Comment by ToucanLoucan

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.