HP sells Palm trademarks | Hacker News Reader

HP sells Palm trademarks

arstechnica.com

41 pointsrcarmo16 comments

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Palm was way ahead of time with webOS.

It featured so many things that simply weren't there in iOS and android:

- Multitasking

- Wireless Battery Charging (Touchstone)

- Over the air Updates

- HTML5 based GUI

- JS Api

- Touch gestures

- Cloud Sync (Apps, Settings, Data)

- Facebook, LinkedIn, GMail integration with Contact List

- many things I surely forgot...

The first Palm Pre had slight quality problems and the battery life wasn't good enough.

Unfortunately Palm didn't have enough time to fix these issues and was bought by HP. Everybody went: "Whoa! They really have a chance now against Apple and Google due to HP's money and scale."

Then the epic fail began when Mark Hurd (then CEO of HP) bought spent some company money for the secretary he was secretly having an affair with. He was replaced with the Leo Apotheker who was just fired from SAP (by the time I worked for SAP and trust me he seemed to be very "special").

Apotheker didn't understand the vision HP had for WebOS and Phones and wanted to get entirely rid of HPs Hardware Business (Imagine Mercedes Benz stop selling cars and putting it's focus on engines instead... o_O). The by then HPalm Product Line was actually very solid: HP Pre3, HP Veer, HP Touchpad. Unfortunately only a few weeks after market introduction everything was killed of by Leo.

So Apotheker rather sooner than later proofed himself as completely insane in the eyes of board and investors and needed to "leave the company to pursue new opportunites outside of HP"(c).

This made room for Meg Whitman who was feared to revert Apothekers decisions concerning webOS. Yes, it would have been a risk but when executed correctly there was a chance to win market shares. No risk no fun I guess...

So great products failed because of bad leadership decisions.

Probably a good deal for the phone manufacturer that purchased it; Palm is a well-known name among a previous generation of electronics consumers, and that name could help them sell to a different demographic than the typical smartphone.

The buyer is actually not Alcatel Lucent (French-Canadian telecom infrastructure company). The "Alcatel" feature phone business was a JV with TCL (Chinese electronics giant), and Alcatel sold off in 2007. TCL retained the right to use the Alcatel One Touch brand (unclear for how long).

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCL_Corporation

Interesting, this goes well with the Wiko french brand which is a Chinese manufacturer behind the curtain. I'd never expect the Alcatel One name to be a tag only.

Microsoft should have bought that and used it for a line of 6" surface devices.

Some of us hope it succeeds for more than nostalgia. Microsoft is doing nothing coherent to compete with iOS and Android. The ecosystem is reasonably healthy; a third real player could make it more so.

If they're to be just another Android vendor -- if Alcatel got brands only and none of the IP or interest in developing WebOS or anything Palm-specific -- it's less interesting.

Also beyond just nostalgia, Palm was PDAs, they were desktop-mobile sync, before they got sued by a troll, Grafitti was a tremendous way to input text. It would be good having that DNA back in the game.

I think I had more than 5 Palm PDAs during my life, including the Zires and Treos. They were PDAs, yes. Even smartphones. You could sync them with your computer and people did it, when it worked. OTOH Grafitti was rubbish and probably one of the reasons why Microsoft ate Palm's cake with WM. The others were ActiveSync and Office.

I'm not sure about the DNA bit, though. They never managed to have a multitasking OS, so it was extremely painful to get a phone call on your Treo while working on some document and losing everything :) I welcome competition and love to tinker with new devices and OSes, but my expectations would be quite low this time.

Wow, it seems only a short time ago that I and a colleague wagered to which stable the place would go. We were consultants on-site at Palm HQ pre-exit. Seems sad considering webOS was ahead of its time, but alas, the shop was unable to generate the numbers necessary to stay afloat on its own.

It's silly that trademarks are able to be sold. That undoes the idea of consumer protection as the trademark name is now misleading consumers.

I learned that lesson hard during the whole HP Compaq fiasco.

It was so very difficult to explain to my older customers how a "quality" name like HP could suddenly be on such god-awful printers and computers.

>It's silly that trademarks are able to be sold. That undoes the idea of consumer protection as the trademark name is now misleading consumers.

If companies could not sell trademarks, they would simply form a new corporation for each trademark and then sell the entire corporation.

There's no way to enforce that a certain trademark indicates products of a certain quality. Whoever owns the trademark can simply start making shitty products.

Trademarks don't exist to protect consumers; they exist to protect producers from knock-offs leeching off their reputation.

You're right there are workarounds. But the protection is for consumers, hence the check as to if people are likely to be confused. It's terrible that the makers of Pyrex can change the product so it's no longer heat tolerant, for instance.

IIRC, Palm bought the Be intellectual property prior to being bought themselves by HP. Does this mean the new owners get that as well?

No, the BeOS rights went to PalmSource when it was spun off.

So off it goes into the Land of the Zombie Brands. Sad.

I knew this was going to happen.

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