I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
philmckinney.substack.com670 points by AndrewDucker 3 days ago
670 points by AndrewDucker 3 days ago
> "Then, in late June 2011 […] I faced a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and a eight-week recovery period confined to bed. […] On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0 […] The launch was botched from the start. HP priced the TouchPad at $499 to compete directly with the iPad, but without the app ecosystem or marketing muscle to justify that premium. The device felt rushed to market, lacking the polish that could have helped it compete."
He claims to have been working with Palm closely for a year, yet he somehow must have missed how bad things were. The product was a week or two away from launch when he had to step away. To me it sounds like the bad decisions had already been made.
The price was likely too high, though that is debatable. However the real take away is if you want something like this to work out you need to invest in to for years. There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points having different predicted ranges!).
They didn't have the app ecosystem - no surprise. However the only way to get that ecosystem is years of investment. The Windows phone failed a couple years latter for similar reasons - nice device (or so I'm told), but it wasn't out long enough to get a lot of apps before Microsoft gave up on it.
> There is nothing wrong with getting the size of the market wrong by that much - it happens too often for anyone to call it wrong. It isn't clear what was predicted, but marketing should have predicted a range of units sold (and various price points having different predicted ranges!).
Shout out to the Itanium sales forecast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...
(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
If they keep predicting that, eventually they’ll be right!
(It’s hard to harvest more power from a star than a Dyson sphere is capable of)
Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.
Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too.
So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.
Those 2 charts are amazing! At least the Itanium people adjusted their curves downward over time, looks like the IEA just carried on regardless!
It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.
an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar
In the 64-bit server space, which is really what's relevant to this discussion, AMD was pretty much not part of the discussion until Dell (might have been Compaq at the time) and Sun picked them up as a supplier in the fairly late 2000s. Yes, Intel apparently played a bunch of dirty pool but that was mostly about the desktop at the time which the big suppliers didn't really care about.
Opteron was a much bigger deal than you're making it sound. Market share was up to 25%.