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Comment by fisherjeff | Hacker News Reader

Definitely feels more like a brand building exercise than anything else…

Pivoted to shilling halfway down.

And the acquisition was entirely incompetent. These devices need a software ecosystem. Purchasing the company without the acquirer having a bought-in plan to build that ecosystem was just dumb. And that would have required a company willing to lose money likely for half a decade minimum.

> But because I wasn't there during the critical 49 days when the decision was made to kill WebOS, somehow the failure became my responsibility.

Wow, so whiney. He's an executive, a leader. A captain doesn't complain if the crew is mad at him, for any reason.

Exactly! It is your responsibility, like it or not. That’s what the money’s for!

... and it is their job to actually find somebody to represent the agreed-on goals and make damn sure that the leadership will listen them. If you're as a manager / team leader whatnot alone in your skillset and trained nobody to represent you and your vision, you did a bad job of management.

I’m going to stick up for him on this point. It’s likely there’s no way to get the right person in the room to argue on his behalf. Much as I think it’s not a good organisational structure, it’s very likely that the CTO title was the only thing that got him into conversations with the board or C-suite, they wouldn’t speak to a VP at all, even if he asked them to.

This is well after the fact though, and it does sound like in this circumstance he was treated unfairly. I don’t begrudge him some annoyance/complaining now.

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