HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
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.
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.
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.
This would be an awesome thing if WebOS ended up on the HP Slate.
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.
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
http://www.androidcentral.com/htc-pay-royalties-microsoft-af...
OK, but if time is of a premium, why not just use Android, as it's free? Or build on top of Android?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a compelling reason to believe that HP won't make a mess of the software in WebOS?
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.
With Apple and Android clearly the top players, and Microsoft always being a long-term contender, I don't see how there's any room left in the marketplace for another major player.
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.