I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
(philmckinney.substack.com)681 points by AndrewDucker 6 days ago
681 points by AndrewDucker 6 days ago
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The big issue is that they were a web-first platform, but their version of Webkit and JS JIT were years out of date which meant they were behind on web standards and WAY behind on JS performance at a time when JITs were still getting faster at a very rapid pace.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.
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.
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'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.
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
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...
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
“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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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
Interesting story, but the “DECIDE” framework definitely gave me strong “conjoined triangles of success” vibes.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Does anybody have insider details on how HP killed the Memrister? I'd be fascinated to read that, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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...
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I was a contractor at palm. The code was complete spaghetti. It no wonder it failed so miserably
Apothecary is the guy who acquired Autonomy. Maybe ‘stupid’ was the right word
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.