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I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days

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  • During this same period, he became laser-focused on acquiring Autonomy for $10.3 billion—a software company that fit his transformation vision perfectly. Everything else, including breakthrough mobile technology, felt like a distraction from this software-focused strategy. That Autonomy acquisition later required more than an $8 billion write-down,

    Apotheker wrote down 9.2 billion in 11 months and that’s just the stuff the article mentions. I can’t achieve that level of failure in a lifetime.

    Autonomy was hot garbage while HP owned it. Zero improvements to the product stack. I think the original owners bought it back and pushed out an upgrade that made it 10x better.

  • I assumed he hadn’t sold his stock because HP paid a dividend (which could’ve been substantial with all his stock from being there so long). But HP doesn’t. 🤷

    Sad story of corporate idiocy. All too common.

    “If it wasn’t for my medical leave, HP and Apple would be competing for the mobile market!”

    It takes a lot of arrogance to be a senior executive; the way he tells the story justifies his position, that’s for sure.

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    There was nothing wrong with WebOS. HP just didn’t have the cojones to stand behind it.

  • Autonomy was hot garbage while HP owned it. Zero improvements to the product stack. I think the original owners bought it back and pushed out an upgrade that made it 10x better.

    Lol, I hope they bought it back for less than they originally sold it for

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    I still remember picking up a couple TouchPads during the fire sale. That was my first foray into sideloading and retro gaming. Both tablets are now long dead, but we had fun times!

  • 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.

    HP's board has done a lot of messed up stuff. I wouldn't touch HP gear with a stick.

    I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

  • I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.

    That was particularly grisly. It sure went to shit fast, didn’t it.

  • WebOS was amazing. I was convinced it was the future of mobile computing. iOS was completely proprietary and Android was a dumpster fire. But HP was the worst buyer imaginable. It’s such a shame. What could have been?

    yes! I was just a child/teen when all this unfolded, remember clearly that I wanted to get the Palm smartphone with WebOS but never could as it never reached the stores near me. It was smooth and multitasking so many great UI/UX details.

  • I had a similarly high opinion on Meego's future at Nokia and then they suddenly went all-in on Windows Phone.

    I also had a somewhat high opinion of Windows Phone before MS killed it.

    No one wants to maintain an OS for any less than like 25% of the market — which pretty much only leaves room for Abdroid and iOS... and KaiOS I guess, though I don't know how much effort the put into maintaining that. webOS and Tizen (resting place of Meego) are now pretty much only in TVs.

    Nokia didn’t suddenly go all in on Windows Phone, they were bought by Microsoft.

    There were only ever like 2 phones that used MeeGo. Nokia primarily used an OS called Symbian before they were bought out.

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    I love hearing these kinds of retellings from industry insiders, I was deep in Tech and high up in the games industry, and I know the kinds of shenanigans that happen at the CEO and board level!

    But in my view the mobile game was over already in *2001-2003. That's when Microsoft had everything wrapped up in their hot little hands, but decided that mobile computing was not the future, and that embedded Windows CE on every device is the way to go.

    Everything that happened after 2003 to 2005 basically sealed everything in stone. I think he's vastly over playing whatever revolution was in his mind.

  • 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.

    HP's board has done a lot of messed up stuff. I wouldn't touch HP gear with a stick.

    (This is only tangentially related, sorry for the notification. I just want to complain. I hope you understand)

    I bought a used, old HP laptop with a fairly capable AMD apu for some power and cost efficient gaming. Problem is that even though modern games can theoretically run on it at playable frame rates at very low settings, HP does not allow you to change how much RAM is dedicated to the GPU in BIOS. They have a setting, but its locked behind a BIOS only they have access to. Its quite frustrating that I have capable hardware but cannot use it to its full extent because of this software lockout. Knowing that they lock their consumer BIOS' down like this is absolutely keeping me from buying HP basically ever again, because I really want to make the most of my hardware and keep it all alive as long as possible to reduce waste, and they won't let me.

  • And I've had two HP laptops work for over 5yrs+ without problem. The only laptop that died in less than a year was a Toshiba.

    Only had one Toshiba, and it was put together poorly. Thermal paste was improperly applied and it would simply shut down within 30 minutes. It’s hard to find a faultless brand, but cheap hp laptops are rarely worth the money.

  • And I've had two HP laptops work for over 5yrs+ without problem. The only laptop that died in less than a year was a Toshiba.

    My company only buys HP laptops, so I've had quite a few. Each one has lasted me longer than the company mandated refresh cycle of 3 years. My last two HP laptops lasted 4 years before I was forced to get new machines. I'm not saying HP is perfect, but anecdotes are only anecdotes.

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    That pissed me off so much back then. I was a big Palm/WebOS fan, having a Treo 600 and 650, then a Pre and a FrankenPre 2 (the Pre 2 didn't come out on Sprint, only Verizon, so I had to buy the Verizon version and swap out the Sprint radio from my Pre 1 and sideload custom OS modules). I also bought the TouchPad on day 1 and loved the shit out of it.

    After HP killed WebOS, I sideloaded Android onto the TouchPad and kept using it for a couple more years.

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    I never understood how they could choose Apotheker.
    He was literally fired from SAP in less than a year and yet HP got him as a CEO.

    WebOS had its flaws,but it could have made HP market leader - at that time Apple was far from "enterprise ready", Android even less so, so if they had done it right they would have every CIO in their pocket within 4 years.

    But of course that doesn't count for the next quarterly shareholder report. And Apotheker had to go "all in" on Software, because that's what he, the salesman he is, sold them.

  • (This is only tangentially related, sorry for the notification. I just want to complain. I hope you understand)

    I bought a used, old HP laptop with a fairly capable AMD apu for some power and cost efficient gaming. Problem is that even though modern games can theoretically run on it at playable frame rates at very low settings, HP does not allow you to change how much RAM is dedicated to the GPU in BIOS. They have a setting, but its locked behind a BIOS only they have access to. Its quite frustrating that I have capable hardware but cannot use it to its full extent because of this software lockout. Knowing that they lock their consumer BIOS' down like this is absolutely keeping me from buying HP basically ever again, because I really want to make the most of my hardware and keep it all alive as long as possible to reduce waste, and they won't let me.

    This is VERY HP and does not surprise me at all. If they don’t know why they’re going down, it’s not because everyone didn’t tell them.

    The regular HP printer threads are another example.

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    I developed one of the top ten apps in the webOS App Store. I released it about 6 months before they shuttered Palm and started the transition of webOS in to a vague "embedded and mobile things" open source OS that eventually ended up on, primarily, LG televisions.

    It was my first big success as a computer science student. When I started working on my next big app idea it was about 80% complete when the new dropped that they were discontinuing all phones and tablets. Palm used to send me free phones and tablets too, and I spent a lot of time in the community forums, I had reviews on webOS Nation, and so on

    I maintain to this day that enyo is one of the greatest app development frameworks ever written and I wonder what the landscape of web development would look like today if they'd moved faster to liberate it from mobile devices. The webOS team were also earlier adopters of nodeJS for their native services. It felt like living in the future using them at a time when the iPhone 4 was barely out.

    If you can believe it, after that I moved over to Windows Phone, where history repeated without the afterlife. After that, I felt cursed but, honestly, I chose both platforms because the stores weren't saturated with 100 versions of every app imaginable.

    They were great times. Five big mobile platforms, free devices, open APIs to work with - it really was a digital gold rush.

    I now have LG TVs in every room and it's so strange to use webOS in it's final(?) form. Wonderfully, there's a homebrew community just as there was back in the day, albeit on a much smaller scale. I've even made a wrapper for some home assistant features.

    webOS is dead. Long live webOS

  • I had a similarly high opinion on Meego's future at Nokia and then they suddenly went all-in on Windows Phone.

    I also had a somewhat high opinion of Windows Phone before MS killed it.

    No one wants to maintain an OS for any less than like 25% of the market — which pretty much only leaves room for Abdroid and iOS... and KaiOS I guess, though I don't know how much effort the put into maintaining that. webOS and Tizen (resting place of Meego) are now pretty much only in TVs.

    Counterintuitively, ms phones good reviews were also a good reason for ms to kill it. By the time ms got moving with phones, they were way behind and the market was already consolidating. They had a lot of inertia to overcome. They dumped tons of money into phones, exercised the famous ms marketing arm twisted, pulled out all of their usual tricks … and no one bought them. They ended up with phones that people liked, that got excellent reviews … and no one bought them. Even worse, phones were being sold on the strength of their app stores, and despite sinking tons more money persuading developers to port apps to windows phones, they could never get the critical mass of a sustaining ecosystem. It was pretty clear that even ms would not be able to overcome the consolidation of the market into only two

  • That was particularly grisly. It sure went to shit fast, didn’t it.

    Up until that point hp had a stellar engineering reputation. They could have milked that for many more years, but it takes real talent to destroy that so quickly and completely

  • I developed one of the top ten apps in the webOS App Store. I released it about 6 months before they shuttered Palm and started the transition of webOS in to a vague "embedded and mobile things" open source OS that eventually ended up on, primarily, LG televisions.

    It was my first big success as a computer science student. When I started working on my next big app idea it was about 80% complete when the new dropped that they were discontinuing all phones and tablets. Palm used to send me free phones and tablets too, and I spent a lot of time in the community forums, I had reviews on webOS Nation, and so on

    I maintain to this day that enyo is one of the greatest app development frameworks ever written and I wonder what the landscape of web development would look like today if they'd moved faster to liberate it from mobile devices. The webOS team were also earlier adopters of nodeJS for their native services. It felt like living in the future using them at a time when the iPhone 4 was barely out.

    If you can believe it, after that I moved over to Windows Phone, where history repeated without the afterlife. After that, I felt cursed but, honestly, I chose both platforms because the stores weren't saturated with 100 versions of every app imaginable.

    They were great times. Five big mobile platforms, free devices, open APIs to work with - it really was a digital gold rush.

    I now have LG TVs in every room and it's so strange to use webOS in it's final(?) form. Wonderfully, there's a homebrew community just as there was back in the day, albeit on a much smaller scale. I've even made a wrapper for some home assistant features.

    webOS is dead. Long live webOS

    That was a good read, thank you

  • Get Your Filthy ChatGPT Away From My Liberal Arts

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    gedaliyah@lemmy.worldG
    By the same token, you could just read the Cliff's Notes and burn down an acre of rainforest to achieve the same results.
  • The Prototype: One Step Closer To Fusion Power

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    You're forgettinf the simplest reason using Occams Razor. Nuclear energy would have bitten into Oil and Gas. Definitely helped lobby against nuclear power in western countries where companies have as much power as governments.
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  • Are Voice Assistants Becoming Family Members?

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    D
    A family member with no inherent moral compass or empathy, whose eyes, ears, thoughts and agency belong to teams of trained profit-seekers in a different country. I disapprove of this humanization of software.
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    They've probably just crunched the numbers and determined the cost of a recall in Canada was greater than the cost of law suits when your house does burn down
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    The title at least dont say anything new AFAIK. Because you could already download from external sources but those apps still needed to be signed by apple. But maybe they changed?
  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
  • Pocket shutting down

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    Can anyone recommend a good alternative? I still use it to bookmark most wanted sites.