You’ve probably heard by now that HP decided to kill the Palm devices running on WebOS, unless you’ve been living under a rock that is. The HP acquisition of Palm had “fail” written all over it from the beginning. How can it be that HP spent over $1 billion U.S. to buy Palm a little more than a year later is already throwing in the towel and killing the hardware devices associated with the WebOS?
Once upon a time there was this company that made the PalmPilot, this was before the Blackberry from RIM, and all those Nokia Smartphones (the iPhone/iPad and all the Android products too). For much of their history in the past decade or so, they’ve been the little engine that could, they’ve been fighting an uphill battle with limited resources. I’m sure that many of the people that stayed after HP bought them had hoped with HP’s marketplace position and resources that they’d be in position to move to the next level, well they seemed to have been in for a surprise. HP didn’t seem to put any R&D money into Palm and let it die before it really got out of the starting gate.
HP has been in the mobile space before with the iPaq. Remember the iPaq, this was a good device that HP inherited when it “merged” with Compaq. HP didn’t really put the R&D money into this product either and then Nokia, RIM, and the iPhone all came along. HP was going to get back into this market (and expand into others) by buying Palm. What happened here?
HP Executive Vice President Todd Bradley worked at Palm before joining HP. In fact he was CEO of PalmOne. Is it any surprise that HP would buy the company that Todd Bradley once ran?
While it is hard to really know what Mark Hurd was thinking when HP bought Palm, there is little doubt that this is another once great company ruined by him. This is only one of thirty plus acquisitions started and/or closed during his reign. To all the remaining Palm employees and those ruined along the way we do fell for you. How about a big F**k Y** to ole Mark? We hope that you’ll be out of a job like the countess good people that you’ve “workforce balanced” along the way. Unfortunately for the people that you’ve shafted along the way, they aren’t looking at those $100 million plus paydays that you’ve had recently. We hope that you and the other corrupt and greedy CEOs out there like yourself will be out jobs soon, never to be hired again to a position where you can wreak so much havoc on hard working men and women with families to support. For all of the destruction that you’ve caused you should be tried for crimes against humanity with no chance of inflicting pain on anyone again.
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