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I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days
(philmckinney.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Technology
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HP's board has done a lot of messed up stuff. I wouldn't touch HP gear with a stick.
He didn't even do a good job in SAP.
HP and Asus taught me that specs aren't all that important sometimes.
Apotheker wrote down 9.2 billion in 11 months and that’s just the stuff the article mentions. I can’t achieve that level of failure in a lifetime.
Autonomy was hot garbage while HP owned it. Zero improvements to the product stack. I think the original owners bought it back and pushed out an upgrade that made it 10x better.
Lol, I hope they bought it back for less than they originally sold it for
I believe that's what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn't the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I'd book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I'd get less than those 100€ back for it, so I'd write down that difference as a loss.
With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company's value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they'll have paid less for it than they originally got.
(This is only tangentially related, sorry for the notification. I just want to complain. I hope you understand)
I bought a used, old HP laptop with a fairly capable AMD apu for some power and cost efficient gaming. Problem is that even though modern games can theoretically run on it at playable frame rates at very low settings, HP does not allow you to change how much RAM is dedicated to the GPU in BIOS. They have a setting, but its locked behind a BIOS only they have access to. Its quite frustrating that I have capable hardware but cannot use it to its full extent because of this software lockout. Knowing that they lock their consumer BIOS' down like this is absolutely keeping me from buying HP basically ever again, because I really want to make the most of my hardware and keep it all alive as long as possible to reduce waste, and they won't let me.
I had an hp laptop with a locked bios and there was a red flathead screw near the ssd that unlocked it.
This is VERY HP and does not surprise me at all. If they don’t know why they’re going down, it’s not because everyone didn’t tell them.
The regular HP printer threads are another example.
I will never forgive Carley Fiorino for killing HP.
That was particularly grisly. It sure went to shit fast, didn’t it.
Up until that point hp had a stellar engineering reputation. They could have milked that for many more years, but it takes real talent to destroy that so quickly and completely