... It spends a painful amount of time waiting on requests with no visible feedback and the whole UI starts to chug, with some apps becoming almost unusable until the thing has been on for long enough for all the background stuff to finish.
Granted... If they aren't 'Net-connected, most "apps" aren't of much use. But, fast access to settings and inputs is sorta nice too.
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.
I have no explanation of what's going on with your touchpad. They really only had one model with different storage options. I guess I'd speculate there's something wrong with it.
As far as the TV, here's my model number:
OLED77C2AUA
No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife. Just the ads and software/features I don't care about. (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-update disabled for a reason)
(as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)
The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.
An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)
A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).
The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.
Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.
I don't think he's saying it went from great to awful, I think he's saying they canceled the project because the new CEO didn't like it and nobody was there to defend it. He claims the underlying tech was good but there was a market/product mismatch; instead of taking the information and trying again, they just canceled it.
That said, this article really doesn't dwell on the mistakes he made. He sort of implies his work was great and it was marketing/other departments who messed up.
He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000 units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market probably wasn't even his job.
I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of investment to build a platform like this.
The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall.
WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would simply have meant more money down the drain.
The issues that killed webOS had nothing to do with its technical merits (which were many) - it instead was a failure of product management.
* The TouchPad was priced too high for a new entrant with embryonic app support.
* It probably needed more development time before going to market, CTO doesnt really make GTM timing decisions.
* Insult to injury, as this fella pointed out - the applications for webOS extended far beyond a tablet, HP threw the baby out with the bathwater.
* They tried to make a strategic shift into software and services without having a great track record of doing those thing, which compounded all of the above, Palm did have some expertise there, but it was still tossed away.
Agree. I'm sympathetic to the CTO here, but I remember the disaster of the HP TouchPad launch very well - there were multiple fatal errors here that don't seem possible to commit in an 8-week window.
The hardware had basically ~no app ecosystem. That's not a problem that occurs over 8 weeks. The software was also incredibly under-baked, and I'm doubtful that the company pivoted from "this needs more time and should release later" to "full marketing push, press events, and big launch" in that short a time either.
I don't doubt that there was a lot of conflict over strategy with the new CEO, but the framing that all of this happened while he was on the sidelines doesn't seem very plausible.
HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been. They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.
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).
In early 2011 when I told people I had an Android they had no clue what I was talking about. A well done long term investment in other phones could have made a big difference - but HP wasn't willing to make it so we will never know. (Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again killing it before it took off).
> By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this
That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year.
They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you have a bigger image when watching videos.
>HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been.
In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensors, medical and the other shit).
>They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.
From where I am, I saw clear as day that markets usually have room for only two large players who will end up owning 90% of the market, with the rest of the players fighting for the scraps. Intel & AMD, Nvidia & AMD, iOS & Android, PlayStation & Xbox, Apple & Samsung, Windows & Mac, etc,
HP was in no position to win against Apple and Google for a podium spot so they left in due time. Even Microsoft couldn't pull it off.
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.
HP did have competency in a lot of those areas though. They were a large company that did have fingers in a lot of different things, both software and hardware. Their PCs were visible, but they had lots of other divisions doing lots of things.
Which was perhaps their major issue. The HP expertise was all over the place with divisions around the globe reinventing the wheel. Couple that with a recently decimated and outsourced IT department (Such a colossally dumb decision) and you could effectively see HP not as one company but 100 companies all doing their own thing.
I thought WebOS looked great and thought it was the only real chance we ever had for a 3 platform. Much of the UI we take for granted in mobile devices today came from WebOS (such as card based app switching and swiping to close). I would have loved to see what it could become, rather than relegating it to TVs. iOS wasn't what it is today back then. It was still pretty new itself, and lacking what most would say are very basic features today.
I often wonder what HP would look like today had 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.
I actually think if there was anybody who could have competed effectively against Apple at this phase -- on branding -- Palm was it. It had recognition and association with the kind of product. And a patent portfolio, along with it.
I seem to recall there was rumours of the time of Apple sniffing around Palm as an acquisition target, even? I get the impression HP made this purchase simply on account of a strategic move to stop Apple from doing the same, and to get the patent portfolio that came out of it.
And the Palm Pre really was a decent phone, and the software relatively compelling... they just couldn't keep up on the HW manufacturing side.
At the time this was potentially a solvable problem, Apple hadn't become the juggernaut it is now.
I also recall that Jobs was famously pissed at Zuckerberg for launching Facebook on WebOS before iOS?
EDIT: I'd add to this that Palm had the talent at the time, too. Consider Mattias Duarte was the VP at Palm who headed up WebOS UX.. and then went on to direct the same thing for Android at Google, out of which came Material Design, etc. etc.
WebOS should never have tried to compete with Apple. They should have been on a slow march to their own definition for enterprise services. And then pivot to the consumer development market
I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.
I suspect that making business mistakes illegal would ultimately cause more harm than the problem such a move is trying to solve.
And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind, "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like, "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies changes to the existing product portfolio.
This is not to take away from the corporate Vogon tragedy described in the blog post. WebOS could've been a credible competitor to iOS and Android. But the weak spot is right in the name: It's a web UI platform. Look at Google's attempts to make ChromeOS into a tablet OS.
While it's less clear cut now, back when HP acquired WebOS, they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps. HP had the resources.
We don't have a third or fourth mobile platform mainly because of tragically poor leadership at HP and Nokia. Both were almost killed by CEOs who thought they were the corporate savior.
WebOS had a native development kit in addition to the web one.
They were way ahead of the game with stuff like wireless charging and the SoC was cutting-edge for its time with fast (1.2GHz, but the chip was designed to run at 1.5GHz and overclocking to 1.8-2GHz was not too hard) partially OoO dual cores and 128-bit SIMD instead of 64-bit like A9 paired with a good LCD. The UI as shipped was already ahead of its time and if you look around for the cancelled Mocha UI, I think it would look pretty modern even today.
The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a very rapid pace. The CPU was fast compared to everyone else, but it was still slow and they needed to focus on performance a bit more.
> they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps.
It’s not enough to be as good as the competition when they already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories. To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive downside.
This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered. Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged them.
Yeah, we all know that a corrupt person in government is often sponsored by a corporation to rip off the government. I wonder if sometimes a corrupt person is put into leadership at Corporation A who is really on the take from Corporation B with the job of wrecking a competitor.
this does happen: Imagine company B poached staff from A, presumaby for'insights' into company A IP, which had nothing to do with costly decisions and some missteps of unknown causes whereafter A os still in business and B? not so much. seems like a plotline by Sun Tsu
I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design.
We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind.
Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market instead of the adoring consumer market that Palm had collected.
I had a WebOS phone in a lot of ways it was better than my friend's iPhone at the time. Having a fold out keyboard was still the industry standard but he's typing on a screen keyboard. Overall, it was faster and more ergonomic, especially the on the tiny iPhone screen. I was forced to switch to iPhone because of HP's decision.
Nothing about this makes any sense. We’ve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and realize it’s all a ploy to sell you his fancy new equivalent to a self-help book, which you can tell is legit because its name is a forced acronym. Can we take this off the front page please?
I think it is better to be charitable. I think he does genuinely believe what he wrote is what happened. His PDF book is free and Creative Commons.
There could be many reasons he waited this long. Maybe he waited until he was retired and would not face blowback. Maybe he just has some free time.
It is very plausible that WebOS could have been an equal peer to iOS and Android.
CEOs have killed off projects that might have been great commercial successes while perusing short term gains.
In a decade's time we might hear a story from inside ATI or AMD how they killed off their chance of beating CUDA for short term gains.
They had the whole stack in house. os, hardware, firmware, app store infra, even global retail. nobody external blocking them. and they still killed it in 49 days. you can’t build dev trust in 7 weeks. the platform wasn't given time to breathe. this was failure of patience more than product
> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS.
Is this actually the case?
I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
The same day they shut down WebOS, all the unsold hardware was cut to fire-sale prices. TouchPad was $99, and they sold out everywhere at that price.
I bought 2 at the time, sold one and used the other for a while. The hardware didn't feel as nice as the iPad 2, but it was serviceable. The software was neat and the card metaphor arguably is still more sensible than iOS/iPadOS of today. I can't see any way that HP could've been more than a distant 3rd place behind iOS/Android, but it would've been fun to see them try.
Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards)
Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset
> 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.
> I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS.
That’s basically what I meant. Albeit that I was emphasising that people are also happy with something that wasn’t iOS / Android if the price was right.
Right, but HP hadn't figured out how to make and sell profitable $99 10" tablets, they had figured out how to wash their hands of unsold inventory of $500 tablets that people didn't want. They had no moat in selling cheap tablets because as soon as the hardware became affordable enough to do it for a profit anyone else could have too.
You say that but HP already have an established and mature supply chain for hardware which, isn’t common. And particularly with portable drives like laptops and PDAs. HP were in better position to capitalise than you claim with your “anyone” comment.
Their “$500 tablet” could be easily dropped to $100 because it wasn’t a particularly high end device to begin with. I mean, it did have some niceties. But there was also a hell of a lot of corners cut too.
Ironically, this was the same problem Palm faced with its WebOS phones before they sold to HP. Their phones were nice but they felt far too sluggish and basic considering their price point. I actually wanted a WebOS phone but ended up with Android (likely HTC) because you got so much more for your money.
Given HP (and Palm) has experience building portable devices like PDAs, there really isn’t any excuse for their failing in price and hardware for the WebOS tablets and phones. They already had experience in this market so should have really known better.
I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could use iPad 1 cases with the TouchPad and everything fit nicely and worked.
Apple sued Samsung over the shape of their phones. I think it's at least plausible that Apple and HP's legal departments had some discussions about the TouchPad which remain under NDA to this day.
WebOS was so far ahead of it's time in terms of usability and features in the default applications that it's hard to imagine someone dense enough to opt out of owning the mobile platform over the next several decades voluntarily.
But I can imagine an emergency operation to avoid all out legal warfare with Cupertino.
Touchpad had rounded edges vs the sharp aluminum ones on the ipad. Touchpad was visibly shorter and the corners were much more rounded.
If there were a real reason here, it would be that the iPad 2 launched in March 2011. When Touchpad launched 3-4 months later, it was twice as thick with worse battery life and a lot fewer apps were available while it had more bugs.
I think this was the real reason.
HP could have overcome all of these issues if they'd just given the hardware/software teams more time to finish the software and make thinner hardware.
The could have been a big player in the phone, tablet, TV, and even laptop market if they'd stuck with it.
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.
Those differences are precisely why suing wouldn't be possible. Apple barely won against Samsung and they were claiming not only the hardware design (where almost every element was ripped off), but also that Samsung copied Apple software design too.
In my opinion, Touchpad's different edges, corners, and radically different software meant HP wasn't likely to get sued.
That's funny because I see it exactly the opposite. Apple won against Samsung despite Samsung's phone seeming no more similar to Apple's than the Touchpad was to an iPad. Industry watchers at the time were flabbergasted that anyone would sue over a curved edge, and that Apple who had defended itself in lawsuits over similarly trite details in the past would do so. Wins tend to embolden.
It's well documented that mobile is a minefield of lawsuits seemingly aimed not so much at winning as at establishing cross-licensing agreements to mitigate the massive patent warchests of established players. A practice Apple has proven to be adept at. Just entering the mobile space carries a near 100% chance of getting sued by everyone else already occupying it.
You can be of the opinion that something isn't worthy of a lawsuit. Doesn't mean one won't happen. In my humble experience, any pretense can be sufficient. And this one has seemed likely to me since 2011.
I learned about webOS in an unusual way, by writing exploits for a 2019 LG TV.
Something that became apparent even from this vantage point, was that a) the core platform was very solid and nice to work with b) the developers working on product features seemed largely unaware of point a). I assume that when webOS changed hands repeatedly, tons of institutional knowledge about how to actually use it got lost along the way (particularly in the security department). Unfortunate.
I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.
“Why I still believe in HP”… why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since they’ve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. I’ll be it’s bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).
I owned and loved a few palm pilots (and a handspring visor) but Palm was a nostalgia brand already by 2010.
In the proto-smartphone years they were competing with blackberry and losing in that "business-phone" use case. (Treo phones, etc) Maybe they got burned by the Palm VIIx! :)
DangerOS (sidekick phones) came out and had killer games and even Windows CE had a few devices out there, with Palm integrations iirc.
The year HP bought palm - 2010 - had the Android Nexus One and the venerable iPhone 4! HP never had a chance.
RIM (blackberry) was the only one who ever had a (distant) chance at a 3rd player in the smartphone universe at that time.
Can’t really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really could’ve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV I’ve had since.
I know tech people like to villainize bean counters for ruining tech companies, but this man has zero business sense and needs a good bean counter. It's crazy that he thinks people will read this and feel like he was in the right with his business decisions. There is no timeline where HP tablets beat out iOS, Android, and Windows because WebOS had good multitasking.
I’m not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so. Maybe it’s the “LinkedIn”-friendly prose. Maybe it’s the “lessons learned” which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it isn’t this guy at all and is just my general frustration with modern big tech that bleeds its customers and abruptly dismisses products, projects, and employees to buoy its stock price.
But my gut reaction after reading was “what a bunch of self-serving nonsense”.
From “they needed me to babysit the CEO and board” to “I still believe in HP despite destroying 1.2 billion in value while I was on an 8-week break” to “the DECIDE framework”, it’s a masterclass of modern tech executive bloviation. They are always so confident and convincing as they explain their cognitive dissonance, preaching to audiences stuck in the same reality-distorting game. The tech market is a mess because these same types are utterly paralyzed over the path forward now that LLMs have emerged but full of so many words to explain how they have it all figured out.
But this guy insists it isn't his fault. He was just unlucky that he wasn't there to be the beacon of reason their leadership needed:
> Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision." Think about the implications of that statement. HP's own technical staff, the people closest to our innovation work, believed that senior leadership couldn't be trusted to make sound technology decisions without someone there to provide oversight and guidance. They weren't wrong. The numbers proved it in the most painful way possible.
Hollywood-grade drama and warning sirens all around, but a few paragraphs later…
> Despite watching the WebOS disaster unfold, despite being blamed for not preventing it, despite everything that went wrong during that period, I still believe in HP as an organization.
Mercy. The author thinks he's provided an apology to explain his culpability in the failures of the Palm acquisition but, instead, he's just made it clear he has awful judgement.
HP is far, far away from the once-great version of itself. For example, once they achieved dominance, HP ensh*ttified their printer business beyond any reasonable tolerance level to squeeze every last dollar out of its customers. They abandoned all pretense of technical excellence or innovation or customer satisfaction and embraced dark patterns to please their MBA masters.
Like so many of their peers, they see their employees as headcount and their customers as vassals.
That’s the type of decision-making HP values. That's the type of company HP is. And this guy, his excuses, and his experience are a shining example of why.
HP had been making bad decision after bad decision for a while long before this happened. HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware, etc. There was clearly nobody who cared about the user experience at all. It made Apple's job very easy.
yeah, this whole post feels super revisionist to me - HP was a bad company making bad decisions and awful consumer technology products for a long time before the touchpad disaster. everybody knew HP buying palm was going to be the death of palm.
I would make the argument that they run a much better PC business now than they did back then.
Back then they had a rough reputation on product quality, while now I’d say they are the premier high volume brand with a pretty difficult to beat value proposition. They have a wide range of products where none of them are miserable.
If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
The device was always doomed. They launched a direct competitor to the iPad with maybe 10% of the functionality. This article is just hubris on the CTO's part ("if only I had been around for the launch instead of my incompetent team, everything would have worked out").
One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough to be independent of the phone ecosystem.
The CTO here proudly says he convinced the board to buy Palm and get into the tablet market but just thinking about this even lightly i'm not sure it was wrong for the CEO (and subsequently CTO) to be kicked out for this move. It's weird there's no hubris on this. A tablet market without re-use of a larger markets app ecosystem seems like poor strategic thinking to me.
> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.
What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit since then.
Android has unfortunately trended the opposite direction - apps that once had tablet UIs dropped them in favour of big phone UIs as they did redesigns around 2016-2020. I dropped out of the Android tablet world in 2019 for a Windows tablet, and most recently went for an iPad this year, so maybe Android has recovered ground there, but judging by how few Android tablets are actually on the market, I wouldn't be hopeful.
I don't use either of those services so I was unaware. So I guess there are still some apps out there without a proper iPad interface. I haven't encountered any in at least a decade though and they seem to be in the minority. Apple has gone to great lengths to make it easy to at least make something that fits on the iPad even if you don't try to make it properly native and use the screen real estate effectively. So that strikes me as laziness on the part of the Instagram and Bluesky app developers to not even try.
One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying notifications or annoying popups to access privacy violating features [1], without adding clutter to an already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look the same, etc.
[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...
I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps because, well, they require an internet connection too often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is typically stored on their servers, after all).
With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.
Your overall point might be correct, but some of your specifics are incorrect:
>Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.
None of the apps I am using on my iPad have borders/sidebars.
Gmail and Youtube have long had dedicated iPad apps. DeepSeek has one (a well designed and implemented one) for interacting with its chat service. The last time I checked, Google Gemini had only an iPhone app, but I checked again today and found a full-fledged iPad app.
Even my credit union, which operates only in California and does not have any physical branches in Southern California, has a full-fledged iPad app.
HP also shipped two Palm phone devices with webOS, Veer and Pre 3. They would have been more than able to create a complete mobile (and consumer electronic!) ecosystem.
Had the iPad not launched immediately opposite it, I can envision a world where HP goes through two or three revisions and has a solid device with it's own "personality" much like how Microsoft has their "Surface" line of glued-together tablets and "laptops" which sorta compete with the iPad and Macbook Air even if they hardly market them. The fact that Microsoft eventually succeeded in the space seems to indicate HP could have as well. I can see the business case where the new CEO isn't interested in rubber stamping a new product line that's going to lose money for him every quarter for the next three years against the glowing sun that is the iPad. There are better ways to burn political capital as a C level.
The thing with Windows tablets and Android tablets is in both cases the software development only has to justify its net increase in spend over just doing phone apps, but since HP didn't have a good market of phone apps to begin with, they'd basically need to justify the entire software development cost, on lower sales.
Taking the story at face value, the issue isn't necessarily delegation. If the C-suite is making a decision and one of their primary people (CTO in this case) is absent, it almost doesn't matter who he delegates to. The delegated individual is not their peer, so whatever they say will be discounted. I've been in that situation (as the delegated individual) several times. It's frustrating. Even if they respect you, you don't get a vote in the final decision.
* 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 very much feels like a path not taken in mobile technology, it really was slick to use, even though as this fella mentioned it wasnt polished in terms of what was released.
Palm is the Xerox in mobile era. Back then, It’s obviously better than Android, which is not a complete OS in any sense of quality standard. It’s even better than iOS in many technical specifications. HP flop could be one of the worst disasters in computing history.
I remember the day the WebOS tablet came out. I saw stanchions outside of a mobile phone store, with staff waiting for people to show up. No one was there. I had never heard any buzz about WebOS beforehand, and clearly no one else had either.
I have to agree with the sentiment here that the launch was botched, but I also agree with McKinney's assessment that it was killed prematurely. The market for mobile / tablet is huge, and there was plenty of time to "catch up." Perhaps the tablet was launched prematurely; and instead the launch should have focused on app developers?
> On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0.
> While Apple was selling 9 million iPads that same quarter, TouchPads were gathering dust on store shelves.
Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?
I was fully "in" on webOS :( Still got a Palm Pre, Pre 2, Pre 3 and TouchPad in a box, and an LG webOS 2.0 OLED that died in the basement.
Apps were built sort of like PhoneGap, but intentional and supported rather than a middleware work-around. webOS introduced the card concept that we all use now, along with a very coherent design language, and the devices were cool (to me, albeit a bit flimsy) with full keyboards (I was super sold on that but have long-since changed my mind after switching to iOS).
I came from a long line of "alt" devices though, Sidekick 1, 2, 3, Helio Ocean, etc, so you can see where my sensibilities lie HAHAHA
I would also get freakin' roasted by literally everybody I knew every time they saw it for being a hold-out and not getting an iPhone, but iOS just wasn't there yet as far as I was concerned. Apple/Android hadn't cornered the market yet and it was just a time with a lot of options (Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc).
Anyways, when I heard HP was buying Palm (and AT&T did a deal for Pre 3 exclusivity, I think), I assumed it would be a great thing for the mass adoption of what seemed like a really exciting future for mobile. Then HP poured gasoline on it and killed it with fire.
I still miss my Palm Pre. I've sat here since it died and watched Android and iOS slowly adopt the UI that my Pre had 15 years ago. We were swapping between apps with cards and swiping them away a decade before anyone else.
I had multiple friends end up buying the Pre and the non-slidey Pre (I can't remember the name) because they saw what I had thought it was so cool.
Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no shared code, but who knows.
> 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
worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important companies in the world—comparable to what Microsoft or Google are today. A true tech and market leader.
First, HP bought Compaq to gain full ownership of the home computer market. That merger didn’t work out very well. Later, HP acquired Ross Perot’s EDS, attempting to enter the services business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several years.
It was a time of turmoil—every other morning you’d receive an email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of employees.
Hurd’s focus was on increasing the company’s share value. He aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HP’s strongest traditions), essentially putting HP on life support. For example, HP-UX, which was relevant in the server market at the time, was completely abandoned.
When Mark Hurd was fired—accused of using company funds to give gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)—he immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HP’s strongest competitors in the enterprise market at the time. Employees saw him as a traitor to the HP brand. Internally, many people hoped things would finally change.
What came next was completely unexpected. Leo Apotheker, from SAP, took over. He had this idea of transforming HP into a software and services company, essentially abandoning decades of tradition and letting one of the strongest brands in the industry fade away. He lasted only a few months—it clearly wasn’t working.
Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a hardware project called “The Machine,” which was supposed to revolutionize the data center by relying on memory instead of CPU power. That was never released. AWS had already emerged, and HP had no way to compete.
Whitman decided to split the company in two: HP (consumer hardware) and HP Enterprise Services (enterprise hardware and services). HP-ES eventually migrated most of its operations to India. Around that time, I accepted a WFR (Workforce Reduction) plan—since it was clear I’d be laid off sooner or later. Later, HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.
It’s incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest brands in the world—a tech giant and market leader for decades—went to hell in just three or four years. Bad management, a focus on short-term share price, and a complete lack of vision can bring even the most powerful company to its knees.
At the time, many said HP was simply too big for its own good, that it was impossible to succeed in so many markets. I don’t think that’s true. Amazon, Microsoft, Google—they all do what HP did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management. As always.
The top level comments here question his judgement, are incredulous to the 49 days of unraveling, and wonder what relation his emergency surgery had to the fail of launch.
I also wonder how it was possible that the product lacked polish, was priced at XX, lacked an ecosystem, and he was not there to fix any of this in the months that led up to the launch which was immediately after his surgery.
But my insight into his words tells me the following:
1. leadership changed
2. stewardship was out-of-service for 8 weeks
3. new leadership worked on a different vision.
4. new leadership made immediate decisions.
5. new leadership canceled the product because it did not have strong advocacy and stewardship of the product.
6. new leadership did not walk back their cancelation once stewardship returned.
7. momentum for improving the product collapsed.
8. trust for hp collapsed.
9. steward blames leadership! for cancelling the product. talks trash about Leo.
What are the lessons here for this perfect storm? Don't have just one steward.
After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for £109. The software was decent for the time, and nowhere near as terrible as other comments make out.
If it had worked out, it might have altered the current landscape in positive ways. For instance, if they contributed significantly back to Qt this might have affected the linux desktop situation?
> 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.
> When I decided to “retire” from HP, they offered me a separation bonus—a significant financial package that would have made my transition easier. But there was a catch: accepting it would have restricted what I could say publicly about my experiences at the company.
> SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.
ouch. this is actually pretty cool though in terms of putting SAP vs HP in perspective, which i've never considered prior.
In 2008 or 2009 Palm still had enough relevant legacy apps that they could have convinced me to stay with WebOS, but launching a tablet (no phone) in 2010. Forget it!
That shop has sailed and youre not onboard!
By 2010, you were either android/java or ios/ObjC. If they really wanted to present an alternative platform they should have been giving away those 200k tablets and a compiler/sdk to cs majors. They werent! It was a half hearted effort. Acquisition was probably to bail out board members with palm stock with a buyout.
I remember looking at palm webos devices in 2010 and thinking this is cool. The docs on how things worked were really good for the time. The hardware was sleek palm pre if I remember correctly.
I was not keeping track of who bought whom at the time an why. But was surprised when webos got shut down. Android was gaining traction windows mobile on the way out. I bought an old Nokia e63 around the time because I was short on money and I loved the keyboard. The article gave me some nice nostalgic memories.
This guy sounds out of touch on several dimensions... There is something about folks who spend a very long time in a declining business. Their world view seems to diverge from reality.
When I think about HP as a software & services company, I think about the times I booked Disney vacations in the 2010s. The Disney web site for managing your reservations, looking at park attraction wait times, etc., was usually painfully slow, and the bottom of every page proudly featured the HP logo.
It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.
Apotheker had made the discontinuation choice without even informing the Palm team beforehand
Is this how big decisions are made in big companies? Or is this an exception? 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 was there and it’s true. Another point that people forget was the Head/CEO of Palm (which was an independent subsidiary) at the time was Jon Rubinstein who was head of software at NeXT and Apple.
I’m pretty sure the decisions were made before he was consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was dysfunctional.
After getting it on a very good sale I used and loved the Touchpad tablet for years despite some shortcomings. Primarily to visit this site actually. WebOS was gorgeous, innovative and smooth. Matías Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
I really wanted a Palm Pre back in the day, but they initially didn't offer them at all outside of the US, and later only in a handful of other countries. It seemed like they weren't even trying. The tablet saw wider distribution, but it was a joke - nobody was going to pay iPad prices for a plastic piece of crap.
Failure or not I have to say thank you to this guy. This left Jeff Hawkins with a substantial personal fortune which he went on to use to found Numenta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and none of that would have been possible without that acquisition.
Seems like the real goal was to kill it so the market could consolidate under iPhone. Internal sabotage. Now Apple is killing themselves pushing bad UI decisions and getting paid off to insert back doors into Messages someone can control the public narrative as we enter another war.
Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4 introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1] describes it:
"To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g. iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the previous app relaunches it."
"In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and you’ve just “multitasked” in iOS 4."
Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose context in either app because they restarted. The OS was structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.
(In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either way.)
Prior to true multitasking on iOS, Apple would tell you to tag view controllers for preservation so that when your app launches, the OS will restore the original view controllers, as if the app has been running the whole time. Old documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles...
(These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away from an app in a minute and upon switching back I'm back at the app's home screen.)
w.r.t. few apps caring about state, I recently upgraded my phone, which I had been using for a while and did not realize was a 2021 model, basically solely because at 4GB of RAM, I was getting to the point that I couldn't switch between any two apps without them all totally restarting on every switch because I was out of RAM all the time. I was also just starting to notice the battery was going but I could have managed that for a while yet... I really upgraded just for the RAM.
(Also I had to reset the built-in camera to factory state and tell it to stop updating, because it couldn't even start with my phone's RAM anymore. Weird thing is I can't tell you what it was doing any better than the stock factory version.)
But on, ahem, a "real" phone, it is nice to just assume that either I'm still swapped in, or the user doesn't care anymore. It's not quite 100% accurate, but it's pretty close, and low-effort for the app developer who doesn't have to be guessing any more about what state is and is not important.
This is true - and WebOS was legitimately innovative here. At the time neither iOS nor Android could run more than one app at the same time. This was both an architectural matter and a UX matter.
On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back then RAM was in short enough supply that more often than not the memory state of the process was dumped to disk instead.
There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.
But the app executable was totally suspended during this time.
Whereas on WebOS the UX was oriented around showing multiple "Cards"[1] at the same time, but each one represented a live running process that was able to interact to the user and render new UI.
This was a pretty big deal at the time.
Since then both iOS and Android gained a lot more capability and nuance around multitasking.
To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great.
That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".
One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a completely different userspace that what we had in desktop OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works" aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.
Windows CE is quite internally different than Windows NT. It still does support multitasking, but kernel version 5 (which was on all the CE devices of the late 2000's/early 2010's) had a maximum of 32 processes. It was a platform specifically for embedded use, though the GUI was styled to resemble Windows OSes at the time and of course numerous Microsoft things were ported over.
Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to 10 were NT based.
Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29. 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.
> 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.)
+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it.
Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.
The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".
And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)
My recollection was that the N900 battery lasted about a full day of normal use. Maybe two but it was a dice roll. That was pretty much on par with other smartphones on the market. IIRC the main thing android and iOS were doing was shutting down apps to save memory. But perhaps I saved a ton of battery by not buying a data plan? At the time, I had wifi at home and work, and a 100 dollar a year prepaid cell plan.
And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being something close to the home / back on screen button android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast, or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the switcher.
But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store launch was so botched that it was basically dead on arrival. The microusb port sucks.
Elop refused to launch the Nokia N9 in ANY of their primary markets. He refused to advertise the phone AT ALL.
Despite that, the phone sold several million devices and people were paying huge premiums (often $200-400 over price) to get it shipped from these secondary markets to where they lived.
The demand was there and Elop decided to kill it anyway. He also never released the second phone required by their Meego contract with Intel as I recall.
> That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".
The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2 "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user features under the hood.
> 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.
So classic they still use it! iOS now offers a lot more multitasking options, but for the most part when you swipe away from an app it's still good ol' Mr. Screenshot.
And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is being done still to make this even more seamless. For example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to define UIs, because rendering such UIs can be done by the OS outside of the app process.
This means you can have an actual live UI while the actual app process is suspended. They literally don't have to wake the process until you tap on a button.
It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can define a much more coarse-grained idea of "alive" without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.
1. WebOS lives on (purchased from HP) or at least a version of it on LG TVs.
2. Matra: End users don't care about the OS. End users don't care the OS. (or most all the technical aspects Engineers value)
End Users only care whether the product does something they want - make toast, listen to music, prevent stds etc. Jobs shipped products that solved actual problems - desktop publishing, listening to music, making a phone call. They solved other problems also but shipping a product that might one day solve a problem is not a product category.
Yeah, I am pretty confident I was able to keep apps running in the background on my T-Mobile G1 and some old forum posts I found seem to confirm my memory. [1] Multitasking/keeping apps in background and copy/paste were the big differentiators I remember on the first Android phones compared to the iPhone.
The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at all.
It had apps as cards to easily switch between them, useful animations and a completely working gesture control. It was absolutely revolutionary and having to fall back to Android after that was a big step down, until Android incorporated everything from webOS a few years later.
He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by the hype around the fire sale and how many people really liked them then.
I thought proper Android task switching didn’t come until they released the first tablet version (Honeycomb, 2011). Interestingly enough this was after they hired away the webOS UX lead (Matias Duarte)
I think the author of the article really misses the point here. While "true multitasking" might be a neat technical feature, it's not something that the end user really cares about or would base a buying decision on, especially if running multiple apps in the background at the same time came at the expense of battery life. Those early versions of iOS employed a lot of tricks to squeeze performance and battery life out of underpowered devices.
WebOS is not PalmOS based. Your experience is not applicable.
I actually own a discount touchpad. It was snappy as hell, promised to at some point have the Android app store, and could easily be jail broken by design. The software ecosystem was not even bad - my basic needs were all met.
The UI was slick feeling, like an Apple product, but the exterior finish was plasticy and more like an Android device. Battery life was incredible compared to Android devices of the time.
All in all, I really liked it. What might have been!
Are you perhaps thinking of the classic Palm OS on a PalmPilot or whatever, which was limited because it was designed in the '90s for '90s hardware? That was dead by the time HP bought Palm, they were onto Palm WebOS, a modern (for the day) Linux / web app based OS on the Palm Pré and Pixi devices.
I remember thinking it was awesome to be able to ssh from my palm treo on the go 20 years ago - not all the PalmOS (different from WebOS) apps were crap, especially for the time!
No sympathy from me. Guy was the CTO, probably making millions a year, and now he's whining about how a $1.2B investment failed on his watch and nothing was his fault? Sorry guy but you are the leader, you are responsible.
The fall of WebOS (like BeOS) makes me wonder if the tech world is primed for duopolies. Somehow I feel there are parallels in Windows/Linux, Java/.Net, React/Vue etc.
The entire section on bad decision making only deals with the decisions to ultimately kill the product. How would Mr McKinney deal with the decisions that led to releasing a product so rushed and so poorly priced than it initially sold fewer than 10% of the units shipped to retailers? At least some of these decisions (and implementations) must have been made by teams who he had underseen during his extensive due diligence.
I remember when that was happening. Autonomy boasted a few flagship products around enterprise search and CMS. Products I was very familiar with as an implementer. Products that well and truly sucked even back in the early days when they didn't have a ton of competition. By 2011 they were losing customers. Even without seeing their balance sheet, the $10B price tag just felt it had to be a huge mistake.
i loved the touchpad. it was def priced too high and when it dropped i bought some for my family. the OS was really nice and they really should have toughed it out and iterated more.
"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).
Come on, nothing had a chance to compete with the iPhone in 2011. By then Apple had released iPhone 5 (edit iPhone4S), a slick & snappy device with robust app ecosystem that everyone wanted (but most could not afford). There was no place for high end players.
Regardless of that CTOs ability to integrate HP and Palm, whatever they would build, it would be DOA. Unless if they tried to compete with the cheap android devices and race to the bottom for pennies at scale.
And the first WebOS device launched was not 2011, it was actually the Palm Pre in 2009. The iPhone 3G and the App Store were not even a year old when that Pre launched.
My dude such systemic problems can't be attributed to you being out of office. If a hurricane had hit hp headquarters you'd have been just about as responsible. Board made a decision, CEO made decisions, were they wrong? Possibly. What can one man do about it? Not much honestly, unless you own the shares.
Let me completely absolve myself from my role in destroying a beloved company, unload the blame on everyone else around me, then plug my business framework.
HP specialised in snatching Defeat from the very jaws of Victory, always after the elusive $cow and all they get is hate. They have made some tries at additive printing = high end $$. They have had some success in that far from consumer field - but it does not impinge on me.
Seems you were not chasing the launch enough. I've been guilty of that before, missing the development of a demo that was meant to be presented to big clients. You may wanna explore why you lacked commitment and drive for the development.
It wouldn’t matter. By 2010, tge iPhone 4 was out. iOS 4 allowed enough multitasking to be useful as far as most people cared about. Apple had manufacturing capabilities that Palm could only dream about via its Chinese supply chain. It had the app ecosystem. physical Apple stores, carrier relationships, marketing, the iPhone 4 was already a status symbol in China.
If MS couldn’t break into the mobile market, Palm definitely didn’t have a chance.
It is amusing how mainstream media's coverage of Apotheker's firing is opposite to what the author says regarding his attitude towards webOS:
> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.
Palm had the worst combination, the monolithic hardware/software approach of Apple but without the branding and services to make that approach a desirable platform.
Imagine using a Motorola Droid without the services and app ecosystem provided by Google Android and oh wait, the sterile corporate branding only a dinosaur like HP could provide.......lovely.
Watching your brainchild deteriorate when there's physically nothing you can do sounds stressful, especially something you believe could've saved your company. At the same time, I don't think he wants to admit that there never really was anything he could've done.
How would a slightly cheaper Palm compete with Android? It would've been like a pretty Zune.
He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?
He refused the exit package so that he had the option of talking about his experience at the company. It's not like he is compelled to.
Maybe he talked about it plenty in private conversations immediately afterwards, or semi-publicly throughout the years, and you just haven't been privy to those conversations.
Some people, on principle alone, will refuse to sign these sorts of NDAs even if they never plan to talk, simply so they have the ability to do so if they want to in the future.
- 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?
"I nobly refused these golden handcuffs so that well down the road I could continue huffing the farts of a company that is a shell of its former self. Don't let your eyes deceive you - they're still a powerhouse. Buy my book."
I went from a college dropout waiter to small town successful startup founder to Google, and Google somewhere between 3-5x'd my comp. I left, after 7 years, due to some nasty stuff.
It's hard to explain and I don't understand fully myself, yet, but there's a point where more money isn't worth some sort of principle you have, and it's a lot lower than I would have thought.*
In their case, I'd imagine having the unencumbered ability to talk (i.e. not needing to worry if HP would come crying if he got a job at Apple and did an interview for Fortune someday) would be worth more than whatever a severance package was on top of years and years of 6-7 figure comp.
This would be especially paramount if you felt current management was completely misguided on decisions you were involved, they were doing the standard corpo forceout maneuver, and you couldn't say anything yet because the #1 qualification for CXO jobs is a history of placing nice / dumb when needed.
* reminder to self: this is also probably the purest answer to my Noogler fascination with how high turnover was, given the company approximated paradise to my eye at that time
Author admits he held (and still holds) a lot of HP shares. Had he spoken out back then after the fiasco, HP's stock price would have tanked further. He'd be cutting down his own wealth unnecessarily, in addition to harming his prospects at the peak of his career.
Today he is probably past his corporate ambitions, and has a good personal relationship with current HP leadership. There is little to no harm getting it out now.
The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.
HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft.
Now you have two HPs:
- HPE, pretty much a shell of a company. Maintainers of HP-UX, (former) maker of Itanium servers and caretaker of Cray (but also the company that seems to have misplaced the Irix source code).
- HP, Maker of shitty printer products and expensive toner.
How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?
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.
Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.
True, both are solid networking companies in my opinion. Juniper is already slipping on support and pricing though, and we'll be replacing all our Juniper gear starting this summer.
Simple. The execs steal all the innovative IP, start new ventures, drain HP dry with its encredible decision making; completely fuck the Linux devs, use their works and contributions to OSS in the new ventures and then new waves of innovation/competition came about and what was settled upon was whatever looked profitable on quarterlies so servers, and printers.
I'm not saying that's what happened. But, it's a capitalistic type world.
I wonder how many companies had this play out? IBM is another famous example of internal rot of engineering excellence in the 2000s as the business shell was gives fresh coats of paint and varnish.
Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can easily find it using the same button on your android phone you used to use for quick access to emergency services.
We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI?
What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI.
A lot of companies get this process and ideology about how things work ... and that's it, no matter what the business conditions they can't do anything different. Every department and every possible person who would approve or deny something is set in their ways.
It is not specific to HP, but to the top management style of that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these are the companies that are on top today.
There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).
It's pretty easy to pattern-match LLM writing even when there's been a lot of work put into it, and it wasn't one-shotted by the LLM.
I bring this up because this is a very smart person, with an interesting story I've been waiting to hear for years, and an important point, but I couldn't read it.
Not because LLMs were involved: whatever, that's fine.
First, I'm reading then get an uneasy feeling when I see the "That wasn't X—it was Y.", which is a tell of GPT 4o at chatgpt.com or 4.1 on API. [^1 for sentences that got my attention]
Then, as I'm reading, I keep getting a weird "attention reset" buzz and I find it hard to follow. I note that there are no less than 15 sections, each 3-5 paragraphs. This is / was unnatural in writing. 0 flow.
Tips I'm taking away for myself:
- Actively read for "snappy" sentences from the LLM, and then actively eschew them -- you can't be familiar with every LLM's tells, but here, I'd try to notice the repeat structure in a completely different, and the cadence of the phrase ("snappy", in my verbiage)
- Marketing-type writing is best helped by an LLM if you can get it to give you individual feedback items that you have to address, or at least, a set of suggestions. Code works well with LLMs because the metastructure doesn't communicate meaning to a reader, there isn't "flow": in prose, the way the text was assembled can be betrayed by the structure.
[^1]
A) "This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch"
B) "This wasn't about buying a struggling phone company—it was our strategic entry into the future of computing platforms"
Agreed - I'm not surprised, hell, at this point...it is time for me to announce that I have adopted the position that I'm surprised and saddened if you don't use an LLM, at all, when putting something out into the world.
When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.
The pattern sticks out to me, to the point where I have a directive in my LLM conversations, telling it to never to use "It's not just X—it's Y." So, I'm with you on this!
> We knew the computing world was shifting toward mobile, and our traditional PC business faced real threats from tablets and smartphones. We needed to be there.
This right here is already game over. Unless they were the ones making the tablets and smartphones and being the threats to everyone else, they had lost at this point one way or another.
That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted from that price tag and expected immediate results without years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change also didn't help apparently.
I'd say this attitude is more common than many realize. Some seem to think "being in the game" is the thing. It's not just acquisitions - it's half assed investment in product lines. You have to win.
It isn’t game over, but the path to success clearly wasn’t to buy another company and release a product (that was probably already in the queue) only a year later.
If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms.
Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who's developed apps will point out that you shoudn't spend too much time on the tablet version. Just add some borders/sidebars and ship it. The markets not big enough to do more and the tablets are only viable today thanks to re-use of the phone hardware and software ecosystems.
Nokia sold millions of N9 despite zero advertising and Elop refusing to sell it in any of Nokia's primary markets (people were paying big money to import it). Despite that success, he refused to allow another non-Windows phone to be released
It absolutely could have been a huge success if Elop hadn't gone out of his way to kill it.
> "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.
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.
> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points having different predicted ranges!).
Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...
(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right!
(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.
Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too.
So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
Opteron was a much bigger deal than you're making it sound. Market share was up to 25%.
But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.
> As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.
That's one way to explain it. Alternatively, one might say that FSB-based Netburst servers would not benefit much from multi-core because the architecture (and especially FSB) has hit its limitation. Arguably, Intel had no competitive product on the mass server market until 2006 and Core-based Xeon 5100 introduction. Only enormous market inertia has kept them afloat.
> In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s.
That was one relatively small (servers number-wise) segment of the market. Introduction of Opteron servers and Windows Server 2003 64-bit has created a new segment of mass 64-bit servers which have very quickly taken over entire 32-bit (at that time) mass server market. That was the real market that Intel wanted for themselves with introduction of proprietary Itanium but failed to acquire it because of the compatibility issue. High-end mainframe-adjacent market segment indeed belonged to Itanium for many years after, but that wasn't the goal of Itanium. Intel wanted to be a monopoly on the entire PC&server market with no cross-licensing agreements but failed and had to cross-license AMD64 instead.
It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.
I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.
> 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.
There are trillions of dollars on the line in convincing people not to buy solar panels or other renewable sources.
Remember all the conspiracy theories about how someone invented a free energy machine and the government had to cover it up? Well they're actually true - with the caveat that the free energy machine only works in direct sunlight.
How often are they reality distortion fields vs leadership trying to put on a face to rally the troops and investors? How do you do the second without the first?
Something I ponder from time to time, while trying to figure out how to be less of a cynic and more of a leader.
The IEA's purpose is to boost fossil fuels + nuclear?
> Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting
Explain Amazon, Uber, Spotify, Tesla, and other publicly listed businesses that had low or even negative profit margins for many years.
The idea that Wall Street only rewards short term profit margins is laughable considering who is at the top of the market cap rankings.
The section of my comment you quoted directly addresses this! Wall Street can be convinced by a compelling story.
one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how similar the colors of each year was making it very difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the chart was still clear though
Holy cow was that forecast bad!
It reminds me of a meeting long ago where the marketing team reported that oil was going to hit $400/bbl and that this would be great for business. I literally laughed out loud. At that price, gasoline would be about $18/gal and no one could afford to move anything except by ox cart.
> 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)
> by buying more expensive cars
Not to mention less efficient cars.
Not to mention, cars.
How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.
The price of gas isn't immediately and directly impacted by the price of crude because of futures contracts. This naturally means gas prices will move to match the price of crude over time. It's a feature of the current system, not an indication that the price of gas isn't heavily reliant on gas. Nobody is making gas with spot prices.
> How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price?
I googled for a couple sources on the breakdown of the price of gasoline, and they seemed to be in agreement that the raw cost of crude is somewhere around half. (And broke refining out separately.)
I'm sure it's not perfect, but it seems fairly reasonable. (And it can be off by quite a lot and still not make a huge difference to the cost-per-km of driving.)
> How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price?
Look at gas prices in your area. Look at the price of crude. Divide.
How could you possibly not be able to estimate the fraction?
And yeah ideally you use an average number over some months and you sample the crude earlier than the gas but those are minor tweaks.
That's assuming the other costs (refining energy costs, transport, the company's gross margin) are uncorrelated to the price of crude oil, which seems unlikely
A) Just calculating the percentage doesn't assume that.
B) They shouldn't correlate by a particularly large amount in a competitive environment. For an approximation as rough as "half" and assuming no other changes it's not a big deal.
The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home heating and agriculture
I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode
Especially if you live were gas cost a buck twenty a liter
Well it's that high because of taxes, so if crude goes up the total price will go up proportionally less than places that have more of the gas cost comprised of non-taxes. (Some of the taxes are flat, and some get waived when gas gets expensive.)
Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment.
https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis.
https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf
'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
I’m curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I’m betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel’s compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a software vendor and later a computational research lab, and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least the equivalent gain back … or just buy an off-the-shelf system which performed well now and do literally anything else with your life.
One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.
I think you're right. The combination of open source and public clouds has really tended to reduce the dominance of specific hardware/software ecosystems, especially Wintel. Especially with the decline of CMOS process scaling as a performance lever, I expect that we'll see more heterogeneous computing in the future.
Nice insight, thank you.
> “You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?"
It’s comforting to know that massively strategic decisions based on very little information that may not even be correct are made in other organizations and not just mine.
Everybody does it. Information only comes because you made your strategic decision, never before it.
There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.
I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.
Well, yes, the market didn't care all that much for various reasons. (There were reasons beyond technology.) RHEL/GCC supported but, while I wasn't there at the time, I'm not sure how much focus there was. Other companies were hedging their bets on Itanium at the time--e.g. Project Monterey. Aside from Sun, most of the majors were placing Itanium bets to some degree if only to hedge other projects.
Even HP dropped it eventually. And the former CEO of Intel (who was CTO during much of the time Itanium was active) said in a trade press interview that he wished they had just done a more enterprisey Xeon--which happened eventually anyway.
We're not living through this again at all with generative AI, right?
A small boardroom locked in groupthink, misled by one single individual’s weak simulated benchmark, with no indication of real world performance or customer demand?
This form versus substance issue is a really deeply embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting worse.
Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.
Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.
IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.
I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.
The plan was to artificially suppress x86-64 to leave customers with no real alternative to Itanium. The early sales projections made sense under that assumption.
I had heard that it wasn't suppression as much as just not making it a thing at all, and that AMD used the opportunity to extend x86 to 64-bit, and Intel was essentially forced to follow suit to avoid losing more of the market. It also explains why the shorthand "amd64" is used; Intel didn't actually design x86_64 itself.
There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...
I have some very old servers that have the Pentium 4 architecture with amd64 capability.
I've still got a couple small business models along these lines that are over 20 years old now. Still running possibly because I always turn them fully off when not using them. No hibernation, sleep or other monkey business.
One Dell has an early 64-bit mainboard but only a 32-bit CPU in that socket, just fine for Windows XP and will also run W10 32-bit (slowly), mainly dual booting to Debian i386 now since it retired from office work. Puts out so much heat I would imagine there is a lot of bypassed silicon on the chip drawing power but not helping process. IIRC a 64-bit CPU for that socket was known to exist but was more or less "unobtanium".
Then a trusty HP tower with the Pentium D, which was supposedly a "double" with two x86 arch patterns on the same chip. This one runs everything x86 or AMD64, up until W11 24H2 where the roadblocks are unsurmountable.
To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was the legitimately better approach. There were certainly theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward--even if it had never been commercially successful in the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect it was a bit of both and different people at the company probably had different perspectives.
Internal inertia is a powerful thing. This was discussed at length on comp.arch in the late 1990's early 2000's by insiders like Andy Glew. When OoO started to dominate intel should have realized the risk, but they continued to cancel internal projects to extend x86 to 64-bits. Of which apparently there were multiple. Even then, the day that AMD announced 64-bit extensions and a product timeline it should have resulted in intel doing an internal about face and acknowledging what everyone knew (in the late 1990's) and quietly scuttling ia64 while pulling a backup x86 out of their pocket. But since they had killed them all, they were forced to scramble to follow AMD.
Intel has plenty of engineering talent, if the bean counters, politicians and board would just get out of the way they would come back. But instead you see patently stupid/poor execution like then still ongoing avx512 saga. Lakefield, is a prime example of WTFism showing up publicly. The lack of internal leadership is written as loud as possible on a product where no one had the political power to force the smaller core to emulate avx512 during the development cycle, or NAK a product where the two cores couldn't even execute the same instructions. Its an engineering POC probably being shopped to apple or someone else considering an arm big.little without understanding how to actually implement it in a meaningful way. Compared with the AMD approach which seems to even best the arm big.little by simply using the same cores process optimized differently to the same effect without having to deal with the problems of optimizing software for two different microarch.
Sophie Wilson (ARM instruction set designer) was very enthusiastic over her "Firepath" architecture that had VLIW aspects.
It was targeted at DSL modems, and I think the platform has faded and is now somewhat obscure.
https://royalsociety.org/people/sophie-wilson-12544/
https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc14...
Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement where they pay each other the right to use various IP. One of the things Intel pays AMD for is x86_64.
x86_64 patents have expired by now, so they do not in fact pay for them.
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.
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.
I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of accessories or the Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have their commission structure altered to benefit significantly more from each windows phone sale if this was ever to succeed. This is why iPhone competitors failed initially, the sales people took the path of least resistance and more money, just like most would.
Thanks for your story, I had no idea.
While I agree that Windows phone was actually quite nice, I wish they didn't have to kill Meego to make it by planting a mole CEO at Nokia.
If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.
The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be made in Finland. After that, and the whole brand licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones were made in China going forward. Such a shame.
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)
I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.
I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
I thought it was fascinating, agood value proposition, a necessary diversification of the market. I almost wonder just looking primarily at Google's example if a major key to success is just toughing it out and finding an identity and finding a niche in the early years. I feel like this could have been something meaningful and like the plug was pulled too quick. To keep going back to Amazon Prime which played the long long game before becoming kind of a flagship offering.
I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone
At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"
Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info
Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too
I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.
But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
The only Windows Phone people I know either worked for Microsoft, or were Microsoft superfans. (And the one friend who liked to just be a contrarian - this time he was right, but he's usually wrong)
I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of money porting apps to it over the years as well.
I bought one cheap at Costco as a travel phone, and I enjoyed using it enough to make it a daily driver once I got home.
In my case I was a Windows user for work and Linux fanboy at home. I just hated the android experience at the time (phone before my Lumia was the original Galaxy I think which was a piece of garbage) and enjoyed playing with a Lumia at the store.
We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a few years ago. I had never used one before but I was actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand now what it had it's fans.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees, most developers had already moved on and never gave Windows Phone another look.
It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
> When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees
Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...
To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/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.
I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.
Not to mention that when they moved to SDK 8, you could only develop from a Windows 8 machine, that famously popular OS. So many unforced errors, many seeming to stem from denial that Microsoft does not possess the Apple Reality Distortion Field
What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
Up until 2011 I was still using one of those Samsung phones with the slide out keyboard, maybe an Intensity II or something. My first smartphone was a Windows phone, an HTC Titan. I really liked the phone and the OS - I thought it was very well done. The only problem: the app store was complete shit. There were barely any apps and the ones that were there were trash barely discernible from malware.
After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.
WebOS was incredible on phones too. Android and iOS basically mined the Palm Pre for ideas for years. In 2010 I had a phone with touch based gesture navigation, card based multitasking, magnetically attached wireless charging that displayed a clock when docked.
A long time ago I was given an Android, Apple, and MS-windows phone to evaluate as company phones for the company I worked for. the MS-windows phone crashed almost straight out of the box. and crashed again. and again.
Indeed.
As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.
The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be very disappointed with the device.
But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero, so I didn't try to talk them out of it.
It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for smartphones of the time.
Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for them to operate that they never asked for me help. And since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer apps available.
Their experience was the polar opposite of what I envisioned it would be.
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.
I was a developer for Carrier apps. It was by far the best mobile developer experience by a landslide.
Really staked my career on it because of that. Whoops.
Wasn't until react launched that I felt there was finally a better system for frontend development.
> They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
That then became WSL1
My experience with Windows phone around 2010 was exact opposite, very slow and clumsy. I recall I tried a HTC phone on WM 6.5, far behind iPhone 3GS
That was Windows Mobile, which was the end of the line of the old Windows embedded line vs Windows Phone, the brand new OS made for modern (at the time) smartphones.
WP7 was the first of the new OS
Windows Phone 7 was another OS. Windows Phone 8 was the next totally incompatible OS just couple years later.
I had Lumia 950, still my favorite phone.
It also had the best “swipe” text typing mode for Turkish. iPhone got it very recently and it’s close to useless and Android one was meh last I checked.
I’d say for English too. I don’t know about non-standard keyboards, but WP swiping was better than both the stock iOS keyboard and gboard.
Windows Phone was good if you liked staring at "Resuming..." screens all day.
You don't have to be snarky. If you actually have something to say, just say it so people can understand what you're even talking about.
Okay: multitasking in windows phone was rubbish. You would see a loading screen all the time when switching between apps that lasted seconds. Of course that was still better than the pile of garbage that Android was/is, so it was your only option if you, like me, weren’t able to afford an iPhone. But that’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I miss it.
Thanks! I've owned one windows phone (I liked the UI) and multiple android phones and don't remember anything like that. Maybe it was a problem on some earlier (or cheaper) phones since I waited a bit before buying a smartphone.
> The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.
To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined by their pricing.
For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to being more or less a sidegrade from their previous generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the asking price to your average user that has other options.
Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.
In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be overlooked.
The major complaint I have with the 5060 is it offers me no reason to update my 3060 Ti. It's 2 generations out and is somewhere around a 10% performance increase at roughly the same power envelope.
It seems like the only trick nVidia has for consumer cards is dumping in more power.
I remember doing some apps for Windows Phone and it really seemed they hated devs. Constantly breaking small things and then the switch to 10 made me give up. It was a nice OS though
Nokia made some pretty nice phones there for a while, and the OS looked pretty usable by Microsloth's standards.
I blame Ballmer, he's like Steve Gate's less intelligent but at least as evil brother.
> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much
Remember that the Apple Watch did this. The initial release was priced way outside of market conditions--it was being sold as a luxury-branded fashion accessory at a >$1k price point on release. It was subtly rebranded as a mass-affordable sports fitness tracker the next year.
I believe you are mistaken, in several aspects:
1) Entry level watch models were available for about $400 right away, which is still more or less the starting point (though due to inflation, that's a bit cheaper now, of course).
2) Luxury models (>$1K price) are still available, now under the 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Watch
The luxury watch was released in April 2015. The cheaper stainless steel model wasn't released until the fall event a few months later.
But I was talking about branding and marketing; sorry if that wasn't clear. At release the Hermes and "Edition" models were the story. The Apple Watch was the next fashion accessory. You couldn't even buy it at an Apple Store -- you could get fitted, but had to order it shipped to store. But the Hermes store next door had the expensive models in stock.
It wasn't until 2016 that Apple partnered with Nike and changed their branding for the watch to be about health and fitness.
Yes, I agree that health and fitness are a much bigger part of the branding now than they were initially (but the basic features were there right from the beginning — I remember sitting in town halls, with "pings" ringing out at 10 to the hour, and everybody standing up for a minute).
That comports with my memory. I have no idea what Apple's internal sales projections were. But there was a ton of nerd and tech press criticism to the effect that young people didn't wear watches any longer so obviously this was a stupid idea for a product.
Even if I'm not really sold for day-to-day wear because of the limited battery life, I do have one.
Entry level watches are available from China for €40, with everything but Maps. Huawei/Honor Magicwatch 2 e.g.
Sure. My point was that entry level APPLE watches never changed much in their price point.
To me that was the issue, they wanted a 'me too' product without the belief behind to back it.. it was a fine device at the time, a little nicer than all the android tablets around.
What I find interesting about your comment is that iPhone launched with out an ecosystem and 4 years later a. App Store was tabled stakes.
The iPhone opened up the smartphone market to many many more people.
We had smartphones before, but it didn't need to convert their tiny userbase to be a success (and I know some people who stuck with PocketPC-based smartphones for quite a while, because they had their use cases and workflows on them that other smartphones took time to cover).
Once the smartphone for everyone was a category, it was much more fighting between platforms than grabbing users that weren't considering a smartphone before. And after the initial rush that takes much more time to convince people to swap, and obviously app support etc is directly compared. (e.g. for me personally, Nokias Lumia line looked quite interesting at some point. But I wasn't the type to buy a new phone every year, by the time I was actually planning to replacing the Android phone I had it was already clear they'd stop supporting Windows Phone)
I got a Treo in 2006 mostly because I had a badly broken foot and needed an alternative to carrying a computer on some trips. Didn't get an iPhone until a 3GS or thereabouts in around 2010.
Apples app store was 3 years old at that point and white hot. The Samsung Galaxy was 2 years old then. If they wanted to go to market with an unpolished product differentiated with a few nifty features, they'd need to spend months paying loads of money to devs to fill out their app store to have a chance.
And Apple only sold 10 million iPhones the first year out of 1 billion phones that were sold that year. Jobs himself publicly stated his goal was 1% of the cell phone market the guest year
I think microsoft made a valiant effort with windows phone. They kept it in the market for years and iterated, they threw big budgets after it, they made deals with app developers to bring over their apps.
You can point to missteps like resetting the hardware and app ecosystem with the wp 7 to 8 transition and again with 8 to 10, or that wp 10 was rushed and had major quality problems, but ultimately none of that mattered.
What killed windows phone was the iron law that app developers just weren’t willing to invest the effort to support a third mobile platform and iOS and Android had already taken the lead. They could have added android app support and almost did, but then what was the point of windows phone? It was in its time the superior mobile OS, but without the apps that just didn’t matter.
This is what makes apple’s current disdain for app developers so insulting. They owe their platform success to developers that chose and continue to choose to build for their platform, and they reward that choice with disrespect.
There was another reason behind the Windows phone failure and the lack of apps - Google blocking Microsoft from using its platform native APIs. Microsoft weren't allowed to use, for eg, the YouTube API natively, so the "native" Windows OS app for YouTube had to use roundabout methods of getting YouTube data.
Windows phones were out for years, no?
> is years of investment.
Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers.
> to get a lot of apps
Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs. They created their own resistance to app development.
Clearly you have never actually used a WebOS device. They supported app sideloading out of the box and were easy to get root on via an officially supported method. There was an extremely popular third-party app store called Preware that offered all sorts of apps and OS tweaks.
When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to it.
That open ecosystem needs years of investment to develop. A few people will take the risk and make a first app, but a lot will wait longer.
I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market.
Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.
Most of those developers were looking for revenue, though, and there’s a really wicked network effect rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too. By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there just weren’t many developers looking to target a user base at least an order of magnitude smaller – even Android struggled because not as many users were willing to actually buy software.
Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware, very few apps. It's interesting.
People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes.
Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes.
If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops to make software that works for the platform.
That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.
Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.
The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.
No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.
If every single indie developer disappeared and didn’t make software for computers - to a first approximation, no one would notice a difference.
We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.
It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.
So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.
You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.
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.
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.
The people at the top are paid a fortune because they're indeed the very best.
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.
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.
My parents got a cheap Touchpad when they were getting rid of them, and used it for years. Especially after people got AOSP running on it.
Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.
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.
> 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
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.
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.]
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think you've got some "grass is greener on the other side" thinking going on there. There's lots of people just like him, failing upwards in US tech.
Obviously there are. But you still have a higher proportion of engineer types leading multinational companies, whether they are tech or finance businesses, etc. In Europe, except for France (thanks to the Grand Ecole system), I have yet to see a large proportion of companies where non-founder leadership also has a technical or engineering bent.
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
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.
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.
Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…
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.
> 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.
This is well after the fact though, and it does sound like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I don’t begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.
Exactly! It is your responsibility, like it or not. That’s what the money’s for!
... 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.
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.
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.
Truth. Every one of these things would have been visible 4-6 months prior.
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.
>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.
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.
this was my first thought as well.
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.
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
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.
(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!
> I realized the fundamental problem wasn't my absence. It was a systematic mismatch between Leo Apotheker's experience and the role he was asked to fill.
> SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.
> This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch that should have been immediately obvious to any functioning board. But nobody asked the right questions about whether Leo's enterprise software background prepared him to evaluate consumer platform technologies such as WebOS, and I wasn't there to provide what my colleagues called "adult supervision."
Yup, sounds about right.
At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being viewed as their own dedicated skillset that is independent and unrelated to the business itself, when in reality they still require specific understanding of the skills and processes over which they preside. You can't just drop any CEO into any other CEO position, and think they'll succeed.
>> 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."
> "management is a generic function independent of the business being run. With an MBA and you can run Coke GM or Intel into the ground all the same."
I felt it needed a little tweak. You are exactly right otherwise IMO.
They were all very successful at doing that. The financialization of everything was the death of all these businesses.
Very well and succinctly put.
When I talk about the same topic with a friend, we say variants of "MBAs ruin everything they touch". But what we really mean is what you said.
Sure, I don't mean to imply that there aren't additional skills required to manage something, but you still have to fundamentally understand the thing that you are managing.
The idea that management can be subordinate/project/industry-agnostic is the mistake.
You can't (based purely on work experience, not talking about individual abilities) go from managing a coffee shop to running IBM... OR VICE VERSA
If this assertion is rankling anyone, I invite them to look up how many private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground, by trying to make them operate like SaaS companies.
So true. A friend of mine worked as a manager at an ECO diary producer (milk, cheese yoghurt). An investment firm bought the owners who build the company from nothing for a substantial sum. They then brought in a new young executive team who mainly had experience and making online clothes and food retail startups. Initially the owners had a requirement to consult to the business for some amount of time. That was quickly dropped as they didn't want the old owners to "interfere" (essentially telling the exec that they what they wanted to do didn't work). After less than a year my friend and the product manager where the only managers left from before and they had become the "nay sayers" (I.e. telling the boars their ideas and execution don't work in this industry) and where eventually let go. By this time they had lost major costumers, majorly invested into equipment that still didn't work (as the product manager predicted from the get go) and the company was probably worth less than half. I just read the news that 7 years later they sold at 2% of the purchase price. Cases like this should really be mandatory study.
> private investment firms are failing spectacularly to manage small businesses they acquire (e.g. dentists and vets) and running them into the ground
Absolutely, but (and this depends upon the "financialization of everything" point someone made above) that doesn't matter, because in the meantime they'll have personally made a profit on the deal. Building (or keeping) a sustainable business was never one of their goals. I call it "extractive capitalism", and it's ruining the world.
the old "it's all the same shit" fallacy that i loathe so dearly
Defector had a great piece on roughly this point: https://defector.com/how-will-the-golden-age-of-making-it-wo...
You can't blame an MBA for this debacle. Léo Apotheker studied economics in college and had no formal education in management.
Drucker would argue you need practice (e.g. actually doing the work) rather than an educational background to be a good manager.[0] So I would argue he didn't have the experience to be a manager at that level.
https://mlari.ciam.edu/peter-drucker-s-vision-of-management-...
I can only say that it's really refreshing when you talk to a CEO who is interested and understands the products the company is working on. Unfortunately it's pretty widespread to have the top layers of the company only thinking about numbers and deadlines, not the product.
You say 90s but sounds suspiciously like John Scully and Apple in the 80s
Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but IIRC Gerstner's time at IBM was 100% financialization. He didn't solve any of IBM's core problems. Outside of the momentary bright spot of "Global Services" the largest impact he had was selling off IBM's immense real-estate (and other) capital they had acquired by being a capex business for a 100 years, and converted that all to a decade long free rent/etc 0 opex business, Along with EOL'ing their pension program, and a lot of other 'quality of life' stuff that made them one of the best companies to work for. It made the numbers look great as he "reduced overhead" in the short term, bur just created further long term problems. If IBM could have caught just a single one of the tech waves of the next 25 years they would have done fine, but for some reason they continue to snatch defeat despite seemingly always being in the right place at the right time. But it seems they always overcharge, over engineer, whatever their solutions and the market rejects them. (ex, flash arrays, POWER as an alternate hyperscaler server arch, watson/ML, failing to capitalize on centos, etc, etc, etc) while dumping spinning disk, fabs, etc at roughly the right time.
Was that intended to be similar to the real life movement of John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple?
> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being ...
Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of Director and above in technical or related companies.
To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA, development, customer feedback and myriad others are generated on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And during leadership review sessions teams are asked for 10% improvement for next quarter.
If these reports and feedback were any good, these companies would be operating like Navy seal teams by now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
Oh, it's worse in some ways - Leo didn't leave SAP to take this job. Instead, SAP's board chose not to renew his contract in Feb, 2010, so he resigned.
SAP board; This guy sucks let's move on
HP: we'll take him!
Exactly.
Leo Apotheker really did not understand software development and all of nuances running a software company.
While Henning may not have been particularly business-savvy, Leo demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of SAP’s value network.
I can find countless examples of this both ways. Some people are great CEOs able to turn around a company/industry they knew nothing about before. However there are a lot of bad CEOs out there. And being in a company/industry for decades is a good way to turn a bad CEO into a mediocre one which is an improvement I guess. Sadly I have no clue how to make a good CEO - and see no evidence anyone else does.
Most companies that have been around for decades would be absolutely fine with a mediocre CEO.
In my opinion, mediocre is an excellent strategy when optimizing for longevity and durability.
ie Google
I know a guy who held this attitude. He somehow got into a top MBA program without any undergrad degree and poor grades. (Bribery, one wonders)
Got his MBA, eventually bragged about how he lied his way into a CTO position with no tech skills. Lasted about 6 months. No longer listed on his LinkedIn.
After all that, somehow still hasn't eaten his humble pie. Still believes this idea you don't need to know stuff about technology to manage a technology organization.
I need this part explained to me.
This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.The only way that remark makes sense:
Because it's been decades since I've ran into new HP kit that didn't fall somewhere between awful and unusable. I say that without the least exaggeration.DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.
Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.
Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.
Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....
As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.
I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excellent, both in terms of support duration and general stability.
I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.
As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
I have an HP ENVY laptop that’s very nice. Amazingly good screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1, and is quite thin and light for a 15” laptop.
But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it’s been this way for decades.
MacBook Airs are marketed towards consumers, and they're certainly not trash, are they?
This is ancient reference but I used to have HP's nx6320[0] laptop. The thing was built solid, fantastic keyboard, excellent screen - basically an all round solid business laptop. I remember dual-booting Windows XP with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it - worked perfectly.
[0]: https://support.hp.com/in-en/product/product-specs/hp-compaq...
> It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".
“Used car” is a wild exaggeration. For many years, people have been able to buy MacBook Airs that overperform for 90% of consumers for $1,000 (sometimes even less). This device will last at least 7 years, if not 10.
https://www.costco.com/macbook-air.html?screen-size=13-in+13....
> This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.
HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.
Your questions though are valid.
Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.
HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).
They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.
The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be like; I miss those days.
I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.
HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.
You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.
And the company was an engineer's paradise--that's why Woz was so reluctant to quit.
Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.
That sounds about right. Just checked and that's when Carly's tenure started. Compaq ruined DEC, HP ruined Compaq, then HP ruined HP.
We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day. I think that we printed hundred of thousands of pages and I aways trusted it.
But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else HP now. But HP had a good reputation.
> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.
Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.
I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.
But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.
Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
TIL that Agilent was still in business. I thought it was a straight name-change to Keysight for their electronic test equipment business.
Very popular choice for LC/MS
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
You aren't wrong. 70s and 80s HP scientific gear was the gold standard - often because it was pioneered into existence.
I was recently fixing a WinNT 4.0 box, attached to a daily-used 30yo HP Spectrophotometer. The latter needed no service.
I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation (including but not limited to their legendary calculators). Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once got to go to work with him and see one of their giant plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.
When I sold printers in the early 90's, HP Laserjets were broadly considered to be the gold standard.
That is not a bad rep for the shareholder. They were great in those terms. And gave lots of market opportunity for everyone else but HP dominated the scene.
Had a black and white laserjet printer in the late 1980s. Was a magnificent device and super reliable.
> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).
HPE sold its software arm to Micro Focus subsequently as well
I was part of that transition. Great times explaining why my job changed 4 times in 18 months.
Startup -> HP -> HPE -> Micro Focus -> new job after I got tired of all this corporate deck chair rearranging.
> This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.
One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a single share since he left the company. That would mean he has a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing in HP.
These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.
Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.
I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.
Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.
I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.
> I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw"
I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they are locked to chipped cartridges.
And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers as they possibly could.
When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage, it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.
I have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year, scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be used as a printer anymore either.
It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.
No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.
This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.
Their laserjets are fine. It's the inkjets that have all the major problems.
I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.
I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.
The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Prime
Former Palm employee here. I was a developer advocate working directly with app devs from a couple of months before Palm was acquired until after the shutdown.
I remember Phil and rather liked him. Everything he states in the article is correct as far as I remember it. Yes we were being slammed by the iPad, but we were far and away the #2 tablet that summer. Android tablets really sucked then, and despite Google's push there were more tablet native apps in the TouchPad app store than Android's. In hindsight it should have been cheaper and faster. And it would have been by Christmas (the TouchPad mini was just weeks away from shipping). Given more time and funding it would have been a contender (maybe not "winning" but still having a good run).
I suspect Palm was doomed the moment Apotheker took over. He wanted to turn HP into IBM. HP's plans to use WebOS everywhere (I was able to see prototypes of fascinating future products that I still want today) were well thought out, but didn't fit his vision. If you want to blame someone, blame the board for hiring him.
Ultimately WebOS's destruction was great for the rest of the ecosystem. Some really talented people went to Apple and Google, improving their interfaces at the expense of losing a 3rd way. I still wish I'd kept at Pre3. Modern iPhones and Android devices may be more powerful, but they don't have that elegant simplicity I miss from WebOS.
[Some notes](https://joshondesign.com/2012/06/06/webos-on-the-verge) I wrote shortly after the shutdown.
PS: I wish I'd see this post yesterday and could have responded earlier. I'm happy to answer any questions. email me josh at josh dot earth.
Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and canceling the product too early. Am I missing something? The fact it was rushed to market was on him unless he left out a bunch of story prior to his surgery.
The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next generation, which then would have more apps and less early issues to have a better chance at the market.
But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the lead of webOS was.
I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of “this just needs a little polish”, what I would expect for any new to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me.
I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.
It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the way they now handle multiple applications.
The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.
Both android and iOS copied their exact multitasking UI YEARS after webOS had it lmao.
> The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut.
Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/22/hp-touchp...
I bought one, and ... honestly even at that low price I regretted it. The software was trash. I don't know why WebOS got so much praise, it was clearly not fit for purpose.
I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.
That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.
Hey. I wrote some of that trash.
I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch.
Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship stuff that wasn’t ready and couldn’t be ready with the resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have taken a good start and given it the space to become great. Maybe.
webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system.
That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.
Yeah, there's a lot of context there that isn't obvious from the outside and is behind my feelings that Palm just had too little too late. They shouldn't have been blindsided by the iPhone, but with that happening they really did the best they could. I'll make some brief points, but maybe I should write a blog post at some point.
- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)
- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.
- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.
- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.
- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.
- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).
Boot times for alternative kernels were a lot faster. I can't recall exactly (it's been years), but I seem to remember that there were some simple config settings in the bootloader that could cut boot times by a lot.
Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery life).
Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of the tablet for quite a while).
I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a webOS-specific app.
I distinctly remember the Autumn day of 2011 when we stood in the line of the local Best Buy in West Des Moines to grab one of these. It was miles ahead of anything that was in the market that time. It could do multitasking and had a lovely intuitive UI (cards!!). I remember being blown away by it. Android and iOS freely stole features from it later.
I still have the device and it’s one of my cherished vintage devices.
yeah it was years ahead of apple and android (this was and2.3 days if i recall, or 4.3 which typical google was worse than 2.3)
and the emulator was better dev experience than anything else. but actually putting things on the device that had anything more than js was impossible.
and the hardware was garbage. buttons would stuck. I don't know what sort of museum you live but mines lasted 4 and 2 years before turning to literal bits (used by adults)
I might be lucky because mine’s still chugging along.
May horde contains: few old MacBooks running Linux, old Kindles running dashboards, Android phones & tablets, iPhones from OG era and even a Chumby. All of them are still working fine.
> I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.
I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern software development has proven out this whole idea. If WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't get enough development attention.
Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges to success.
Companies do exist to try and hammer Linux into a good desktop/laptop product. I would say that it's just not easy to do given the lack of vertical integration. Redhat centralizing everything into systemd has probably gone the longest way towards improving things. Of course that is odds with the perceived benefits of having many competing options to perform the job of any given piece of software.
> That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.
We certainly do have the performance in such devices to run an OS application layer with web technology now. Many people do anyway, just directly in the browser and with electron. Easier on a PC, but completely possible on TVs and phones. If webOS is slow now on your TV that's because of LG's development capabilities, not because of the technology.
I had both a Touchpad and a HP Veer. The performance was completely fine, especially after the mod scene provided kernel updates with overclocks, plus tunings for the UI. Especially compared to common devices of the time. Those were very good signs for the cut next hardware iteration.
The great thing about webOS was the usability, just how the interface worked was awesome. It's no accident that Android copied the card interface a few years later, with Android 5 I think, and the gestures again a few years later, with Android 10 or 11. Probably coming from Palm were also some nice ideas about how to integrate apps and core functionality.
WebOS LG TV owner, and TouchPad owner here.
As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad.
The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.
I don't remember the touchpad performance being all that bad for the time. Was pretty snappy IIRC.
My LG TV, on the other hand, definitely struggles particularly running apps. That might just be due to the age of the tv.
My observation, after using LG TVs at countless hotels (occasionally internet-connected), AirBnBs (usually internet connected) and at home (never internet-connected) is that even in quite old TVs the UI is blazing fast until you connect it to the 'Net. At that point... It spends a painful amount of time waiting on requests with no visible feedback and the whole UI starts to chug, with some apps becoming almost unusable until the thing has been on for long enough for all the background stuff to finish.
Granted... If they aren't 'Net-connected, most "apps" aren't of much use. But, fast access to settings and inputs is sorta nice too.
> but still snappy
It's about the least snappy thing I've ever used, apart from cheap Android tablets (we made the mistake of buying an Amazon Fire Kids tablet which is the only device I've ever used that was literally unusably slow).
I even bought the higher spec version of the TV because apparently the cheaper version is even slower. Great image quality but I'll definitely never buy another LG TV again.
I have no explanation of what's going on with your touchpad. They really only had one model with different storage options. I guess I'd speculate there's something wrong with it.
As far as the TV, here's my model number:
OLED77C2AUA
No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife. Just the ads and software/features I don't care about. (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-update disabled for a reason)
> Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.
That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.
I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_
I'm pretty sure I bought one for 99$ but I can't remember if that was directly from HP. I LOVED that thign
(as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)
The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.
An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)
A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).
The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.
Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.
I don't think he's saying it went from great to awful, I think he's saying they canceled the project because the new CEO didn't like it and nobody was there to defend it. He claims the underlying tech was good but there was a market/product mismatch; instead of taking the information and trying again, they just canceled it.
That said, this article really doesn't dwell on the mistakes he made. He sort of implies his work was great and it was marketing/other departments who messed up.
He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000 units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market probably wasn't even his job.
I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of investment to build a platform like this.
The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall.
WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would simply have meant more money down the drain.
The issues that killed webOS had nothing to do with its technical merits (which were many) - it instead was a failure of product management.
* The TouchPad was priced too high for a new entrant with embryonic app support.
* It probably needed more development time before going to market, CTO doesnt really make GTM timing decisions.
* Insult to injury, as this fella pointed out - the applications for webOS extended far beyond a tablet, HP threw the baby out with the bathwater.
* They tried to make a strategic shift into software and services without having a great track record of doing those thing, which compounded all of the above, Palm did have some expertise there, but it was still tossed away.
Agree. I'm sympathetic to the CTO here, but I remember the disaster of the HP TouchPad launch very well - there were multiple fatal errors here that don't seem possible to commit in an 8-week window.
The hardware had basically ~no app ecosystem. That's not a problem that occurs over 8 weeks. The software was also incredibly under-baked, and I'm doubtful that the company pivoted from "this needs more time and should release later" to "full marketing push, press events, and big launch" in that short a time either.
I don't doubt that there was a lot of conflict over strategy with the new CEO, but the framing that all of this happened while he was on the sidelines doesn't seem very plausible.
HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been. They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.
By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this - https://fdn2.gsmarena.com/vv/pics/hp/hp-ipaq-glisten-1.jpg.
They simply had been asleep at the wheel for too long. And even then, the correct move would have been to adopt Android instead of thinking you could build and control your own ecosystem (something they finally did in 2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Veer and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Pre_3 could have been great, if they had been well supported.
In early 2011 when I told people I had an Android they had no clue what I was talking about. A well done long term investment in other phones could have made a big difference - but HP wasn't willing to make it so we will never know. (Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again killing it before it took off).
> Microsoft released their Windows phone in 2012, again killing it before it took off
That 2011 iPAQ has a Windows button. Wikipedia lists them as running "Windows Mobile".
I may remember my dates wrong... Close enough for this discussion though.
No, I think you're right. Wikipedia suggests that "Windows Phone" (the operating system) came out the following year, replacing Windows Mobile.
> By 2011 Apple had launched iPhone 4s, Android manufacturers had sold 100M phones, and HP's latest and greatest mobile device looked like this
That looks just like a BlackBerry. What's the problem supposed to be? RIM sold 52 million of them that year.
They're much easier to use than modern phones, because you don't need to touch the screen. The only advantage of the full-screen iPhone / Android style is that you have a bigger image when watching videos.
> What's the problem?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266240/blackberry-revenu...
>HP was definitely in a position to compete with apple, and always has been.
In 1990-2000? Sure, maybe. In 2010? Not a chance. HP was not a SW company like Apple. Apple wasn't making much money from selling Macs in 2001. Their big cash cow came from the iPod which HP couldn't pull off something like iTunes and licensing deals with record labels, they were just a commodity HW company (ignoring the oscilloscope, sensors, medical and the other shit).
>They might not have been in a position to beat them, but you don't have to be on top to be profitable.
From where I am, I saw clear as day that markets usually have room for only two large players who will end up owning 90% of the market, with the rest of the players fighting for the scraps. Intel & AMD, Nvidia & AMD, iOS & Android, PlayStation & Xbox, Apple & Samsung, Windows & Mac, etc,
HP was in no position to win against Apple and Google for a podium spot so they left in due time. Even Microsoft couldn't pull it off.
I agree.
OEMs have always been weird because in some sense consumers attribute the computers to them. But they don’t have a core competency in software. And they don’t have a core competency in the hardest parts of hardware—chip design, etc.
Picking the right parts to buy, assembling them, shipping them, that’s all important stuff. They weren’t in a position to win against Apple; they were playing one of the three games Apple plays, almost as well as Apple.
HP did have competency in a lot of those areas though. They were a large company that did have fingers in a lot of different things, both software and hardware. Their PCs were visible, but they had lots of other divisions doing lots of things.
Which was perhaps their major issue. The HP expertise was all over the place with divisions around the globe reinventing the wheel. Couple that with a recently decimated and outsourced IT department (Such a colossally dumb decision) and you could effectively see HP not as one company but 100 companies all doing their own thing.
Circa 2005, HP did a licensing deal with Apple to sell their own iPod Photo.
I thought WebOS looked great and thought it was the only real chance we ever had for a 3 platform. Much of the UI we take for granted in mobile devices today came from WebOS (such as card based app switching and swiping to close). I would have loved to see what it could become, rather than relegating it to TVs. iOS wasn't what it is today back then. It was still pretty new itself, and lacking what most would say are very basic features today.
I often wonder what HP would look like today had 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.
From what I heared (I had some popular webos apps) the touchpad hardware was forced by HP onto the webos team.
> never in a position to compete with Apple.
I kind of wonder if Apple could pull off something like an iphone or an ipad or even an ipod these days, without Steve Jobs around.
Vision Pro, different kind of device but same idea
No one wants it, though.
The Apple Watch though is much more successful than the iPod ever was.
HP had successful lineup of pocket PC devices that is iPAQ, so I still believe they could've made WebOS as alternate.
I actually think if there was anybody who could have competed effectively against Apple at this phase -- on branding -- Palm was it. It had recognition and association with the kind of product. And a patent portfolio, along with it.
I seem to recall there was rumours of the time of Apple sniffing around Palm as an acquisition target, even? I get the impression HP made this purchase simply on account of a strategic move to stop Apple from doing the same, and to get the patent portfolio that came out of it.
And the Palm Pre really was a decent phone, and the software relatively compelling... they just couldn't keep up on the HW manufacturing side.
At the time this was potentially a solvable problem, Apple hadn't become the juggernaut it is now.
I also recall that Jobs was famously pissed at Zuckerberg for launching Facebook on WebOS before iOS?
EDIT: I'd add to this that Palm had the talent at the time, too. Consider Mattias Duarte was the VP at Palm who headed up WebOS UX.. and then went on to direct the same thing for Android at Google, out of which came Material Design, etc. etc.
WebOS should never have tried to compete with Apple. They should have been on a slow march to their own definition for enterprise services. And then pivot to the consumer development market
I won't argue that this wasn't the appropriate action given the circumstances in capitalism today but we've got to stop legitimizing buying companies and then watching the market of product options shrink and engineers, amongst many other career employees, lose jobs. Companies should be required to continue to maintain some semblance of their acquired company's product portfolio for a good long while, otherwise what purpose did you acquire that company for? Killer acquisitions are still bad whether through intentional choice or negligence.
I suspect that making business mistakes illegal would ultimately cause more harm than the problem such a move is trying to solve.
And I think that there's an unstated major premise behind, "what purpose did you acquire the company for?" It assumes the existing product portfolio is already in great shape and running well. Except, it's probably better to assume the opposite. Companies that are ticking along smoothly like that don't tend to be the ones that are up for sale. So usually the acquiring company's thesis needs to be something like, "we think the technology is sound but it's having problems with product/market fit that we are uniquely positioned to solve for them." And that's a thesis that directly implies changes to the existing product portfolio.
This is not to take away from the corporate Vogon tragedy described in the blog post. WebOS could've been a credible competitor to iOS and Android. But the weak spot is right in the name: It's a web UI platform. Look at Google's attempts to make ChromeOS into a tablet OS.
While it's less clear cut now, back when HP acquired WebOS, they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps. HP had the resources.
We don't have a third or fourth mobile platform mainly because of tragically poor leadership at HP and Nokia. Both were almost killed by CEOs who thought they were the corporate savior.
WebOS had a native development kit in addition to the web one.
They were way ahead of the game with stuff like wireless charging and the SoC was cutting-edge for its time with fast (1.2GHz, but the chip was designed to run at 1.5GHz and overclocking to 1.8-2GHz was not too hard) partially OoO dual cores and 128-bit SIMD instead of 64-bit like A9 paired with a good LCD. The UI as shipped was already ahead of its time and if you look around for the cancelled Mocha UI, I think it would look pretty modern even today.
The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a very rapid pace. The CPU was fast compared to everyone else, but it was still slow and they needed to focus on performance a bit more.
> they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps.
It’s not enough to be as good as the competition when they already have an established ecosystem of apps and accessories. To be successful you have to leapfrog the competition. You need to offer something so compelling that consumers are willing to put up with the inconvenience of the lack of ecosystem. This is why WebOS and BlackBerry 10 failed. They were as good as iOS and Android but not good enough to overcome that massive downside.
This is also why Apple managed to get a foothold even though established players like Nokia and RIM had the market cornered. Instead of catching up to the competition they leapfrogged them.
My personal conspiracy theory is that Nokia was an orchestrated takedown by MS. Get a leader in there to tank its stock for an acquisition.
MS just shit the bed on the other side of it and failed to deliver a competitive-enough mobile platform.
Yeah, we all know that a corrupt person in government is often sponsored by a corporation to rip off the government. I wonder if sometimes a corrupt person is put into leadership at Corporation A who is really on the take from Corporation B with the job of wrecking a competitor.
this does happen: Imagine company B poached staff from A, presumaby for'insights' into company A IP, which had nothing to do with costly decisions and some missteps of unknown causes whereafter A os still in business and B? not so much. seems like a plotline by Sun Tsu
Remember too that from the Nokia board POV selling the phone division to MS was a $1B+ dollar exit.
Nokia were in a deep shi^W trouble way before Elop's memo.
Sure, MS benefited greatly from this situation but Nokia was in the steady downhill since 2008.
Nokia had credible mobile OSs for modern phones. Windows Phone was not one.
I freaking loved my Palm Pixi. Just a masterpiece of usability and design.
We knew a bunch of people in engineering at HP at the time of the acquisition, and to a T each knew it was instantly going to be canned. Even before Apotheker, HP was rushing to follow IBM's business model and leave consumers behind.
Also, don't forget Blackberry hadn't even yet peaked as a "business" phone - HP was clearly chasing this market instead of the adoring consumer market that Palm had collected.
I'm selling OxyContin on my Palm Pixi / man, chicken sandwiches, they cost a clam fifty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ
I had a WebOS phone in a lot of ways it was better than my friend's iPhone at the time. Having a fold out keyboard was still the industry standard but he's typing on a screen keyboard. Overall, it was faster and more ergonomic, especially the on the tiny iPhone screen. I was forced to switch to iPhone because of HP's decision.
Just want to agree, WebOS was incredibly good, the Palm Pre and Pixi were both great. HP 100% killed it.
Nothing about this makes any sense. We’ve already got a number of people pointing out flaws like why did he wait 15 years to write about it, why does it look like it was written by an LLM, and is it really reasonable to blame such a massive failure completely on your peers and not take an ounce of responsibility yourself? But these things all start to make sense once you actually reach the end of the article and realize it’s all a ploy to sell you his fancy new equivalent to a self-help book, which you can tell is legit because its name is a forced acronym. Can we take this off the front page please?
I think it is better to be charitable. I think he does genuinely believe what he wrote is what happened. His PDF book is free and Creative Commons.
There could be many reasons he waited this long. Maybe he waited until he was retired and would not face blowback. Maybe he just has some free time.
It is very plausible that WebOS could have been an equal peer to iOS and Android. CEOs have killed off projects that might have been great commercial successes while perusing short term gains.
In a decade's time we might hear a story from inside ATI or AMD how they killed off their chance of beating CUDA for short term gains.
> Can we take this off the front page please?
Don’t do this. Engagement is what drives stories to the front page. If you don’t like it just move on.
They had the whole stack in house. os, hardware, firmware, app store infra, even global retail. nobody external blocking them. and they still killed it in 49 days. you can’t build dev trust in 7 weeks. the platform wasn't given time to breathe. this was failure of patience more than product
> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS.
Is this actually the case?
I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
The same day they shut down WebOS, all the unsold hardware was cut to fire-sale prices. TouchPad was $99, and they sold out everywhere at that price.
I bought 2 at the time, sold one and used the other for a while. The hardware didn't feel as nice as the iPad 2, but it was serviceable. The software was neat and the card metaphor arguably is still more sensible than iOS/iPadOS of today. I can't see any way that HP could've been more than a distant 3rd place behind iOS/Android, but it would've been fun to see them try.
Those units weren’t unsold. They went for ridiculously low prices and everyone went nuts trying to buy one (edit: this isn’t even an exaggeration. People were buying up multiple tablets. Even buying non-discounted tablets then asking for price-matching afterwards)
Ironically this showed that there was demand for webOS. It was just priced wrongly from the outset
The Slickdeals comment thread for the HP Touchpad firesale has over 285,000 comments
https://slickdeals.net/e/3220862-hp-touchpad-9-7-wifi-tablet...
> 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.
> I think the frenzy at the discounted price showed there was demand for a 10" tablet for $99 rather than interest in WebOS.
That’s basically what I meant. Albeit that I was emphasising that people are also happy with something that wasn’t iOS / Android if the price was right.
Right, but HP hadn't figured out how to make and sell profitable $99 10" tablets, they had figured out how to wash their hands of unsold inventory of $500 tablets that people didn't want. They had no moat in selling cheap tablets because as soon as the hardware became affordable enough to do it for a profit anyone else could have too.
You say that but HP already have an established and mature supply chain for hardware which, isn’t common. And particularly with portable drives like laptops and PDAs. HP were in better position to capitalise than you claim with your “anyone” comment.
Their “$500 tablet” could be easily dropped to $100 because it wasn’t a particularly high end device to begin with. I mean, it did have some niceties. But there was also a hell of a lot of corners cut too.
Ironically, this was the same problem Palm faced with its WebOS phones before they sold to HP. Their phones were nice but they felt far too sluggish and basic considering their price point. I actually wanted a WebOS phone but ended up with Android (likely HTC) because you got so much more for your money.
Given HP (and Palm) has experience building portable devices like PDAs, there really isn’t any excuse for their failing in price and hardware for the WebOS tablets and phones. They already had experience in this market so should have really known better.
I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could use iPad 1 cases with the TouchPad and everything fit nicely and worked.
Apple sued Samsung over the shape of their phones. I think it's at least plausible that Apple and HP's legal departments had some discussions about the TouchPad which remain under NDA to this day.
WebOS was so far ahead of it's time in terms of usability and features in the default applications that it's hard to imagine someone dense enough to opt out of owning the mobile platform over the next several decades voluntarily.
But I can imagine an emergency operation to avoid all out legal warfare with Cupertino.
Touchpad had rounded edges vs the sharp aluminum ones on the ipad. Touchpad was visibly shorter and the corners were much more rounded.
If there were a real reason here, it would be that the iPad 2 launched in March 2011. When Touchpad launched 3-4 months later, it was twice as thick with worse battery life and a lot fewer apps were available while it had more bugs.
I think this was the real reason.
HP could have overcome all of these issues if they'd just given the hardware/software teams more time to finish the software and make thinner hardware.
The could have been a big player in the phone, tablet, TV, and even laptop market if they'd stuck with it.
Touchpad dimensions: 240mm 190mm 13.7mm
iPad dimensions: 243mm 190mm 13mm
Both had rounded corners as can be seen in the images here:
https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/phones/26850-940/HP-Touc...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/IPad-WiF...
I know the ipad cases fit the touchpad because I used one on my TouchPad for it's entire service life.
Why post incorrect information so authoritatively? Seems silly.
I also owned a touchpad. You are misremembering if you think they look the same.
Here's a side-by-side image
https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&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...
I'm sure whatever differences you see seem important to you.
None of them prevented a $15 iPad case from working flawlessly with my TouchPad for a half dozen years.
Tapping into Apple's ecosystem in such a way is exactly the sort of action Apple dislikes, for obvious reasons.
Those differences are precisely why suing wouldn't be possible. Apple barely won against Samsung and they were claiming not only the hardware design (where almost every element was ripped off), but also that Samsung copied Apple software design too.
In my opinion, Touchpad's different edges, corners, and radically different software meant HP wasn't likely to get sued.
That's funny because I see it exactly the opposite. Apple won against Samsung despite Samsung's phone seeming no more similar to Apple's than the Touchpad was to an iPad. Industry watchers at the time were flabbergasted that anyone would sue over a curved edge, and that Apple who had defended itself in lawsuits over similarly trite details in the past would do so. Wins tend to embolden.
It's well documented that mobile is a minefield of lawsuits seemingly aimed not so much at winning as at establishing cross-licensing agreements to mitigate the massive patent warchests of established players. A practice Apple has proven to be adept at. Just entering the mobile space carries a near 100% chance of getting sued by everyone else already occupying it.
You can be of the opinion that something isn't worthy of a lawsuit. Doesn't mean one won't happen. In my humble experience, any pretense can be sufficient. And this one has seemed likely to me since 2011.
I learned about webOS in an unusual way, by writing exploits for a 2019 LG TV.
Something that became apparent even from this vantage point, was that a) the core platform was very solid and nice to work with b) the developers working on product features seemed largely unaware of point a). I assume that when webOS changed hands repeatedly, tons of institutional knowledge about how to actually use it got lost along the way (particularly in the security department). Unfortunate.
I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.
“Why I still believe in HP”… why would anyone still believe in HP? How many decades has it been since they’ve produced a good product? Quick, think of what products you associate with HP. I’ll be it’s bottom-of-the-market windows laptops and innovation in the all-important space of printer consumer abuse (planned obsolescence, ink-as-a-service, etc).
I owned and loved a few palm pilots (and a handspring visor) but Palm was a nostalgia brand already by 2010.
In the proto-smartphone years they were competing with blackberry and losing in that "business-phone" use case. (Treo phones, etc) Maybe they got burned by the Palm VIIx! :)
DangerOS (sidekick phones) came out and had killer games and even Windows CE had a few devices out there, with Palm integrations iirc.
The year HP bought palm - 2010 - had the Android Nexus One and the venerable iPhone 4! HP never had a chance.
RIM (blackberry) was the only one who ever had a (distant) chance at a 3rd player in the smartphone universe at that time.
Can’t really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really could’ve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV I’ve had since.
I know tech people like to villainize bean counters for ruining tech companies, but this man has zero business sense and needs a good bean counter. It's crazy that he thinks people will read this and feel like he was in the right with his business decisions. There is no timeline where HP tablets beat out iOS, Android, and Windows because WebOS had good multitasking.
I’m not sure what it is about this post that sets me off so. Maybe it’s the “LinkedIn”-friendly prose. Maybe it’s the “lessons learned” which reveal nothing remotely insightful. Or maybe it isn’t this guy at all and is just my general frustration with modern big tech that bleeds its customers and abruptly dismisses products, projects, and employees to buoy its stock price.
But my gut reaction after reading was “what a bunch of self-serving nonsense”.
From “they needed me to babysit the CEO and board” to “I still believe in HP despite destroying 1.2 billion in value while I was on an 8-week break” to “the DECIDE framework”, it’s a masterclass of modern tech executive bloviation. They are always so confident and convincing as they explain their cognitive dissonance, preaching to audiences stuck in the same reality-distorting game. The tech market is a mess because these same types are utterly paralyzed over the path forward now that LLMs have emerged but full of so many words to explain how they have it all figured out.
But this guy insists it isn't his fault. He was just unlucky that he wasn't there to be the beacon of reason their leadership needed:
> Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision." Think about the implications of that statement. HP's own technical staff, the people closest to our innovation work, believed that senior leadership couldn't be trusted to make sound technology decisions without someone there to provide oversight and guidance. They weren't wrong. The numbers proved it in the most painful way possible.
Hollywood-grade drama and warning sirens all around, but a few paragraphs later…
> Despite watching the WebOS disaster unfold, despite being blamed for not preventing it, despite everything that went wrong during that period, I still believe in HP as an organization.
Mercy. The author thinks he's provided an apology to explain his culpability in the failures of the Palm acquisition but, instead, he's just made it clear he has awful judgement.
HP is far, far away from the once-great version of itself. For example, once they achieved dominance, HP ensh*ttified their printer business beyond any reasonable tolerance level to squeeze every last dollar out of its customers. They abandoned all pretense of technical excellence or innovation or customer satisfaction and embraced dark patterns to please their MBA masters.
Like so many of their peers, they see their employees as headcount and their customers as vassals.
That’s the type of decision-making HP values. That's the type of company HP is. And this guy, his excuses, and his experience are a shining example of why.
> “what a bunch of self-serving nonsense”
That is exactly how I felt.
HP had been making bad decision after bad decision for a while long before this happened. HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware, etc. There was clearly nobody who cared about the user experience at all. It made Apple's job very easy.
yeah, this whole post feels super revisionist to me - HP was a bad company making bad decisions and awful consumer technology products for a long time before the touchpad disaster. everybody knew HP buying palm was going to be the death of palm.
or at least, everybody except HP knew that.
> HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware
HP laptops outsell Apple laptops 2 to 1
Not saying they are better, but HP hasn't lost to Apple in the laptop market.
I would make the argument that they run a much better PC business now than they did back then.
Back then they had a rough reputation on product quality, while now I’d say they are the premier high volume brand with a pretty difficult to beat value proposition. They have a wide range of products where none of them are miserable.
If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
The device was always doomed. They launched a direct competitor to the iPad with maybe 10% of the functionality. This article is just hubris on the CTO's part ("if only I had been around for the launch instead of my incompetent team, everything would have worked out").
One other thing to point out is that the entire tablet market only exists today due to re-use of the phone ecosystems. Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is. Not even Facebook makes a dedicated tablet app. It's all just the phone app ported across in a very crude way. The simple fact is that the tablet market isn't big enough to be independent of the phone ecosystem.
The CTO here proudly says he convinced the board to buy Palm and get into the tablet market but just thinking about this even lightly i'm not sure it was wrong for the CEO (and subsequently CTO) to be kicked out for this move. It's weird there's no hubris on this. A tablet market without re-use of a larger markets app ecosystem seems like poor strategic thinking to me.
> Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.
What apps are you using? That's not the case for any of the iPad apps I use anymore, though early on it was fairly common since quick ports could be made by checking the "release for iPad" box or however it worked back then. That was 15 years ago, though, things have changed quite a bit since then.
Android has unfortunately trended the opposite direction - apps that once had tablet UIs dropped them in favour of big phone UIs as they did redesigns around 2016-2020. I dropped out of the Android tablet world in 2019 for a Windows tablet, and most recently went for an iPad this year, so maybe Android has recovered ground there, but judging by how few Android tablets are actually on the market, I wouldn't be hopeful.
There is a difference between iPad and iPhone apps. The former run full screen, and the latter letterboxed.
I don’t use iPhone apps on this iPad Mini, they are too painful. I use the Instagram and Blue Sky web sites instead.
I don't use either of those services so I was unaware. So I guess there are still some apps out there without a proper iPad interface. I haven't encountered any in at least a decade though and they seem to be in the minority. Apple has gone to great lengths to make it easy to at least make something that fits on the iPad even if you don't try to make it properly native and use the screen real estate effectively. So that strikes me as laziness on the part of the Instagram and Bluesky app developers to not even try.
One could make the case that nobody needs tablet apps because web apps work well on tablets -- without annoying notifications or annoying popups to access privacy violating features [1], without adding clutter to an already too cluttered "desktop" of icons that all look the same, etc.
[1] that nobody in their right mind would click on, but I guess somebody with dementia might...
I don't totally disagree, though I dislike most web apps because, well, they require an internet connection too often (if not always). And I don't trust their creators to be any better at not violating privacy (my data is typically stored on their servers, after all).
With that said, I'm not sure what you're replying to in my comment.
Your overall point might be correct, but some of your specifics are incorrect:
>Just look at any popular app on a tablet - they all have massive borders/sidebars and within those it's just the phone app as-is.
None of the apps I am using on my iPad have borders/sidebars.
Gmail and Youtube have long had dedicated iPad apps. DeepSeek has one (a well designed and implemented one) for interacting with its chat service. The last time I checked, Google Gemini had only an iPhone app, but I checked again today and found a full-fledged iPad app.
Even my credit union, which operates only in California and does not have any physical branches in Southern California, has a full-fledged iPad app.
HP also shipped two Palm phone devices with webOS, Veer and Pre 3. They would have been more than able to create a complete mobile (and consumer electronic!) ecosystem.
Had the iPad not launched immediately opposite it, I can envision a world where HP goes through two or three revisions and has a solid device with it's own "personality" much like how Microsoft has their "Surface" line of glued-together tablets and "laptops" which sorta compete with the iPad and Macbook Air even if they hardly market them. The fact that Microsoft eventually succeeded in the space seems to indicate HP could have as well. I can see the business case where the new CEO isn't interested in rubber stamping a new product line that's going to lose money for him every quarter for the next three years against the glowing sun that is the iPad. There are better ways to burn political capital as a C level.
The thing with Windows tablets and Android tablets is in both cases the software development only has to justify its net increase in spend over just doing phone apps, but since HP didn't have a good market of phone apps to begin with, they'd basically need to justify the entire software development cost, on lower sales.
Taking the story at face value, the issue isn't necessarily delegation. If the C-suite is making a decision and one of their primary people (CTO in this case) is absent, it almost doesn't matter who he delegates to. The delegated individual is not their peer, so whatever they say will be discounted. I've been in that situation (as the delegated individual) several times. It's frustrating. Even if they respect you, you don't get a vote in the final decision.
In a company like HP at that moment...
* Might the same decisions have been made, even if the CTO were there?
* Would the CTO have one or more (SVP? VP?) people ramped up on the technical/product, and able to take a temporary acting-CTO role on that?
* Would there have been any sharp-elbow environment reason not to elevate subordinates temporarily into one's role and access? (For example, because you might return to find it's permanent.)
* What was the influence and involvement of the other execs? Surely it wasn't just CTO saying "buy this", CEO saying "OK", and then a product and marketing apparatus executing indifferently?
That'd imply a bus factor of 1 in most analyses right?
webOS very much feels like a path not taken in mobile technology, it really was slick to use, even though as this fella mentioned it wasnt polished in terms of what was released.
Palm is the Xerox in mobile era. Back then, It’s obviously better than Android, which is not a complete OS in any sense of quality standard. It’s even better than iOS in many technical specifications. HP flop could be one of the worst disasters in computing history.
I remember the day the WebOS tablet came out. I saw stanchions outside of a mobile phone store, with staff waiting for people to show up. No one was there. I had never heard any buzz about WebOS beforehand, and clearly no one else had either.
I have to agree with the sentiment here that the launch was botched, but I also agree with McKinney's assessment that it was killed prematurely. The market for mobile / tablet is huge, and there was plenty of time to "catch up." Perhaps the tablet was launched prematurely; and instead the launch should have focused on app developers?
> On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0. > While Apple was selling 9 million iPads that same quarter, TouchPads were gathering dust on store shelves.
Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?
I was fully "in" on webOS :( Still got a Palm Pre, Pre 2, Pre 3 and TouchPad in a box, and an LG webOS 2.0 OLED that died in the basement.
Apps were built sort of like PhoneGap, but intentional and supported rather than a middleware work-around. webOS introduced the card concept that we all use now, along with a very coherent design language, and the devices were cool (to me, albeit a bit flimsy) with full keyboards (I was super sold on that but have long-since changed my mind after switching to iOS).
I came from a long line of "alt" devices though, Sidekick 1, 2, 3, Helio Ocean, etc, so you can see where my sensibilities lie HAHAHA
I would also get freakin' roasted by literally everybody I knew every time they saw it for being a hold-out and not getting an iPhone, but iOS just wasn't there yet as far as I was concerned. Apple/Android hadn't cornered the market yet and it was just a time with a lot of options (Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc).
Anyways, when I heard HP was buying Palm (and AT&T did a deal for Pre 3 exclusivity, I think), I assumed it would be a great thing for the mass adoption of what seemed like a really exciting future for mobile. Then HP poured gasoline on it and killed it with fire.
RIP late-oughts Palm, we barely knew ye!
I still miss my Palm Pre. I've sat here since it died and watched Android and iOS slowly adopt the UI that my Pre had 15 years ago. We were swapping between apps with cards and swiping them away a decade before anyone else.
I had multiple friends end up buying the Pre and the non-slidey Pre (I can't remember the name) because they saw what I had thought it was so cool.
Now my LG TV runs WebOS, which I assume is the name with no shared code, but who knows.
> 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
Does anybody have insider details on how HP killed the Memrister? I'd be fascinated to read that, too.
worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important companies in the world—comparable to what Microsoft or Google are today. A true tech and market leader.
First, HP bought Compaq to gain full ownership of the home computer market. That merger didn’t work out very well. Later, HP acquired Ross Perot’s EDS, attempting to enter the services business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several years.
It was a time of turmoil—every other morning you’d receive an email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of employees.
Hurd’s focus was on increasing the company’s share value. He aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HP’s strongest traditions), essentially putting HP on life support. For example, HP-UX, which was relevant in the server market at the time, was completely abandoned.
When Mark Hurd was fired—accused of using company funds to give gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)—he immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HP’s strongest competitors in the enterprise market at the time. Employees saw him as a traitor to the HP brand. Internally, many people hoped things would finally change.
What came next was completely unexpected. Leo Apotheker, from SAP, took over. He had this idea of transforming HP into a software and services company, essentially abandoning decades of tradition and letting one of the strongest brands in the industry fade away. He lasted only a few months—it clearly wasn’t working.
Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a hardware project called “The Machine,” which was supposed to revolutionize the data center by relying on memory instead of CPU power. That was never released. AWS had already emerged, and HP had no way to compete.
Whitman decided to split the company in two: HP (consumer hardware) and HP Enterprise Services (enterprise hardware and services). HP-ES eventually migrated most of its operations to India. Around that time, I accepted a WFR (Workforce Reduction) plan—since it was clear I’d be laid off sooner or later. Later, HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.
It’s incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest brands in the world—a tech giant and market leader for decades—went to hell in just three or four years. Bad management, a focus on short-term share price, and a complete lack of vision can bring even the most powerful company to its knees.
At the time, many said HP was simply too big for its own good, that it was impossible to succeed in so many markets. I don’t think that’s true. Amazon, Microsoft, Google—they all do what HP did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management. As always.
The top level comments here question his judgement, are incredulous to the 49 days of unraveling, and wonder what relation his emergency surgery had to the fail of launch.
I also wonder how it was possible that the product lacked polish, was priced at XX, lacked an ecosystem, and he was not there to fix any of this in the months that led up to the launch which was immediately after his surgery.
But my insight into his words tells me the following:
1. leadership changed
2. stewardship was out-of-service for 8 weeks
3. new leadership worked on a different vision.
4. new leadership made immediate decisions.
5. new leadership canceled the product because it did not have strong advocacy and stewardship of the product.
6. new leadership did not walk back their cancelation once stewardship returned.
7. momentum for improving the product collapsed.
8. trust for hp collapsed.
9. steward blames leadership! for cancelling the product. talks trash about Leo.
What are the lessons here for this perfect storm? Don't have just one steward.
After the plug was pulled, I bought a new HP TouchPad on sale for £109. The software was decent for the time, and nowhere near as terrible as other comments make out.
If it had worked out, it might have altered the current landscape in positive ways. For instance, if they contributed significantly back to Qt this might have affected the linux desktop situation?
I hate to say this but when I saw this line:
> My continued shareholding isn't just a matter of financial confidence—it's a statement of faith in what HP can become when the right leadership applies systematic thinking to innovation decisions.
I strongly felt like it was ChatGPT and suddenly my interest in the article plummeted.
Interesting story, but the “DECIDE” framework definitely gave me strong “conjoined triangles of success” vibes.
I developed an in-house app for the Palm and supported it for several years.
The developer support from Palm was very primitive. They did the very minimum and it showed in the lack of software ecosystem.
I don’t think the leadership knew how to grow that. I’m sure they knew it was important but they didn’t take the steps.
> When I decided to “retire” from HP, they offered me a separation bonus—a significant financial package that would have made my transition easier. But there was a catch: accepting it would have restricted what I could say publicly about my experiences at the company.
> I refused.
Should probably have taken it.
> SAP's annual revenue while Leo served as its CEO was approximately $15 billion. The HP board hired a CEO whose largest organizational experience was running a company smaller than HP's smallest division. Based purely on revenue management experience, Apotheker wouldn't have qualified to be a Executive Vice President at HP, yet the board put him in charge of a $125 billion technology company.
ouch. this is actually pretty cool though in terms of putting SAP vs HP in perspective, which i've never considered prior.
In 2008 or 2009 Palm still had enough relevant legacy apps that they could have convinced me to stay with WebOS, but launching a tablet (no phone) in 2010. Forget it! That shop has sailed and youre not onboard! By 2010, you were either android/java or ios/ObjC. If they really wanted to present an alternative platform they should have been giving away those 200k tablets and a compiler/sdk to cs majors. They werent! It was a half hearted effort. Acquisition was probably to bail out board members with palm stock with a buyout.
I remember looking at palm webos devices in 2010 and thinking this is cool. The docs on how things worked were really good for the time. The hardware was sleek palm pre if I remember correctly.
I was not keeping track of who bought whom at the time an why. But was surprised when webos got shut down. Android was gaining traction windows mobile on the way out. I bought an old Nokia e63 around the time because I was short on money and I loved the keyboard. The article gave me some nice nostalgic memories.
This guy sounds out of touch on several dimensions... There is something about folks who spend a very long time in a declining business. Their world view seems to diverge from reality.
49 days on top of the year of him being there, and luckily he didn't sign an NDA so that he can sell his DECIDE framework at the end of the article.
This article got more fishy the more I read it
What a hit piece. The only thing the author seemed to have on his mind while writing it is revenge. Oh, and he’s also selling a course btw
When I think about HP as a software & services company, I think about the times I booked Disney vacations in the 2010s. The Disney web site for managing your reservations, looking at park attraction wait times, etc., was usually painfully slow, and the bottom of every page proudly featured the HP logo.
It's probably still slow (I haven't been to Disney in a while) but no longer mentions HP.
Apotheker had made the discontinuation choice without even informing the Palm team beforehand
Is this how big decisions are made in big companies? Or is this an exception? 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 was there and it’s true. Another point that people forget was the Head/CEO of Palm (which was an independent subsidiary) at the time was Jon Rubinstein who was head of software at NeXT and Apple.
I’m pretty sure the decisions were made before he was consulted. I also think everyone at the time had a very low opinion of the CEO of HP and the entire board. HP was dysfunctional.
After getting it on a very good sale I used and loved the Touchpad tablet for years despite some shortcomings. Primarily to visit this site actually. WebOS was gorgeous, innovative and smooth. Matías Duarte IMO is a better designer than Jony Ive.
I really wanted a Palm Pre back in the day, but they initially didn't offer them at all outside of the US, and later only in a handful of other countries. It seemed like they weren't even trying. The tablet saw wider distribution, but it was a joke - nobody was going to pay iPad prices for a plastic piece of crap.
Failure or not I have to say thank you to this guy. This left Jeff Hawkins with a substantial personal fortune which he went on to use to found Numenta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and none of that would have been possible without that acquisition.
Killing it so quickly after buying, it doesn’t look like the board were really convinced as the author believed.
Why would the board buy in the first place if it weren't the case?
Seems like the real goal was to kill it so the market could consolidate under iPhone. Internal sabotage. Now Apple is killing themselves pushing bad UI decisions and getting paid off to insert back doors into Messages someone can control the public narrative as we enter another war.
> WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it
Am I missing something?
Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4 introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1] describes it:
"To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g. iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the previous app relaunches it."
"In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and you’ve just “multitasked” in iOS 4."
Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose context in either app because they restarted. The OS was structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.
(In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either way.)
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3779/apples-ios-4-explored/2
Prior to true multitasking on iOS, Apple would tell you to tag view controllers for preservation so that when your app launches, the OS will restore the original view controllers, as if the app has been running the whole time. Old documentation here: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles...
(These days few apps bother to do this anymore. I switch away from an app in a minute and upon switching back I'm back at the app's home screen.)
The state preservation API wasn't added until iOS 6.0 in 2012.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro...
That's just an improved API introduced in iOS 6.0. Here's another earlier API that's available since iOS 2.0: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiviewcontro...
w.r.t. few apps caring about state, I recently upgraded my phone, which I had been using for a while and did not realize was a 2021 model, basically solely because at 4GB of RAM, I was getting to the point that I couldn't switch between any two apps without them all totally restarting on every switch because I was out of RAM all the time. I was also just starting to notice the battery was going but I could have managed that for a while yet... I really upgraded just for the RAM.
(Also I had to reset the built-in camera to factory state and tell it to stop updating, because it couldn't even start with my phone's RAM anymore. Weird thing is I can't tell you what it was doing any better than the stock factory version.)
But on, ahem, a "real" phone, it is nice to just assume that either I'm still swapped in, or the user doesn't care anymore. It's not quite 100% accurate, but it's pretty close, and low-effort for the app developer who doesn't have to be guessing any more about what state is and is not important.
That's interesting. Yes, I had assumed, with a kernel, that iOS was multitasking — at least to the degree we've come to expect it.
I think what’s confusing things is the underlying operating system is multitasking.
This is true - and WebOS was legitimately innovative here. At the time neither iOS nor Android could run more than one app at the same time. This was both an architectural matter and a UX matter.
On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back then RAM was in short enough supply that more often than not the memory state of the process was dumped to disk instead.
There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.
But the app executable was totally suspended during this time.
Whereas on WebOS the UX was oriented around showing multiple "Cards"[1] at the same time, but each one represented a live running process that was able to interact to the user and render new UI.
This was a pretty big deal at the time.
Since then both iOS and Android gained a lot more capability and nuance around multitasking.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4508/hp-touchpad-review/2
The Nokia N900, running Maemo, also supported multitasking in 2011. It was just toppled by a similarly dedicated team of executive fuckups.
To be honest there were a lot of mobile OSes at the time supporting multitasking, like Windows CE, because they were desktop OS (Linux for Maemo, Windows for CE) with little adaptation for mobile. That meant performances and battery life were not great.
That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".
One of the strength of iOS and Android were to create a completely different userspace that what we had in desktop OS, more adapted to mobile. They combined the "just works" aspect of feature phones with the power of smartphones.
Windows CE is quite internally different than Windows NT. It still does support multitasking, but kernel version 5 (which was on all the CE devices of the late 2000's/early 2010's) had a maximum of 32 processes. It was a platform specifically for embedded use, though the GUI was styled to resemble Windows OSes at the time and of course numerous Microsoft things were ported over.
Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to 10 were NT based.
Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29. 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.
> 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.)
+1. I sometimes hear nostalgia for the N900 but personally I don't get it.
Anybody could run a full multi-tasking OS on a mobile device trivially. The performance sucked and you killed your battery super quickly.
The innovation was in multitasking that didn't result in a terrible user experience, and it took a lot to get there! And the answer wasn't "welp what if we just treated this thing like a desktop".
And it's still not a fully solved problem - there continues to be a lot of movement around how apps are defined so that they can be efficiently concurrent! (or at least give the appearance of concurrency)
My recollection was that the N900 battery lasted about a full day of normal use. Maybe two but it was a dice roll. That was pretty much on par with other smartphones on the market. IIRC the main thing android and iOS were doing was shutting down apps to save memory. But perhaps I saved a ton of battery by not buying a data plan? At the time, I had wifi at home and work, and a 100 dollar a year prepaid cell plan.
And the UI did have plenty of affordances. Basically all the apps were custom, and I vaguely recall there being something close to the home / back on screen button android used in the early days. Heck, it's still a pita to switch apps on my Pixel: swipe up, but not too fast, or it'll bring up the full app list instead of the switcher.
But sure, there's plenty to dislike about the n900: it had a resistive touch screen and a stylus. Turn by turn navigation sucked for most of its life. The app store launch was so botched that it was basically dead on arrival. The microusb port sucks.
Elop refused to launch the Nokia N9 in ANY of their primary markets. He refused to advertise the phone AT ALL.
Despite that, the phone sold several million devices and people were paying huge premiums (often $200-400 over price) to get it shipped from these secondary markets to where they lived.
The demand was there and Elop decided to kill it anyway. He also never released the second phone required by their Meego contract with Intel as I recall.
> That's why those OS were mostly used by geeks and power users, and "regular" users were using feature phones that "just work".
The N9, N900's successor, shipped with MeeGo 1.2 "Harmattan" and had the most simple and elegant UI I've ever seen on a mobile. The phone-UI combination was a masterpiece. But it was still Linux, with all power-user features under the hood.
Windows CE had nothing to do with Windows the desktop OS. We're talking entirely different codebases running on different kinds of hardware.
The N900 battery could run down in 30 minutes due to true multitasking (especially when using the true desktop browser).
> There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.
I love this, such a classic hack
So classic they still use it! iOS now offers a lot more multitasking options, but for the most part when you swipe away from an app it's still good ol' Mr. Screenshot.
And if you'll excuse more nerding out - a lot of work is being done still to make this even more seamless. For example, iOS now heavily encourages the use of SwiftUI to define UIs, because rendering such UIs can be done by the OS outside of the app process.
This means you can have an actual live UI while the actual app process is suspended. They literally don't have to wake the process until you tap on a button.
It used to be that your app either got a full-time 60-120Hz runloop, or you got suspended completely. Now the OS can define a much more coarse-grained idea of "alive" without losing interactivity. It's super cool stuff.
1. WebOS lives on (purchased from HP) or at least a version of it on LG TVs. 2. Matra: End users don't care about the OS. End users don't care the OS. (or most all the technical aspects Engineers value)
End Users only care whether the product does something they want - make toast, listen to music, prevent stds etc. Jobs shipped products that solved actual problems - desktop publishing, listening to music, making a phone call. They solved other problems also but shipping a product that might one day solve a problem is not a product category.
3rd party apps couldn't do anything in the background until iOS 4, and it's always been a bit limited.
I think he's wrong about Android, although AFAIK Palm had a nicer task switching UI at first.
Yeah, Android had good support for multi-tasking from the start, though at least some early devices did not really have enough RAM for it to work well
Yeah, I am pretty confident I was able to keep apps running in the background on my T-Mobile G1 and some old forum posts I found seem to confirm my memory. [1] Multitasking/keeping apps in background and copy/paste were the big differentiators I remember on the first Android phones compared to the iPhone.
The app switcher UI for multitasking on Android didn't really exist yet though so WebOS was ahead there and I think that gave some people the illusion Android didn't support it at all.
[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/t-mobile-g1-android-pho...
It had apps as cards to easily switch between them, useful animations and a completely working gesture control. It was absolutely revolutionary and having to fall back to Android after that was a big step down, until Android incorporated everything from webOS a few years later.
He is right in his analysis I think. The webos devices needed a price cut and time to build an app ecosystem, as evident by the hype around the fire sale and how many people really liked them then.
I thought proper Android task switching didn’t come until they released the first tablet version (Honeycomb, 2011). Interestingly enough this was after they hired away the webOS UX lead (Matias Duarte)
Early iOS would pause background apps. Limited multistasking was added in iOS 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_4#Multitasking
I think the author of the article really misses the point here. While "true multitasking" might be a neat technical feature, it's not something that the end user really cares about or would base a buying decision on, especially if running multiple apps in the background at the same time came at the expense of battery life. Those early versions of iOS employed a lot of tricks to squeeze performance and battery life out of underpowered devices.
I must be missing the same, because I had a Palm back in the day, and the OS was IMHO absolute crapware
WebOS is not PalmOS based. Your experience is not applicable.
I actually own a discount touchpad. It was snappy as hell, promised to at some point have the Android app store, and could easily be jail broken by design. The software ecosystem was not even bad - my basic needs were all met.
The UI was slick feeling, like an Apple product, but the exterior finish was plasticy and more like an Android device. Battery life was incredible compared to Android devices of the time.
All in all, I really liked it. What might have been!
Are you perhaps thinking of the classic Palm OS on a PalmPilot or whatever, which was limited because it was designed in the '90s for '90s hardware? That was dead by the time HP bought Palm, they were onto Palm WebOS, a modern (for the day) Linux / web app based OS on the Palm Pré and Pixi devices.
Palm didn’t have a WebOS product on market until 2009 and HP acquired them less than a year later.
I don’t think HP was remotely interested in the previous operating system.
I remember thinking it was awesome to be able to ssh from my palm treo on the go 20 years ago - not all the PalmOS (different from WebOS) apps were crap, especially for the time!
When WebOS was released, it had multitasking whereas iOS and Android froze background apps?
Dunno, it's a pretty straightforward statement.
WebOS was a legit Linux OS and had a lot of good features...
No sympathy from me. Guy was the CTO, probably making millions a year, and now he's whining about how a $1.2B investment failed on his watch and nothing was his fault? Sorry guy but you are the leader, you are responsible.
The fall of WebOS (like BeOS) makes me wonder if the tech world is primed for duopolies. Somehow I feel there are parallels in Windows/Linux, Java/.Net, React/Vue etc.
Can confirm. Was an HP Scholar at the time and leadership was chaotic.
Good people though.
The entire section on bad decision making only deals with the decisions to ultimately kill the product. How would Mr McKinney deal with the decisions that led to releasing a product so rushed and so poorly priced than it initially sold fewer than 10% of the units shipped to retailers? At least some of these decisions (and implementations) must have been made by teams who he had underseen during his extensive due diligence.
There's a lot of buck passing in this article.
HP is the /dev/null of acquirers. Their crowning glory has to be Autonomy.
I remember when that was happening. Autonomy boasted a few flagship products around enterprise search and CMS. Products I was very familiar with as an implementer. Products that well and truly sucked even back in the early days when they didn't have a ton of competition. By 2011 they were losing customers. Even without seeing their balance sheet, the $10B price tag just felt it had to be a huge mistake.
I bought them on sale, I think it was 99 USD each. I bought two. Moded them at the time, don't remember if I installed android. Nice times.
I don't get it. Even in the late 80's we had these devices called "speaker phones" that facilitated remote meetings.
I was there on-site when HP was doing IT consulting (badly) about the time the Oprah giveaway led to giant roaming data bills.
Wait… HP sells software?
(This isn't a joke or sarcasm, I genuinely thought both HP and HPE are hardware companies?)
Apothecary is the guy who acquired Autonomy. Maybe ‘stupid’ was the right word
I just want Grafitti
i loved the touchpad. it was def priced too high and when it dropped i bought some for my family. the OS was really nice and they really should have toughed it out and iterated more.
Forget about Palm, BeOS is the real tragedy here.
Reminds me also a bit of how Microsoft killed Nokia
Something missing from this article is more depth into the issues of doing a webkit-based os back in the late 2000s/2010s, and this goes back to 2008. From https://web.archive.org/web/20140110095058/https://www.theve... (2012, theverge) :
"The way Simon and Grignon saw it, using pure HTML and JavaScript would have a few key advantages. One, it would allow large chunks of functionality to be implemented very quickly because the underlying standards were simple, straightforward, and widely understood. Two, Duarte was intrigued by the notion that his designers would be able to apply their handicraft to apps, screens, and UI elements without extensive assistance from engineers, all of whom had other things to worry about. And perhaps most appealing, WebKit already existed — Palm just had to port it.
Of course, it wasn't that simple. WebKit simply wasn't created for doing this kind of thing. No one working on the core WebKit project had a mobile device with limited RAM, processor, and battery in mind — certainly not for the entire user interface, anyway. Granted, Nokia and Apple had already ported WebKit for use in their mobile browsers at that point, but what Simon and Grignon were spitballing was a considerably more ambitious idea.
One weekend later, though, the two believed they'd cobbled together enough of a mockup to prove that Matias' vision could indeed be realized using nothing more than a web engine. They took the demo to software boss Mitch Allen; Rubinstein saw it not long after. Allen was impressed enough that Grignon was given approval to peel off ten staff members and crank for a month with the goal of bringing up WebKit and basic functionality on a very early prototype handset called "Floyd," essentially a modified Treo 800w"
[...]
"Prototypes of the original Pre first started showing up in Palm offices around April of 2008. Luna was far from perfect, especially running in just the 256 MB of RAM shipped with the original Pre. The system would regularly exhaust the limited space. To help speed things up, the Luna team had decided to port Google's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine, making Palm the first company to ship V8 on mobile"
[...]
"Mercer was shuffled into a new role looking for ways to optimize WebKit, but sources tell us that it quickly became apparent he was only using it to advance his cause: he'd created benchmark tool after benchmark tool showing that the web "wasn't ready for primetime" on mobile. And in a way, he was right — at that time, it wasn't ready for primetime, but Palm's engineers were on the bleeding edge trying to get it there. "It was obvious that this stuff was the future," one senior-level source told us. As the saying goes, they were trying to skate to where they believed the puck was going; Mercer was trying to skate to where it was."
It still feels wild to think of Palm attempting all this while Apple iOS ecosystem developers were generally writing code in Objective-C (Swift came out in 2014).
HP... HP...
Wasn't that an old ink company?
Come on, nothing had a chance to compete with the iPhone in 2011. By then Apple had released iPhone 5 (edit iPhone4S), a slick & snappy device with robust app ecosystem that everyone wanted (but most could not afford). There was no place for high end players.
Regardless of that CTOs ability to integrate HP and Palm, whatever they would build, it would be DOA. Unless if they tried to compete with the cheap android devices and race to the bottom for pennies at scale.
iPhone 4s shipped October 2011.
Oh you are right, I remembered 4 was released in 2010, and my mind jumped to 5. But they were doing the s cycles back then.
And the first WebOS device launched was not 2011, it was actually the Palm Pre in 2009. The iPhone 3G and the App Store were not even a year old when that Pre launched.
As a high school freshman in 2009, I can confirm that no teen in the Northern VA area wanted that thing lol.
They did however rave about Droid and iPhone.
The book Androids by Chet Haase talks about how the early Android team had a lot of ex-Palm people on it.
My dude such systemic problems can't be attributed to you being out of office. If a hurricane had hit hp headquarters you'd have been just about as responsible. Board made a decision, CEO made decisions, were they wrong? Possibly. What can one man do about it? Not much honestly, unless you own the shares.
I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It no wonder it failed so miserably
Let me completely absolve myself from my role in destroying a beloved company, unload the blame on everyone else around me, then plug my business framework.
Sounds like a great Silicon Valley episode plot.
He honestly thought UNIX on iphone was something other than multitasking?
A company that bought into the bad premise would be one to be done in by its own successive CEO choices that are legendarily bad.
Sucks to be powerless, but a surgery shouldn’t really have any bearing on the colossal failure that lived out in 49 days.
It’s a big, ready to fail HP on display.
HP specialised in snatching Defeat from the very jaws of Victory, always after the elusive $cow and all they get is hate. They have made some tries at additive printing = high end $$. They have had some success in that far from consumer field - but it does not impinge on me.
Shame an interesting post turned into a sales pitch
Seems you were not chasing the launch enough. I've been guilty of that before, missing the development of a demo that was meant to be presented to big clients. You may wanna explore why you lacked commitment and drive for the development.
Stupid strategic decisions ruined good potential. Same happened with Nokia's effort for Meego.
It wouldn’t matter. By 2010, tge iPhone 4 was out. iOS 4 allowed enough multitasking to be useful as far as most people cared about. Apple had manufacturing capabilities that Palm could only dream about via its Chinese supply chain. It had the app ecosystem. physical Apple stores, carrier relationships, marketing, the iPhone 4 was already a status symbol in China.
If MS couldn’t break into the mobile market, Palm definitely didn’t have a chance.
It is amusing how mainstream media's coverage of Apotheker's firing is opposite to what the author says regarding his attitude towards webOS:
> Apotheker stuck to what he knows best and decided to refocus HP on higher-margin businesses like cloud computing and software. He was particularly bullish on HP's acquisition of Palm, which was made prior to his arrival at the company. He planned to let Palm's webOS software permeate the company's various hardware lines, including PCs, phones and the much-publicized TouchPad tablet.
from https://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/ind...
Palm had the worst combination, the monolithic hardware/software approach of Apple but without the branding and services to make that approach a desirable platform.
Imagine using a Motorola Droid without the services and app ecosystem provided by Google Android and oh wait, the sterile corporate branding only a dinosaur like HP could provide.......lovely.
Watching your brainchild deteriorate when there's physically nothing you can do sounds stressful, especially something you believe could've saved your company. At the same time, I don't think he wants to admit that there never really was anything he could've done.
How would a slightly cheaper Palm compete with Android? It would've been like a pretty Zune.
He refused a generous exit package because he wanted to maintain his ability to talk about his experience with HP, but waited 15 years to do so? I think i missed something, or he's not completely honest?
He refused the exit package so that he had the option of talking about his experience at the company. It's not like he is compelled to.
Maybe he talked about it plenty in private conversations immediately afterwards, or semi-publicly throughout the years, and you just haven't been privy to those conversations.
Some people, on principle alone, will refuse to sign these sorts of NDAs even if they never plan to talk, simply so they have the ability to do so if they want to in the future.
He took the smaller exit package that was time limited on the muzzle to 15 years :)
Or he needed a subject to talk to to sell his “decision framework” to which the article switches rather abruptly.
Several reasons to wait 15 years come to mind:
- at first, maybe he wanted to focus on anything else for a while. Shame, stress and anger don't always diminish when you share something on the Internet ;)
- at first, maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his colleagues' careers
- maybe he was worried it would jeopardize his own career
- maybe someone intimidated him
- maybe he didn't have the bandwidth to share this for a while
- maybe he found more fulfillment doing something other than talking about this, and stuck to that for a while
- maybe he was waiting for a good moment to share this message, and decided now was the time
Can you think of a reason why he'd be dishonest that's more likely?
"I nobly refused these golden handcuffs so that well down the road I could continue huffing the farts of a company that is a shell of its former self. Don't let your eyes deceive you - they're still a powerhouse. Buy my book."
Is this what LinkedIn considers radical candor?
I went from a college dropout waiter to small town successful startup founder to Google, and Google somewhere between 3-5x'd my comp. I left, after 7 years, due to some nasty stuff.
It's hard to explain and I don't understand fully myself, yet, but there's a point where more money isn't worth some sort of principle you have, and it's a lot lower than I would have thought.*
In their case, I'd imagine having the unencumbered ability to talk (i.e. not needing to worry if HP would come crying if he got a job at Apple and did an interview for Fortune someday) would be worth more than whatever a severance package was on top of years and years of 6-7 figure comp.
This would be especially paramount if you felt current management was completely misguided on decisions you were involved, they were doing the standard corpo forceout maneuver, and you couldn't say anything yet because the #1 qualification for CXO jobs is a history of placing nice / dumb when needed.
* reminder to self: this is also probably the purest answer to my Noogler fascination with how high turnover was, given the company approximated paradise to my eye at that time
Author admits he held (and still holds) a lot of HP shares. Had he spoken out back then after the fiasco, HP's stock price would have tanked further. He'd be cutting down his own wealth unnecessarily, in addition to harming his prospects at the peak of his career.
Today he is probably past his corporate ambitions, and has a good personal relationship with current HP leadership. There is little to no harm getting it out now.
The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.
HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft.
Now you have two HPs:
- HPE, pretty much a shell of a company. Maintainers of HP-UX, (former) maker of Itanium servers and caretaker of Cray (but also the company that seems to have misplaced the Irix source code).
- HP, Maker of shitty printer products and expensive toner.
How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?
> HPE
Also with one of the worst logos ever. Have you seen RECTANGLE? It encapsulates our venerable company in two dimensional space. It's at least honest - Three dimensions would imply we're solid, and four would imply that we're moving anywhere.
Oh shit, that's their logo? I don't exactly know what I though it was, but I didn't consider that it might be their logo.
It's so subtle you can't even tell! That's what you get when you commission with a blank cheque.
> How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?
First slowly and then suddenly.
Well if autonomy bet worked out well they could have challenged Google. :)
Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.
True, both are solid networking companies in my opinion. Juniper is already slipping on support and pricing though, and we'll be replacing all our Juniper gear starting this summer.
HPE wants to buy Juniper. The DOJ has blocked the deal and that lawsuit is expected to play out next month.
Simple. The execs steal all the innovative IP, start new ventures, drain HP dry with its encredible decision making; completely fuck the Linux devs, use their works and contributions to OSS in the new ventures and then new waves of innovation/competition came about and what was settled upon was whatever looked profitable on quarterlies so servers, and printers.
I'm not saying that's what happened. But, it's a capitalistic type world.
I wonder how many companies had this play out? IBM is another famous example of internal rot of engineering excellence in the 2000s as the business shell was gives fresh coats of paint and varnish.
Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can easily find it using the same button on your android phone you used to use for quick access to emergency services.
We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI?
What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI.
AI.
I love looking at Coreweave's long description for their stock. It says AI 32x. That's huge AI to price ratio!
A lot of companies get this process and ideology about how things work ... and that's it, no matter what the business conditions they can't do anything different. Every department and every possible person who would approve or deny something is set in their ways.
didn't they turn down the apple I in the 70s?
It is not specific to HP, but to the top management style of that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these are the companies that are on top today.
There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).
It's pretty easy to pattern-match LLM writing even when there's been a lot of work put into it, and it wasn't one-shotted by the LLM.
I bring this up because this is a very smart person, with an interesting story I've been waiting to hear for years, and an important point, but I couldn't read it.
Not because LLMs were involved: whatever, that's fine.
First, I'm reading then get an uneasy feeling when I see the "That wasn't X—it was Y.", which is a tell of GPT 4o at chatgpt.com or 4.1 on API. [^1 for sentences that got my attention]
Then, as I'm reading, I keep getting a weird "attention reset" buzz and I find it hard to follow. I note that there are no less than 15 sections, each 3-5 paragraphs. This is / was unnatural in writing. 0 flow.
Tips I'm taking away for myself:
- Actively read for "snappy" sentences from the LLM, and then actively eschew them -- you can't be familiar with every LLM's tells, but here, I'd try to notice the repeat structure in a completely different, and the cadence of the phrase ("snappy", in my verbiage)
- Marketing-type writing is best helped by an LLM if you can get it to give you individual feedback items that you have to address, or at least, a set of suggestions. Code works well with LLMs because the metastructure doesn't communicate meaning to a reader, there isn't "flow": in prose, the way the text was assembled can be betrayed by the structure.
[^1] A) "This wasn't just a cultural mismatch—it was a fundamental scale and complexity mismatch" B) "This wasn't about buying a struggling phone company—it was our strategic entry into the future of computing platforms"
Thanks for delving into this! Very helpful.
I found the issue!
;)
At the end he's trying to sell his framework. Using AI for the copy isn't surprising
Agreed - I'm not surprised, hell, at this point...it is time for me to announce that I have adopted the position that I'm surprised and saddened if you don't use an LLM, at all, when putting something out into the world.
When I, and others, perform a similar action as a producer, I want to avoid the experience I had as a consumer.
The pattern sticks out to me, to the point where I have a directive in my LLM conversations, telling it to never to use "It's not just X—it's Y." So, I'm with you on this!
> We knew the computing world was shifting toward mobile, and our traditional PC business faced real threats from tablets and smartphones. We needed to be there.
This right here is already game over. Unless they were the ones making the tablets and smartphones and being the threats to everyone else, they had lost at this point one way or another.
That is what HP acquired in Palm and webOS: smartphone and tablet products arguably on par with iOS and Android.
That attitude is exactly the problem. Thinking "oh we'll just buy company X and check the [x] mobile/tablet box and we'll be in the game". The existing leadership probably smarted from that price tag and expected immediate results without years of investments like Google at least did. The CEO change also didn't help apparently.
I'd say this attitude is more common than many realize. Some seem to think "being in the game" is the thing. It's not just acquisitions - it's half assed investment in product lines. You have to win.
I mean, they were in the game. The problem is that they immediately folded.
HP already had plenty of experience of building handheld computers at that point. Their own and from Compaq and Digital.
That's something but the Post iPhone 1 generation of Smartphones was a major leap passed PDA's.
They needed an App store to entice developers and bring about killer apps. There was no logical reason to buy an HP Palm, it was too expensive even.
It isn’t game over, but the path to success clearly wasn’t to buy another company and release a product (that was probably already in the queue) only a year later.
If you compare what HP did here to what Nokia did with Maemo and its Nokia Tablets the board here 100% made the right call. The tablet market just isn't large enough for an app ecosystem independent of the two major phone platforms.
Nokia did what the author is suggesting HP should have done and it doesn't exist anymore. Going independent of the major platforms was a dead end. HP did well to kill it early. Anyone who's developed apps will point out that you shoudn't spend too much time on the tablet version. Just add some borders/sidebars and ship it. The markets not big enough to do more and the tablets are only viable today thanks to re-use of the phone hardware and software ecosystems.
Nokia sold millions of N9 despite zero advertising and Elop refusing to sell it in any of Nokia's primary markets (people were paying big money to import it). Despite that success, he refused to allow another non-Windows phone to be released
It absolutely could have been a huge success if Elop hadn't gone out of his way to kill it.