I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
486 comments
·June 13, 2025iconara
bluGill
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.
joecool1029
> 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_...
duskwuff
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...)
c-linkage
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.
ghaff
Itanium needs a lot longer discussion than can be covered in an HN comment.
https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-sinking-of-itanic-...
wmf
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.
lukevp
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.
7thaccount
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.
wvenable
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.
goosedragons
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.
pantalaimon
> They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
That then became WSL1
patchtopic
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.
ssl-3
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.
blackguardx
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.
virtue3
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.
KronisLV
> 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.
cogman10
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.
vjvjvjvjghv
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
codr7
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.
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adastra22
> 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.
microtherion
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.
null
Joeri
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.
fakedang
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.
halflife
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.
fmorel
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.
brulard
Although amusing, I hoped you would share more insight to the situation.
halflife
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.
myvoiceismypass
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.
hn_throwaway_99
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.
rawgabbit
Apotheker was the product of HP’s incompetent board. The board fired Mark Hurd who had rescued the company after Carly Fiorina’s disastrous tenure. Hurd, was investigated for sexual harassment, found innocent, and fired for inappropriate expenses.
The board then hired Apotheker whose grand strategy was to sell everything including the printer business and buy Autonomy a hot British company. The board signed off on this. It is the equivalent of selling your farm and tractor for some magical beans.
mitthrowaway2
The people at the top are paid a fortune because they're indeed the very best.
tlogan
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.
knuckleheadsmif
I was at Palm when launched working on the device end user software startup experience. The software I think was ready but the hardware was far inferior to the current iPad at the time. However it’s possible that the next iteration could have been more competitive, they just had to stick with it. But neither the hardware or software mattered because it was the CEO who killed it through poor long term judgement As the author noted.
[I remember sitting in meetings where HP seemed proud to be selling more and more PC at below their manufacturing costs. They raced to the bottom and were happy they were gaining market share in the race to the bottom.]
zubiaur
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.
buildbot
That’s a little uncharitable I think, you could know all those issues and be hoping that marketing and management will hold off on a launch until things are set. And the pricing made a huge difference - at 250, it would have been a different story I think!
foobiekr
No one holds off a launch of a hardware device. Logistics production etc are all lined up and underway long before two weeks out. Two weeks out you’ve already shipped boxes to retailers a month prior.
mlinsey
It was a hardware device launch, not a web product; pushing back the launch date by months or dropping the price in half with only two weeks to go (when the launch devices have been manufactured, sold to retail partners, and are probably being shipped to stores already) would only be done in the event of a true catastrophe (something along the lines of a gross safety problem), one big enough that leadership should have flagged it beforehand.
Wurdan
A CTO shouldn’t be “hoping”, a CTO should have been influencing those decisions (including pricing) all along. If he only realized the price was wrong when the product hit the shelves (while he was in bed recovering), then he has no place in lecturing others on their lack of strategic perspective.
ToucanLoucan
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.
ndiddy
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.
aidenn0
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.
EPWN3D
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.
fisherjeff
Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…
x0x0
Pivoted to shilling halfway down.
And the acquisition was entirely incompetent. These devices need a software ecosystem. Purchasing the company without the acquirer having a bought-in plan to build that ecosystem was just dumb. And that would have required a company willing to lose money likely for half a decade minimum.
jonny_eh
> 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.
ang_cire
> 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.
phkahler
>> 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."
Henchman21
> "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.
mlinhares
They were all very successful at doing that. The financialization of everything was the death of all these businesses.
ang_cire
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.
cycomanic
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.
technol0gic
the old "it's all the same shit" fallacy that i loathe so dearly
roughly
Defector had a great piece on roughly this point: https://defector.com/how-will-the-golden-age-of-making-it-wo...
nradov
You can't blame an MBA for this debacle. Léo Apotheker studied economics in college and had no formal education in management.
mbesto
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-...
vjvjvjvjghv
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.
Affric
You say 90s but sounds suspiciously like John Scully and Apple in the 80s
quantified
Lou Gerstner at IBM is probably the outlier that supported this line of thinking. He was at Amex, RJR Nabisco before IBM.
StillBored
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.
isleyaardvark
Was that intended to be similar to the real life movement of John Sculley from Pepsi to Apple?
geodel
> 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.
DannyBee
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!
tlogan
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.
bluGill
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.
freeone3000
Most companies that have been around for decades would be absolutely fine with a mediocre CEO.
klank
In my opinion, mediocre is an excellent strategy when optimizing for longevity and durability.
scarface_74
ie Google
RajT88
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.
WarOnPrivacy
I need this part explained to me.
And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
The only way that remark makes sense:
1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.
DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.
Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.
Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.
Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....
As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.
jeroenhd
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".
mort96
MacBook Airs are marketed towards consumers, and they're certainly not trash, are they?
bradfa
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.
lotsofpulp
> 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....
sundarurfriend
> 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.
bluGill
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.
charlieyu1
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.
hn_throwaway_99
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.
diegof79
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.
alnwlsn
You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.
bluGill
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.
draculero
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.
EasyMark
About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.
zrobotics
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.
senderista
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.
melbourne_mat
Had a black and white laserjet printer in the late 1980s. Was a magnificent device and super reliable.
rsstack
> 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).
dpedu
HPE sold its software arm to Micro Focus subsequently as well
_whiteCaps_
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.
melbourne_mat
> 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.
stapedium
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.
dcminter
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.
necovek
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.
WarOnPrivacy
> 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.
Sohcahtoa82
Their laserjets are fine. It's the inkjets that have all the major problems.
zrobotics
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.
phkahler
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.
onli
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.
phatskat
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.
cogman10
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.
IshKebab
> 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.
FlyingSnake
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.
jmtulloss
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.
wvenable
> 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.
onli
> 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.
RajT88
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.
biorach
> 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_
xeromal
I'm pretty sure I bought one for 99$ but I can't remember if that was directly from HP. I LOVED that thign
maxsilver
(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.
guywithahat
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.
bluGill
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.
paxys
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.
Aloha
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.
potatolicious
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.
dec0dedab0de
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.
paxys
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).
phonon
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.
bluGill
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).
thaumasiotes
> 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.
FirmwareBurner
>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.
bee_rider
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.
coredog64
Circa 2005, HP did a licensing deal with Apple to sell their own iPod Photo.
null
al_borland
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.
mosdl
From what I heared (I had some popular webos apps) the touchpad hardware was forced by HP onto the webos team.
commandlinefan
> 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.
Tteriffic
Vision Pro, different kind of device but same idea
throwanem
No one wants it, though.
scarface_74
The Apple Watch though is much more successful than the iPod ever was.
navigate8310
HP had successful lineup of pocket PC devices that is iPAQ, so I still believe they could've made WebOS as alternate.
cmrdporcupine
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.
Zigurd
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.
hajile
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.
Aaargh20318
> 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.
snoman
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.
PaulHoule
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.
Not4Hire
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
happycube
Remember too that from the Nokia board POV selling the phone division to MS was a $1B+ dollar exit.
justsomehnguy
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.
Zigurd
Nokia had credible mobile OSs for modern phones. Windows Phone was not one.
legitster
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.
neuroelectron
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.
Lammy
I'm selling OxyContin on my Palm Pixi / man, chicken sandwiches, they cost a clam fifty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GMavkkkFtQ
nwienert
Just want to agree, WebOS was incredibly good, the Palm Pre and Pixi were both great. HP 100% killed it.
IntrepidPig
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?
teruakohatu
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.
mulmen
> 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.
b0a04gl
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
lesuorac
> 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?
mrpippy
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.
hnlmorg
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
e_y_
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...
giantrobot
> 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.
hnlmorg
> 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.
idkwhattocallme
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.
timschmidt
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.
hajile
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.
timschmidt
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.
hajile
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...
> "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.