Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
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?"
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.
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.
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.
and customers who ahve already bought in, a eco-system, outside developers that are already fluent, programs already designed for the system, etc.
Bitter that he didn't earn twice as much for the first 28 years?
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."
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
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.
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.
Exactly right. Palm in the 1990s was pioneering, but they stumbled once smartphones came along. Not sure why, really - I mean, everyone could see that manufacturers would put more and more stuff on phones and eventually everything a Palm Pilot could do, a phone would one day be able to do. But Palm was a one trick pony that didn't adapt (or at least, didn't adapt fast enough).
Advice: on VPS providers
From the same company that rejected Wozniak's Apple I, they appear to try to make Xerox feel better about that PARC thing.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
(Shrug) That was the correct decision on HP's part. No analogies between Woz's garage and Xerox PARC can be drawn, IMHO. An inexpensive 6502-based micro board didn't fit into HP's marketing and sales strategies in any respect. No traditional HP customers would have been interested in early personal computers, and no rock-star product managers were itching to pivot the whole company in that direction, as later happened with printers.
Instead of helping to launch a new industry, the Apple I would've died on the vine at HP. They could have been dicks about it and stopped Wozniak dead in his tracks, but instead they told him to party on with their blessing. Under the HP Way it was considered a good thing for entrepreneurs to get their start at the company, and Woz was perhaps one of the last employees to benefit from that kind of forward thinking.
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.