Wow. I just bought a Pre a month ago. At least they'll continue to be a going concern (and able to provide me with support ;) I was hoping Palm would be able to make it independently somehow, though.
This would be an awesome thing if WebOS ended up on the HP Slate.
Really? They should be grateful that they look to still have jobs. If Apple or Microsoft or Google bought them, a bunch of them would have been laid off.
HP cut deep when it acquired EDS, from top management all the way down to the trenches. I don't think they will leave much besides (parts of) R&D this time.
That's because there was lots of overlap w/ EDS. They already had their own services division, a pretty big one at that, so they had to cut out the redundancies. Not the case with Palm. HP doesn't have many software developers, and much less for mobile platforms.
HP's recent track record of purchase and lay-off has to be at least as good (bad?) as those three. And actually, having recently worked there and having kept in touch former co-workers, getting laid off from HP with some severance isn't so bad, compared to the alternatives.
I am sure for many this is a welcomed event. Imagine if you had options, stock? This would be a nice payday in addition to having a job with a company with deep pockets (and some agenda).
Not sure what the industry analysis of this will be, but I like the idea of HP having its own platform to present to the world.
It reminds me of the 80s where the was lots of diversity in the platforms. The good news here is WebOS apps are mostly built on web standards so we have the best of both worlds.
Well, Palm is a publicly traded company. Their valuation is fairly objective. HP actually paying more than the market cap of 784 M. http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=palm&d=t
Groupon doesn't have that litmus test, and valuations and cash money are two different things.
I had hoped that HTC would discontinue making new Windows Mobile devices after Microsoft told them that Android stepped on their patents. Instead HTC is now 'licensing' these patents from MS. Still, it would have been funny if there were no major manufacturers for Windows Mobile.
I love my Apple gear, and I'm going to stay that way as long as they keep making well-designed (minimalistic externally) stuff.
But with the Palm acquisition, HP will be able to do just what Apple is doing. And that's great - integration between software and hardware makes my life (as a user) so much easier.
The main question I have is: will they have any taste? The HP slate has a big white HP logo on the user-facing side, which will keep me from buying one no matter what else it might do. (I don't want to be distracted when I'm using a tablet.)
It's funny, even though Apple has resisted messing up the hardware, there is still that "Sent from my iPhone" message which always struck me as having no taste at all. It is different because you can remove it, but still.
Yeah, it's the default email signature for iPhone and many others and you can change it under Settings->Mail, Contacts-> Signature. I'm not sure who added it first, but I find it obnoxious regardless of what company does it.
I believe the "Sent from my Blackberry" message was responsible for a large part of Blackberry's success, so it makes sense that Apple would want to do the same. It's a lot less obnoxious than the advertisement footers Hotmail adds. Still, I'd change it right away if I had an iPhone.
iPhone users rarely send e-mail with typos; instead, they send e-mail with (at best) nonsensical words or phrases in place of what they meant, or (at worst) entirely sensical phrases that had nothing to do with what they meant ('how big is that disk you got last night' -> 'how big is that dick you got last night').
As an iPhone owner, I've learned to double-check everything I type.
By awhile, I hope you mean less than a month, since they've been in a downward spiral and a month ago were above the $5.70 asking price. 2 months ago they were at $8 and 6 months ago they were at $16 per share.
It was a good thing you didn't buy it (unless you purchased December 2008).
This is very surprising. I'd speculated that Sony or RIM would consider buying them once HTC fell out of favor. Sony seemed to be a good fit from a capacity to deliver a high quality product, plus they have ability, much like Apple, to sell stuff at a premium.
RIM seemed less likely but given their need for a new phone OS, it seemed like a pretty easy fit. Corporate culture might have been a factor against them doing this deal, hard to say.
HP's not the sort of company that can enter a new market like this and turn it on its ear, but maybe I'm wrong. They did have the foresight to buy DEC Alpha, which seemed like a great fit, but then they did nothing with it.
HP's not the sort of company that can enter a new market like this and turn it on its ear
This isn't a new market for HP. They've been a leader in the PocketPC space for years, with their Axim line, and Compaq's Ipaq link (no, Apple didn't invent the "i" thing).
I wonder now what's to become of the Ipaqs. I assume that the Windows Mobile based devices will simply be phased out.
I didn't mean to imply this was a new market for HP. I meant that they haven't historically torn up a new market the way say Sony has in the past.
Bringing webOS to a Slate device actually makes a lot of sense; I hadn't considered that and honestly that might be the real reason they pulled the trigger.
Single: 1x return (100% ROI), confusingly 2x back on what was invested. This means a triple is a 300% return, or 4x back what was invested. A home run is a 400% return or better, or 5x back what was invested.
Along those lines, Save: money back = money invested
webOS was definitely the most promising of the platforms imo. It never saw much adoption because the political approval/development process at Palm was horrible even if you tried really hard to get your apps on it (see jwz) and it was only available on the one not-very-popular phone.
I'm happy to see someone who might do something decent with webOS take over.
Android's life-cycle and Bundles makes a developer think about saving app state information from day one. Something as simple as a configuration change, rotating orientation, recreates your Activity.
Since creating and destroying your activity is such a common occurrence you are forced to save the state info.
When the OS needs to kill a background activity to free up space it tends to work.
I get that a lot of people like WebOS, but as a developer it seems like the worst POSSIBLE thing that could happen is for a third mobile OS to actually get traction. Back in the days when Palm ruled the PDA market, things were good, but they're hanging out in fourth or fifth place these days.
Regardless of merit of their respective UIs, the absolute best thing that could happen to the mobile space is if one completely open mobile OS became completely dominant. And pretty much the only reasonable contender for that role is Android.
I would not say it is easy to get into. When I first tried creating an app using the SDK when it first came out, there was no good debugging, lots of things going wrong for me with no way to see what the problem was. Uncomparable to Xcode environment.
WebOS is unique but I wouldn't be generous enough to say unparalleled at this point. I don't think either Android or iPhone have leaped too far ahead in the last year. Android 2.x offers very little in terms of new end user features over 1.x and iPhone OS is evolving at a faster pace but if you take multitasking out of the picture (which WebOS already had) it's only an incremental improvement. The big issue of course is third party interest where the iPhone is way out in front of the pack.
Open source packages and linux kernel compiled together - really really unparalleled. No community, no support, no market, just a plain cognitive dissonance.
Man, that is a big pile of cash. It hardly seems worth it, but if HP wanted to be a player in the mobile space now they are.
But Palm has a (very long and storied) software problem, not a hardware problem. HP doesn't have much of a reputation in consumer-grade OS software development so I'm not sure how they will be able succeed where Palm failed.
They spent an eternity trying to develop a successor to the old Palm OS, then they abruptly threw it all away and created WebOS by sticking WebKit on top of a Linux kernel.
As a result, WebOS has been plagued with performance and reliability problems that they're still trying to address, and that shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with system software development.
They've also had a lot of trouble getting 3rd-party development off the ground.
But, they are buying the name and existing customers of Palm. Don't forget that the acquisition will also give HP access to Palm's patent portfolio...This is especially important now that we have seen Android targeted by MS for "patent infringement". If HP/Palm have a good device, a good OS and patents to keep the competition from pushing too hard, then they have a chance.
By the time you're done writing and testing a new webOS, the market would have changed and the serious contenders established. Right now it's still up for grabs.
HP's getting a hell of a deal here. They're now a major player in the mobile devices market, overnight.
Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.
However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.
Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.
What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.
If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.
I laughed because they were also a major player in the mobile devices market upon the acquisition of Compaq. Remember the iPaq? They were solid devices at the time and sold well.
Granted, your emphasis on WebOS is correct. That time, they didn't get control of an OS. Microsoft let WinCE stagnate to some degree over the next few years. We'll see how HP does this time around.
And way before that it had the HP200LX, a 300g DOS computer that ran for 35 hours(!) on 2xAA batteries (monochrome LCD). The closest today is the eee PC, which has heavier batteries, worse battery life [I'd have said the iPhone - but no keyboard, no coding allowed. But it shows an ARM-based clamshell is possible...]
That was before HP, the original garage startup, went consumer with Carly Fiorina. They'd lost their way before then, with Matrix management, but Messrs H and P were still around to unretire and fix it. No more. :(
First EDS and now this. HP is just going after mega deals but no real innovation in their own R&D. As an ex-HP employee I can only imagine what all they could do had they invested same in R&D.
The memristor alone is a gold mine. They've also innovated tremendously in making data centers more energy efficient. I'm not sure what you consider innovation, but because this stuff doesn't make in the news regularly like some pretty phones do, it doesn't mean large companies like IBM and HP aren't innovating every day.
An example of the point I am trying to make is that HP now has a consulting division that implements SAP (ERP) solutions for other companies. Why would you spend money acquiring businesses like that?
Memristor is a great example. But how much time between nano technology research at HP labs and end-user products being released? main point being will the money spent on acquiring other businesses be rather well spent if invested in internal R&D to speedup things.
HP is indirectly investing in R&D. It would take HP years to build something like WebOS on their own. They just bought 1500 patents and years of R&D effort with talent for a good price. I am not sure how they could top that.
I've been using the Palm Pre for the last month after using an iPhone for more than a year. I feel the Pre is as polished from hardware to software as iPhone. They are two different animals, but webOS and the Pre are fine examples of good design.
I've used the Pre (I have an iPhone) - it is incredibly solidly designed. Its main problems are twofold:
- It's slow. Really slow. If they can get a 2-3x performance improvement overall throughout webOS, they can actually compete with Apple. So far it's just not snappy enough to be a pleasant experience.
- The marketing sucked. Seriously, what the hell. It's almost as if they went out of the way to convince you to not buy this device.
In the area of performance, going with V8 sounds like a smart move. It's now faster than Python 3k and Ruby 1.9 if the Computer Benchmarks Game is to be believed.
I like my iPhone/iPad but it's high time Apple had some real competition.
It's really too bad that the software wasn't faster and more solid out of the gate - they had some key innovations that Apple still doesn't have: social media integration.
Do I want my Facebook contacts in my address book? Hell yes. Would I like a dashboard with recent Facebook updates from my friends? Duh.
Palm has an innovative head on its shoulders, I for one am glad they are in a position to have a deep pit of money with which to battle Apple.
That may be true - but is it faster than the 3GS on native apps benchmarks? Most of the iPhone's strength is not in its browser, it's how snappy the UI is on its variety of native apps.
Except for a lot of other things, too: iTunes client, App Store with millions of credit card numbers in its database, MobileMe cloud service, a chip design firm in PA Semiconductor, 5% of Akamai, 7% of Disney, a soon to launch iAds, and a soon to launch Game Centre.
People seem to forget that Apple owns a chunk of absolutely everything from one end to the other.
Palm's Synergy works better than MobileMe ever has (including its time back as .Mac). Its free, over the air and automatic. Handles calendars, address book and the like. And I've never had (or heard of) a horror story in which it synced and removed all the contacts on the device.
Apple has been milking the same, tired design cues for the last 10 years. The fact that people still think they have brilliant designers is a testament to the brilliance of their marketing team.
Palm shot video of everything at the Developer Day, and should be posting it online soon at http://developer.palm.com.
If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to create event-driven javascript services of your own. At the moment, you're limited to the ones that Palm provides.
They've also got a lot of other really net web tech in the pipeline, including things like a pluggable data service on the device that automagically syncs to CouchDB servers in the cloud.
Also check out their Ares web-based development environment, which reached 1.0 recently. Very, very cool.
I'm hopeful, but I'm expecting the worst. webOS seems to be a compelling technology, particularly because its SDK allows developers to use HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript which many more developers know and use than say Objective-C.
The reason I'm expecting the worst is that HP has never been a software company and not even Palm can change that.
If HP keeps the WebOS team as a separate entity (without cramming new management, coding practices, etc. down their throats) they'll win. If they screw it up, they'll have wasted half a billion dollars.
According to the press release, Palm shareholders get $5.70/share. The stock is above $5.90/share in after-hours trading. Is there some reason for this? Is this an arbitrage opportunity (assuming you could get shares to borrow)?
I have to think that HP could just throw $100m at the problem and build an embedded OS that's far better than Palm, without having to take on the assets of a long-since failed corporation.
Probably a lot quicker than it will take to save the sinking ship that is Palm. Sure this is a market penetration play, but why? Palm was a failure. PalmOS was a failure. WebOS might be cool, but the damage is done. Google is making good penetration into the mobile market, and they didn't need to buy grandpa to do so.
Yep but something really interesting can happen in the process of creating something new. Buying a company that was not able to provide great things for a log time is not exactly exciting IMHO.
Then acquire a startup that is inside that business. Take it separated from yourself, but just provide enough money for them to continue working better, faster, with more people.
Tell them what you need. Not interms of specifications, you as a big company are not good about it probably, everything will be too much formal and the resulting code will suck. Just tell your start up the final result, the user experience.
I think this stuff is doable, just can't understand why companies don't do it. I mean if you are going to acquire a company and this is a successful company in its market this makes sense. But with Palm what they are getting is more or less only the technology and the people.
Buying another company "instantly" transfer their assets/resources to you. The knowledgeable people, the patents, the deals with suppliers and clients, the brand.
Even with what could be considered infinite money, it takes time to build a Palm (and then there's the risk).
If they had started 3 years ago maybe. HP is not a software company in any significant way. Look at how many years of development Apple & Google, both very good software companies, needed to build their platforms. WebOS is at least a legitimate competitor today.
That's sort of a ridiculous statement. HP probably has far, far more software under active maintenance than Google, and maybe than Apple. Do you understand how many different products HP maintains software for between management tools, firmwares, device drivers? They've also bought a number of large enterprise software companies over the past decade.
Yes I suppose I should have said a "consumer software company" to be more clear. There's a world of difference between enterprise/support software and consumer oriented SmartPhone platforms. Still I'm sure HP could have managed it in-house but they're working on a 4-5 year deficit of time compared to Apple and Google. $1B to catch-up overnight is not a bad deal at all. Either way they probably would have needed to pull in outside resources. I can't imagine the OpenView guys writing a SmartPhone media player or e-mail application.
When a big company throws $100,000,000.00 at something it tends to attract a lot of people (either internally or externally) who are more interested in figuring out how to acquire as much of the $100,000,000.00 as possible without worrying too much about delivering a final product in any kind of time frame.
By buying Palm HP knows that it's getting a modern mobile OS that's already in use on shipping products. For a company like HP a known quantity is better than spending money on R&D it may not be able to pull off.
As a developer, HP coming out with their own OS makes me want to do about anything else with my time rather than write an app for it. There are already too damn many mobile OSes. But, buying Palm makes WebOS seem that much more relevant, and makes me consider it much more than I was.
Been there, done that, and HP is not capable of developing a product from the ground up that will be competitive in the marketplace. For them the best option is definitely to buy. I hate to say it, but they're a company that's out of innovation and out of talent.
Procurve?
Proliant (otherwise known as the best value enterprise servers on the market)
Let's not forget their various diagnostics tools and imaging products.
Printers?
Cameras?
Calculators?
The incredible solutions from EYP for building efficient datacenters, including their containerized solutions?
Openview (Sure nobody ever used it, but a lot of companies pay a hell of a lot of money for it)
But you're right, HP is incapable of building anything that is competitive in the marketplace.
Maybe they're incapable of building a cellphone that doesn't make phone calls, or of putting out silly little web products, but HP is massive, and has built some incredible network and server hardware.
You're right, they are massive, and I will admit that the only division I'm intimately familiar with is HP Software. At about 13,000 employees it's is a relatively small part of HP. I can speak only to that division, you may be more familiar with ISS and Procurve than I am. I have the utmost respect for HP's technologists. The tech demos and prototypes created are truly amazing. But lets be honest, the ipaq has been in maintenance mode for years and needs a complete refresh to be on par with current offerings from competitors. When was the last time you've seen HP enter a market with a truly innovative and successful product which was built entirely in-house? Networking is being augmented with the $2.7bn 3com acquisition rather than developing new technology in house, Proliant came from the Compaq acquisition, IPG hasn't done anything truly innovative in years -- Snapfish was an acquisition, they discontinued internal production of photosmart cameras two years ago, and much of the current OpenCall (formerly OpenView) came from the Mercury and Opsware acquisitions. HP is good at buying technology, and it's services, sales, and ops, are top notch. But they've either by intent or by misstep strayed from The HP Way over the last couple years and are no longer capable of living up to their slogan of "Invent".
You're a storied pioneer in tech, but you got massive and lost your sense of direction. You're about to acquire something of a microcosm of yourself—a company that pioneered an industry but lost its way as it grew.
The difference is that your new acquisition rediscovered its sense of curiosity and turned itself around, too late to save itself, but brilliantly so nonetheless. You can learn from this. Your size has protected you from Palm's fate, but you were slowly headed down the same path, despite even your well-intentioned yet insufficiently-pursued experiments with things like TouchSmart.
While this is a new beginning for Palm, it's also a new beginning for you. What's your tagline again? Ah, yes: Invent. There's never been a better time to make good on it.
HP is now run by business men, not engineers. If Carla didn't prove this to you, then you are probably never going to get it. The fact is, they don't care about Compaq, DEC, Palm, or even HP. They just want to pull in enough money over the next few years, until they retire. They could be selling Paper cups for all they care about the product, as long as they still get their bonuses.
I don't know if that's really true. Most businesspeople are not just interested in milking salaries. Like most other people, they want to do a good job at the job they've been assigned. Unless you have personal knowledge of the execs at HP, I wouldn't go so far; such a claim is rather personal and depends on a lot of individual factors and I don't think it can really be made en masse about a whole exec team.
Also, there is financial incentive to set the company on an innovative, profit-filled future; many (most?) executives hold lots and lots of stock.
I hope HP gets WebOS to be a big enough player to mean great things for innovation in the mobile device space going forward. Gotta love competition as a consumer!
<joke>I guess HP figured out that when print media dies, it can't sell as many cartridges and figured it would tow along a sinking boat to its tanker ship. </joke>
Whatever the case may be, HP needs to put blinders on Palm. Palm needs to ultra focus on one good phone. How did they forget that they used to focus so well on the Treos that Blackberry seemed pale in comparison.
I don't think that HP has a clear purpose for making this purchase. They held a conference call on the acquisition, which is available on their webpage, along with a transcript:
The first questioner wanted to know why HP didn't just build Android devices. HP didn't have a compelling response. They just mumbled something about "early stage market" and making webOS "more compelling". Oddly, HP then mentioned that they are still a strategic partner with Microsoft.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadThis would be an awesome thing if WebOS ended up on the HP Slate.
It reminds me of the 80s where the was lots of diversity in the platforms. The good news here is WebOS apps are mostly built on web standards so we have the best of both worlds.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/groupon-raises-huge-new-rou...
Groupon doesn't have that litmus test, and valuations and cash money are two different things.
Think of it more as, the perceived value way way way down the road of groupon == palm's value as of an hour ago.
http://www.androidcentral.com/htc-pay-royalties-microsoft-af...
I love my Apple gear, and I'm going to stay that way as long as they keep making well-designed (minimalistic externally) stuff.
But with the Palm acquisition, HP will be able to do just what Apple is doing. And that's great - integration between software and hardware makes my life (as a user) so much easier.
The main question I have is: will they have any taste? The HP slate has a big white HP logo on the user-facing side, which will keep me from buying one no matter what else it might do. (I don't want to be distracted when I'm using a tablet.)
I hate that bleepin' message. (I didn't know you could delete it.)
iPhone came out in June 2007 so .. looks like BB's did it first.
As an iPhone owner, I've learned to double-check everything I type.
RIM seemed less likely but given their need for a new phone OS, it seemed like a pretty easy fit. Corporate culture might have been a factor against them doing this deal, hard to say.
HP's not the sort of company that can enter a new market like this and turn it on its ear, but maybe I'm wrong. They did have the foresight to buy DEC Alpha, which seemed like a great fit, but then they did nothing with it.
Here's hoping for the best.
This isn't a new market for HP. They've been a leader in the PocketPC space for years, with their Axim line, and Compaq's Ipaq link (no, Apple didn't invent the "i" thing).
I wonder now what's to become of the Ipaqs. I assume that the Windows Mobile based devices will simply be phased out.
Bringing webOS to a Slate device actually makes a lot of sense; I hadn't considered that and honestly that might be the real reason they pulled the trigger.
So, yes, Apple did invent the "i" thing for consumer electronics.
Elevation Partners must be trilled!
http://investor.palm.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=369812
EDIT: Ouch, looks like they paid $9 per share initially. http://investor.palm.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=246860
Question: is Palm's web os platform really unparalleled? Or is it quickly falling behind the race that is now dominated by iPhone and android?
I'm happy to see someone who might do something decent with webOS take over.
Android's life-cycle and Bundles makes a developer think about saving app state information from day one. Something as simple as a configuration change, rotating orientation, recreates your Activity.
Since creating and destroying your activity is such a common occurrence you are forced to save the state info.
When the OS needs to kill a background activity to free up space it tends to work.
Really good YouTube video explaining this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL6gSd4ugSI
Palm may have nailed the UX, but Android nailed the engineering.
Regardless of merit of their respective UIs, the absolute best thing that could happen to the mobile space is if one completely open mobile OS became completely dominant. And pretty much the only reasonable contender for that role is Android.
But Palm has a (very long and storied) software problem, not a hardware problem. HP doesn't have much of a reputation in consumer-grade OS software development so I'm not sure how they will be able succeed where Palm failed.
Though Palm Pre and Pixi didnt sell as expected, Palm's WebOS has received pretty decent feedback from all over.
As a result, WebOS has been plagued with performance and reliability problems that they're still trying to address, and that shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with system software development.
They've also had a lot of trouble getting 3rd-party development off the ground.
OK, but if time is of a premium, why not just use Android, as it's free? Or build on top of Android?
Palm has current relationships with the three biggest American cell carriers, plus channels in Canada, France, Germany, UK, and Mexico. Palm also has an extensive patent portfolio, many of which Apple is infringing upon.
However, the real prize is WebOS. I just got back from Palm's Developer Day, and their technology stack for their next OS version is pretty damn neat. It's a high performance event-driven javascript architecture on the back end, with WebKit on the front, all programmed through a Rails-ish MVC model. As a web developer, it looks shockingly easy to program for.
Of course, if you want to program the phone in raw C/C++ and SDL, you can do that too. It's incredibly flexible.
What Palm has been lacking is cash and time. The WebOS development stack won't be fully built out until Fall, and they haven't had the resources to push new phone models out as quickly as they need. This deal gives Palm much needed juice, and gives HP all the things they need to go head-to-head with Apple.
If HP is smart, they'll start tossing WebOS on tablets as soon as they can. I'd buy an HP slate with WebOS in a heartbeat.
Granted, your emphasis on WebOS is correct. That time, they didn't get control of an OS. Microsoft let WinCE stagnate to some degree over the next few years. We'll see how HP does this time around.
That was before HP, the original garage startup, went consumer with Carly Fiorina. They'd lost their way before then, with Matrix management, but Messrs H and P were still around to unretire and fix it. No more. :(
Memristor is a great example. But how much time between nano technology research at HP labs and end-user products being released? main point being will the money spent on acquiring other businesses be rather well spent if invested in internal R&D to speedup things.
Except for the one thing that makes apple products special: Design.
- It's slow. Really slow. If they can get a 2-3x performance improvement overall throughout webOS, they can actually compete with Apple. So far it's just not snappy enough to be a pleasant experience.
- The marketing sucked. Seriously, what the hell. It's almost as if they went out of the way to convince you to not buy this device.
I like my iPhone/iPad but it's high time Apple had some real competition.
Do I want my Facebook contacts in my address book? Hell yes. Would I like a dashboard with recent Facebook updates from my friends? Duh.
Palm has an innovative head on its shoulders, I for one am glad they are in a position to have a deep pit of money with which to battle Apple.
Plus if you overclock, it's actually faster than the 3GS on the JS benchmarks.
That may be true - but is it faster than the 3GS on native apps benchmarks? Most of the iPhone's strength is not in its browser, it's how snappy the UI is on its variety of native apps.
People seem to forget that Apple owns a chunk of absolutely everything from one end to the other.
Palm's Synergy works better than MobileMe ever has (including its time back as .Mac). Its free, over the air and automatic. Handles calendars, address book and the like. And I've never had (or heard of) a horror story in which it synced and removed all the contacts on the device.
If you're interested in taking a look, the Webkit/V8 MVC bits are all there today. The upcoming part is the ability to create event-driven javascript services of your own. At the moment, you're limited to the ones that Palm provides.
They've also got a lot of other really net web tech in the pipeline, including things like a pluggable data service on the device that automagically syncs to CouchDB servers in the cloud.
Also check out their Ares web-based development environment, which reached 1.0 recently. Very, very cool.
The reason I'm expecting the worst is that HP has never been a software company and not even Palm can change that.
Think of it as $100m for a great mobile OS and $1.1billion for a time machine.
Tell them what you need. Not interms of specifications, you as a big company are not good about it probably, everything will be too much formal and the resulting code will suck. Just tell your start up the final result, the user experience.
I think this stuff is doable, just can't understand why companies don't do it. I mean if you are going to acquire a company and this is a successful company in its market this makes sense. But with Palm what they are getting is more or less only the technology and the people.
Even with what could be considered infinite money, it takes time to build a Palm (and then there's the risk).
By buying Palm HP knows that it's getting a modern mobile OS that's already in use on shipping products. For a company like HP a known quantity is better than spending money on R&D it may not be able to pull off.
But you're right, HP is incapable of building anything that is competitive in the marketplace.
Maybe they're incapable of building a cellphone that doesn't make phone calls, or of putting out silly little web products, but HP is massive, and has built some incredible network and server hardware.
Please don't mess this up.
You're a storied pioneer in tech, but you got massive and lost your sense of direction. You're about to acquire something of a microcosm of yourself—a company that pioneered an industry but lost its way as it grew.
The difference is that your new acquisition rediscovered its sense of curiosity and turned itself around, too late to save itself, but brilliantly so nonetheless. You can learn from this. Your size has protected you from Palm's fate, but you were slowly headed down the same path, despite even your well-intentioned yet insufficiently-pursued experiments with things like TouchSmart.
While this is a new beginning for Palm, it's also a new beginning for you. What's your tagline again? Ah, yes: Invent. There's never been a better time to make good on it.
Also, there is financial incentive to set the company on an innovative, profit-filled future; many (most?) executives hold lots and lots of stock.
All, probably.
I quit HP early this year (around 18 months after I joined HP in an aquisition). After that experience, I can't believe HP continues to grow at all.
Whatever the case may be, HP needs to put blinders on Palm. Palm needs to ultra focus on one good phone. How did they forget that they used to focus so well on the Treos that Blackberry seemed pale in comparison.
http://www.hp.com/investor/webcast
The first questioner wanted to know why HP didn't just build Android devices. HP didn't have a compelling response. They just mumbled something about "early stage market" and making webOS "more compelling". Oddly, HP then mentioned that they are still a strategic partner with Microsoft.