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HP Wanted $1.2B For WebOS and Palm
PolygamousRanchKid passes along this quote:
"As baffling as it may seem, HP was trying to rid itself of Palm without taking a loss on its purchase, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told [VentureBeat]. The company seemingly ignored that Palm's value had fallen significantly since HP purchased the smartphone pioneer in April 2010, thanks to the spectacular failure of the HP Touchpad tablet. And the fact that HP didn't make any progress with its new webOS phones, the Pre 3 and Veer, didn't help either. ... The $1.2 billion asking price shines some light on a story we heard from another source: At one point, HP's team tried to pitch the sale to Facebook but was practically laughed out of the room. And yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was present at the meeting, although he apparently didn't say much (I'm sure whatever he was thinking at the time would have been gold)."
1.2 billion for a property which they've mostly continued to run into the ground, apart from the patent portfolio?
In a few years, Facebook might buy HP for $1.2 billion.
Buying something and only then wondering what they could do with their purchase.
It has happend before. It will happen again.
Move along there, nothing to report.
Except, I'd really have liked to be a fly on the wall at the meeting with Facbook.
HP showing its usual ineptitude.
Disclaimer,
I worked at HP for 28years until they laid me off last year. Now I earn twice as much looking after the same customers & systems that I did before. Go figure.
They wanted to show that they tried every option, but they didn't actually want to sell Palm.
Why sell it and have someone else potentially give it a heartbeat again? They put it down and kept its assets in the event that they could use the narrowed field to their advantage in deep-diving back into the mobile market in the future.
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but when I dream, I get a pony.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Well, you can't blame HP for trying. If the folks at Facebook think the masses will clammor for a Facebook phone when the mobile market is already saturated, maybe they'd take the bait on acquiring WebOS, something that is more or less device-ready and which they could own themselves?
Owning an OS puts them on the same footing as Android - not as advantageous as Apple who owns the OS and the device, but it would be a step up from licensing a phone to customize for your app. Facebook today is still just an app.
Use the stash of Palm's patents against the obvious patent trolls. HP should then embrace Android.
Look at this "iPhone like" color Palm from 2001.
If anyone is going to purchase anything, it's google.
Google plus now integrated with newly acquired googlebook!
Zuckerberg does have that killer instinct for business that Jobs had. Luck did have something to do with it, but he;d have been reasonably successful if someone else beat him to it.
Some might call it sociopathy of course, but Apple did a lot better with Jobs than without, and I dare say facebook would struggle without a clear leader.
...how much patents are were left anyhow? why does everyone assume all the companies have patents - or that they have them left without licensing.
palm os was owned by palmsource, one version sold to garnett.. the only ip palm was sitting on was pretty much webos - I guess they thought they were smart fooling garnet to buying palm os from palmsource and then ditching it.
webos was then developed inhouse at palm(not palmsource).
that's how I gather it anyhow. so who owns the ip, the little there was to begin with? seen hp been doing much cease and desists lately? no? though google might still buy it, they got more money than sense(motorola is sort of a similar example, they don't sit on much patents either, the motorola that once was had been hacked up many, many times already).
(their devices can be used as prior art without buying what's left of them)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The summary sucks (big Palm fan here, BTW). The Pre3 was never even released. It probably could have done alright. In any case, something that's never released cannot be a failure. I'd personally love to get my hands on a Verizon model (but not enough to pay $500).
Zuckerberg has the killer instinct for business that Gates had. Take somebody else's idea, hustle them out of it, and then sit and wait for all the MySpace users to go someplace more cool.
So where's that Facebook IPO?
So far, Facebook has seemed content to grow their core business rather than branch out into other offerings. They also don't currently sell any physical items at all (as far as I know), so going into a really tough market like mobile devices would be a huge investment without any guaranteed payoff.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Given that there have been no takers, perhaps HP should post this little nugget on eBay and see what offers come in. As long as they set the reserve at whatever tax loss value may still reside with keeping WebOS et al., any higher bid should be considered a gain.
since Platt. Thanks, Carly. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Cathie. Thanks, Directors. And to think I actually kidded myself into thinking I could retire on my options. WebOS? Thanks, Léo. Thanks, Brian Humphries. See you at the unemployment office.
Yup. Edison too. Actually Steve Jobs too, since Wozniak was the brains behind the actual technology.
Not going to disagree with you, but there's a certain skill to spotting the right idea to steal, as well as actually committing the theft. Whether they deserve their success or not I make no comment but I know I'd not be able to be successful in the same way.
They considered selling off their hardware business (accounting for 33% of their revenue), and now they don't want to take a loss selling a company that they bought and ran into the ground.
Who, exactly, is running this company, and why?
I am John Hurt.
Nothing new under the sun. "living on the moon" execs are enjoying the new yatch, while workers are trying to keep up with mortgages and food. It happens in every institution, starting from Govt, public and private companies.... BTW, the Ark B is ready to go...
Yeah, I'd have to agree. People are quick to call Zuckerberg a genius for the groundbreaking idea that was Facebook, yet Facebook was nothing more than a slightly less tacky MySpace, and before that we had Friends Reunited which was almost identical.
There was absolutely nothing groundbreaking about Facebook, Zuckerberg just had the contacts and the business sense to be able to cash in on it and grow it better than even the likes of Rupert Murdoch failed so hard to do with MySpace.
and customers who ahve already bought in, a eco-system, outside developers that are already fluent, programs already designed for the system, etc.
But also the sense to execute it in a way that people wanted to use it. There /is/ something to that.
I had a friend like that... bought a bike for eighteen grand, rode it for eight years, when he went to sell it, he insisted the price was eighteen grand. Didn't get any takers.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well, you can't blame HP for trying.
After all, Schwartz managed to sell Sun to Oracle for vastly more than it was worth.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So far, Facebook has seemed content to grow their core business rather than branch out into other offerings.
Seems like Zuckerberg learned something in the time he spent talking to Steve Jobs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What? Smartphone pioneer? How do they figure that?
They were a PDA pioneer, but did very little, if anything revolutionary or pioneering in the Smartphone space. They just did what everyone else was doing... they did not pioneer anything in that space. They were already pretty much washed up and a has-been by the time the smartphone revolution rolled around. Not saying their phones weren't nice or quality or anything, just saying they weren't anything revolutionary.
smartphone pioneers? That's not how I remember Palm, they were the people that made PDAs cheap and popular.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I think you undervalue Jobs' role in the creation of Apple. For example, Woz really had no idea how to package the components into a case that would appeal to anyone other than a hobbyist. It was Jobs insistence that the Apple II have a switching power supply to reduce heat. Woz knew little about them. Basically every desktop computer uses a switching power supply now.
Woz has had little impact at Apple since 1978 or so. I don't think he had any involvement in the creation of the Mac.
Don't get me wrong. Without Woz, there never would have been an Apple computer to sell, but without Jobs, Woz would have likely never created a computer at all and would have spent his career at HP.
There is no such thing as a 'saturated' market - only if the market is selling a commodity, with no room for the price floor to drop or the feature/functionality ceiling to be raised.
In this case, the 'smartphone market' is anything but saturated. There are a half dozen or so competitors (HTC Sense + Android, Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Symbian, Blackberry), and they each have a non-trivial percentage of the market. There is room to improve on each and every one of those platforms. webOS improves in a number of ways on each of those platforms, some of which Android 4.0 -tries to implement.
webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them. Its downfall is shit hardware: well designed handhelds have never, ever been HPs strength (and they've fucked it up consistently since they bought Compaq for the iPAQ line).
IMO, if anyone were to be a good buyer for Palm, it'd be HTC. That would be a pretty picture, IMO.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It goes like this.. CEO of HP plays golf with CEO of Palm. Palm: my company is such a mess, we are going nowhere...HP: hey, I've got some 20Gs sitting here and... I will buy your company for those 20G if you pass me 10%, ok? Palm: deal!
Nokia still needs a modern OS which can support multi-core chips and over 512MB of RAM. Microsoft isn't able to provide that until well into 2012 so Nokia might want a capable modern OS before the end of their world in late 2012. That's when nobody knows who Nokia is anymore.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Now you've gone and pissed off the HP calculator people. Kiss you karma goodby. I hope they can't track you down IRL.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I agree, the only time a "saturated market" exists is when you're talking about items that aren't often replaced or when people aren't buying those items. If the market was saturated, we'd see GOOD new cell phones showing up at discount outlets being sold for a loss. WebOS products weren't didn't fail because the market was saturated, they failed because of poor marketing and not listening to what consumers wanted hardware wise. While I liked the pebble design, the market wants 4"+ screens or Apple products. Had the hardware been more appealing to the masses, the OS would have caught up. I sold a number of people on WebOS products, despite their dislike of the hardware, after demoing the software. IMO, WebOS and WP7 are the only two mobile OSes that make sense from a usability perspective.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Actually Palm is not that bad. Blackberry gave it a black eye, but tablets is where WebOS could have made a difference. WebOS was a great OS in 2009 and HP didn't want to let Apple and Google eat up the market leaving HP out of computing.
When Hurd left, the new CEO viewed it as a failure and never invested heavily into the product. He then went on and told customers, BestBuy, and suppliers he has no plans to sell it. Gee, that really makes me want to go out and buy one now. lol
So BestBuy got nervous and pulled the plug within 60 days of launch! UGH
Sunken costs are not popular at HP as witnessed with them killing the Alpha processor because they invested in Itanium, but the last CEO didn't care and made some enemies at the board of directors.
HP is a horribly managed company starting with Carly Fiona. When accountants run the company the value goes into the shithole and greed takes over. All the good employees leave and you have a company with accountants and no engineers left. Either HP is going to have to rebuff WebOS and beg BestBuy and Walmart for forgiveness, or sell it for pennies and accept the loss. That is a tough one for the CEO as the board of directors and shareholders will have a riot if they do not get every penny back! Ouch
http://saveie6.com/
Now you've gone and pissed off the HP calculator people. Kiss you karma goodby. I hope they can't track you down IRL.
Yeah, they're gonna chase him around with their wheelchairs.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Riding wheelchairs or dragging their walkers, them smacking this kid upside the head with one of their old-school calculators will knock him out cold.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Zuckerberg does have that killer instinct for business that Jobs had.
Um, no. He's a 27-year-old who sweats so much when asked a mild non-softball question on TV that he has to wipe the perspiration off his head and take off his jacket.. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were mature adults when they were 27 (1982). Zuckerberg is a child.
Advice: on VPS providers
I am actually laughing out loud, being a dedicated HP 12c and 15c owner myself. Since LOL no longer conveys it, I felt like typing it out. -- Josh
It not about market saturation it about ecosystem capture. You buy a smartphone then you buy apps for that phone on either the Apple or Google marketplace what do you do two years from now when you decide to get a new smartphone? Considering that you invested say more or less 100$ in apps will you switch ecosystem and lose those apps or stay inside whatever ecosystem you were in. This is why the smartphone OS market is so hard to crack for everybody but the few who got there first.
It was doomed to fail from the start despite being technologically superior at one point.
It was cuter than the first iphone and was way more usable, but it lacked the cult following required to sell the cute factor. It was better hardware than whatever crappy selections android had at the time, but it wasn't as open and it didn't have the native plethora of google apps so it didn't get the geeky nerdy following. It was a million times more useful than the blackberry, but it didn't have the support of businesses.
> webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them.
Where did you get that feeling from? The TouchPad has the most powerful CPU of any tablet, and yet it takes nearly 2 minutes for WebOS just to boot. Starting applications is a pain, and the web browser is not exactly fast either.
webOS has great potential, but it is not a finished product. That's the main problem.
Look at the track record:
1) Compaq: bought 2002: Product line disappeared, brand name wrecked.
2) Digital Equipment Corporation: bought 2002: Product line disappeared, brand name wrecked.
3) Palm: bought 2010: Product line almost disappeared, brand name almost wrecked.
If a company is bought out by HP than that is the end. My guess is that HP suffers from a very, very serious case of “Not invented here syndrome.”
So where's that Facebook IPO?
Delayed. The problem with an IPO is that you end up with a lot of stock holders which means that you have to do things like publish financial reports. Facebook and Goldman Sachs worked out a nice scam where Facebook sold a big chunk of stock to GS for a hugely inflated bubble value, giving them a single large shareholder. GS then create a fund backed by these shares, still giving Facebook a single shareholder (because they're not selling the stock) and allowing them to sell shares in the fund. The sold these to their preferred customers (at an even more hyped price) and then hyped it even more. Their preferred customers then dumped the stock off on whoever GS chose to be patsies in this scheme.
This scam will collapse when Facebook has an IPO because GS won't be able to massively overvalue the fund when their financials are public. By that stage, GS and their friends will have sold all of their shares in the fund, so it won't matter, but it's much better for Facebook to keep funnelling stock into the overvalued fund for as long as they can get away with it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually Steve Jobs too, since Wozniak was the brains behind the actual technology.
That's not totally true at Apple, and it certainly wasn't at NeXT. Jobs was very good at identifying trends. NeXT, for example, shipped the first workstation with a general purpose DMA controller because Jobs looked at how mainframes got better performance than workstations and said 'copy that idea' to his hardware people. The CPU wasn't stellar, but the fact that the network, disk, video and sound systems could all access memory without needing the CPU to get involved meant that a NeXT workstation with a 33MHz 68040 felt a lot faster than comparable machines of the same era.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I am actually laughing out loud, being a dedicated HP 12c and 15c owner myself. Since LOL no longer conveys it, I felt like typing it out.
If you hold it upside-down, it says "boobs."
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well, apart from the fact that they are sneakily becoming an off site communications platform, have payments transactional volume reminiscent of paypal some 4 years ago (this one I'm guessing based on zynga reported revenues), have released couple of completely flopped 'facebook' phones already (Reminds of Motorola ROKR anyone?) and have free access agreements with quite a few mobile operators around.
What is their core business again?
That depends on whether you consider your privacy a physical item. They routinely sell access to user accounts, their content and their connections to others. They make a pretty penny selling all your personal information, who you know and what you think and do to anyone willing to pay for that access. The Governments of the world are some of their biggest clients. For example, the US government may be bared from collecting this information without a warrant but they aren't bared from purchasing it from a private business. Facebook gives them the loophole they need to routinely spy on every American and the best part is that the people themselves are participating and assisting in the spying.
Fiona got rid of the calculator division a decade ago. The last good calculator that HP ever developed was the HP48 and that was more than 20 years ago. They still sell a few of the old good models but for the most part they don't have a calculator division anymore.
TV sets aren't saturated.
I take that back: TV display units are saturated. However, that's not what Apple would conceivably make. They'd make something white and beveled (everything out there is black and square), with something Logitech Revue-like built in (such as the Sony TV - IIRC the only one out there with Android on it at the moment). There's not much out there like that yet.
Apple wants to get into the ad revenue market. It's simple: they've only got a couple possible vehicles for doing so, short of creating a 'new' market.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Duh.
Like that matters to those fanatics. The GP said HP never made good handhelds.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
to get each other's mobile OSs banned from public sale. In the meantime, it would be a bright idea for some patent attorneys to look at the 'abandoned' mobile OSs to see if they conflict with the Apple / Google / M$ IP portfolios.
One of these days, a lawsuit-proof mobile OS might prove extremely valuable. Imagine the next generation of mobile OS products based on WebOS and Maemo rather than banned-from-sale iOS and Android.
And an object lesson as to why tech companies should compete on technology and marketing ability rather than on the ability to suppress competitor's products via legal means would also be a good thing, and better it be that companies I am not involved with provide it.
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