Here’s one of the most bizarre things that I’ve learned recently… HP paid $1.2 billion for Palm roughly 8 years ago. A USA Today story from April 28, 2010:
“This is a transformational deal” in an increasingly mobile world, said Todd Bradley, the former Palm CEO who is now executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group.
Palm’s WebOS operating system, which runs the Pre and Pixi phones, gives HP a competitive edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-connected mobile devices, Bradley says.
The acquisition qualifies as a “no-brainer” for HP, which used to be strong in mobile computing but did not make a strong transition to the smartphone arena, says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Altimeter Group. Despite the hefty price, HP made a prudent decision, he says. It needs a strong presence in the mobile market without relying too much on the technology of Microsoft or Google, which also compete. “For WebOS to survive, it needs an operation on the scale of an HP,” he says.
Here’s a guy from whom you want to take stock tips:
Still, Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin says HP made the right move but with the wrong company. “I don’t think the WebOS platform is viable long term in the face of its competition,” he says, noting that developers are more likely to create applications for iPhone and Droid.
The iPhone was launched in 2007, three years prior to this deal. Android was released to consumers in 2008, roughly 1.5 years prior to this deal.
Microsoft paid $7.9B for Nokia in 2013.
These companies wanted to be players in the mobile phone market. While these takeovers seem foolish, so does letting Apple walk off with all the profits.
I was in grad school in the mid 90s and HP who had never sold a PC came by and said they were going to become huge in PCs and I laughed, but sure enough, they spent enough money to become huge.
It seems that with Palm, HP decided they wanted to become big in phones and mobile devices, but then, I dunno, maybe the guys who could do that had left the company, probably fired by Carly Fiorina.
LG now has the rights to WebOS, and they’ve released an open source version of it. I plan on installing it on the same box as OpenGenera, OpenNextStep, and OpenBeOS.
HP, Palm, IBM, etc. business model is all around business customers first and consumers next. This is why they failed and continue to fail. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. business model is all around consumers first and business next. This is why they are still around.
“Digital cameras will never take off.” – Former Kodak CEO.
Hindsight is 20:20. The ultimate failure rate of high tech companies is near 100%, and it’s mostly due to failing to take chances on new trends.
@jerry
> was in grad school in the mid 90s and HP who had never sold a PC came by…
How dare you! I worked on an HP (MS-DOS) PC running Lotus 123 in 198(something). It had a 9″ “touch screen”. The design comprised 20ish IR lights on the top (pointing down) with electric eyes on the bottom (pointing up). Same with left side – right side. You would jab the screen with your finger, thus giving the 80×24 display an approximate X,Y coordinate to move the block cursor to. Same technology as the safety “kid detector” on my garage door. No one used the touch screen function. My 12″ monochrome display at home was luxuriously large by comparison. Needless to say HP’s premium-priced, not quite IBM-compatible was not well received by the market. It was one of the first (the first?) to sport 3 1/2″ floppy drives. 720k single sided IIRC.
Hindsight is 20/20. In retrospect, it looks like Apple/Android were the sure winners but the collapse of all the other competing smartphone OS’s happened quite rapidly. Palm for a long time was the absolute leader in handheld devices and had more experience with them than anyone. It should not have been rocket science to add phone functionality to what was already a well-liked device. Blackberry also went from hero to zero overnight. Even Microsoft had experience with Windows CE which ran GPS devices and such.
Google had zero experience in handheld devices (or operating systems) – they basically came out of nowhere. In PC operating systems their Chrome OS has not exactly set the world on fire. The main advantage they had was that they gave their OS away for “free” (as far as the phone mfrs were concerned). The old maxim is that if a product is “free” that means that YOU are the product.
HP who had never sold a PC came by and said they were going to become huge in PCs and I laughed..
Not long after HP bought out Compaq who had vast experience in PC’s, being one of the first “IBM compatibles”.
The first HP computer line came out in *1980*, as a response to the Apple ][. HP had a bunch of internal groups that thought they could make computers. The calculator division tried to scale up a calculator, the scientific instrument division and a couple other groups scaled up or scaled down other platform bases.
We had an HP-86 at home to write and use travel agency automation software using HP-BASIC, later moving up to Turbo Pascal on the above-mentioned touchscreen model that came out in 1983. (HP-150)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_series_80
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-150
> Needless to say HP’s premium-priced, not quite IBM-compatible was not well received by the market.
And so by the mid to late 90s, essentially they were out of the PC business.
> The first HP computer line came out in *1980*, as a response to the Apple ][
Key word: PC as in IBM PC Compatible marketed as such to businesses and homes, a market HP just wasn’t in to any significant amount.
> Not long after HP bought out Compaq who had vast experience in PC’s, being one of the first “IBM compatibles”.
Yeah, but given the dates, I think when they bought Compaq, they already had done their late 90s push into PCs. Doubtless, buying Compaq was strategic and critical.