HP Wanted $1.2B For WebOS and Palm

PolygamousRanchKid passes along this quote: "As baffling as it may seem, HP was trying to rid itself of Palm without taking a loss on its purchase, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told [VentureBeat]. The company seemingly ignored that Palm's value had fallen significantly since HP purchased the smartphone pioneer in April 2010, thanks to the spectacular failure of the HP Touchpad tablet. And the fact that HP didn't make any progress with its new webOS phones, the Pre 3 and Veer, didn't help either. ... The $1.2 billion asking price shines some light on a story we heard from another source: At one point, HP's team tried to pitch the sale to Facebook but was practically laughed out of the room. And yes, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was present at the meeting, although he apparently didn't say much (I'm sure whatever he was thinking at the time would have been gold)."

Re:Probably

[ProppaT]

I agree, the only time a "saturated market" exists is when you're talking about items that aren't often replaced or when people aren't buying those items. If the market was saturated, we'd see GOOD new cell phones showing up at discount outlets being sold for a loss. WebOS products weren't didn't fail because the market was saturated, they failed because of poor marketing and not listening to what consumers wanted hardware wise. While I liked the pebble design, the market wants 4"+ screens or Apple products. Had the hardware been more appealing to the masses, the OS would have caught up. I sold a number of people on WebOS products, despite their dislike of the hardware, after demoing the software. IMO, WebOS and WP7 are the only two mobile OSes that make sense from a usability perspective.

Re:It could only be HP

[Man On Pink Corner]

(Shrug) That was the correct decision on HP's part. No analogies between Woz's garage and Xerox PARC can be drawn, IMHO. An inexpensive 6502-based micro board didn't fit into HP's marketing and sales strategies in any respect. No traditional HP customers would have been interested in early personal computers, and no rock-star product managers were itching to pivot the whole company in that direction, as later happened with printers.

Instead of helping to launch a new industry, the Apple I would've died on the vine at HP. They could have been dicks about it and stopped Wozniak dead in his tracks, but instead they told him to party on with their blessing. Under the HP Way it was considered a good thing for entrepreneurs to get their start at the company, and Woz was perhaps one of the last employees to benefit from that kind of forward thinking.