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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.
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.
What?!! Are you saying they weren't serious when they offered it to Facebook? That's ridiculous. They have perfect synergy: Palm makes phones and Facebook has a mobile app and uses mobile phones. See? They fit together perfectly.
Neither webOS or Android is just "a skin" on Linux. Android uses a Linux kernel, but the rest of the stack is almost entirely custom and completely unrelated to anything most people would recognize as "Linux." webOS is closer, but still involves extensive custom engineering, especially for the graphics/video components.
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."
Facepalm...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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!
They'd have to be idiots
I think you've identified the problem.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
(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.