HP Wanted $1.2B For WebOS and Palm 139
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)."
Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
1.2 billion for a property which they've mostly continued to run into the ground, apart from the patent portfolio?
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
you'd have to remember that it was worth 1.2billion _ONLY_ because hp bought them! no-one else would have paid so much money for webos ip.
because, uh. you could just like, take meego base for free. and even that ain't worth 1.2 billion and webos is less parts than that.
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Yeah, webOS is a nice platform, but they probably could've developed their own mobile OS for less than a billion dollars. And I can't imagine the patent portfolio is worth enough to ever pay back what HP spent on the acquisition.
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The issue is time. Development from scratch requires a lot of it.
And installed base (Score:3)
and customers who ahve already bought in, a eco-system, outside developers that are already fluent, programs already designed for the system, etc.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes and no. WebOS is nice, but it's a Linux kernel, a GNU userland, a port of WebKit, and a (quite nice) JavaScript toolkit. Writing all of this from scratch would take a long time, but taking an existing Linux or BSD kernel, a GNU or BSD userland is easy. The port of WebKit and SDL is only about a month's worth of work for someone who knows what they're doing. There are some existing JavaScript toolkits that are pretty nice - maybe take the (BSD licensed) Yahoo one. Then there are the apps, but most
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WebOS had a lot of potential, and if HP had made the Pre 3 the priority and released it in March of 2011, it would probably have done quite well(with marketing support). WebOS still has a lot of potential as an OS, but HP has grossly mismanaged it and placed the priorities in the wrong places.
Basic concept, the Veer was NEVER going to be a wildly successful device, it was a niche device with its small size. The Pre 3 would have been your mainsteam/flagship, and tablet sales are very much linked to how
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I ditched my Pre after the HP fiasco with WebOS and bought a new Android phone. Look I can actually use Flash on it (one of the selling points on my Palm Pre was that a Flash player would be out in a few months when I bought the Pre shortly after launch). And people develop stuff for it.
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I believe the Pre2 and higher DID get Flash however.
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WebOS had a lot of potential, and if HP had made the Pre 3 the priority and released it in March of 2011, it would probably have done quite well(with marketing support).
By March 2011 it was all over already. WebOS itself was great, but the hardware already had a tainted reputation, and the commercials Palm had put out had already alienated customers.
In my opinion, if Palm had released the Pre 3 hardware as the Pre 2, that may have stopped the slide, but only if they had much better commercials and had kept some faith with developers. (Did developers even ever get all the APIs for the hardware?) Palm was a PDA company, for Christ's sake. They should've been able to put
Think... (Score:5, Funny)
In a few years, Facebook might buy HP for $1.2 billion.
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In a few years, Facebook might buy HP for $1.2 billion.
in a few years the facebook fad will be over
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in a few years the facebook fad will be over
Or it may not be. You could have made this statement a few years ago and you would have been wrong.
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But the S/N ratio on the rest of the internet will get worse.
I kind of miss AOL. All that stupid that you could filter away so easily.
We will feel that way about Facebook someday.
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Google already have, what, two operating systems, if you count Chrome? WebOS is just a skin on linux, like android so I fail to see the advantage for them is doing that, unless WebOS starts to compete with android and they want to shut it down.
Re:You mean googlebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Google can't afford facebook.
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Well you've got all the answers...
It could only be HP (Score:1)
Buying something and only then wondering what they could do with their purchase.
It has happend before. It will happen again.
Move along there, nothing to report.
Except, I'd really have liked to be a fly on the wall at the meeting with Facbook.
HP showing its usual ineptitude.
Disclaimer,
I worked at HP for 28years until they laid me off last year. Now I earn twice as much looking after the same customers & systems that I did before. Go figure.
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From the same company that rejected Wozniak's Apple I, they appear to try to make Xerox feel better about that PARC thing.
Re:It could only be HP (Score:5, Interesting)
(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.
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Bitter that he didn't earn twice as much for the first 28 years?
It's simple. (Score:3)
Why sell it and have someone else potentially give it a heartbeat again? They put it down and kept its assets in the event that they could use the narrowed field to their advantage in deep-diving back into the mobile market in the future.
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I am a Palm fan from way back, but really, what is the company even worth now? They don't own the original OS (that was spun off into another company years ago), they don't manufacture devices anymore, and while webOS is pretty nice, it's not different enough to set itself apart from Android and iOS. And didn't HP basically can all the old Palm employees, anyway?
Sad to see a once great company trashed this way, but I'm not sure there's much to recover from it at this point.
Re:It's simple. (Score:4, Funny)
What?!! Are you saying they weren't serious when they offered it to Facebook? That's ridiculous. They have perfect synergy: Palm makes phones and Facebook has a mobile app and uses mobile phones. See? They fit together perfectly.
Re:It's simple. (Score:5, Funny)
Facepalm...
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Facebook is in the marketing and social networking market. Not phone/tablet market.
If they did buy it then Google, Apple, and MS would compete with their own social platforms and ruin facebook. Windows 8 has tweet-orama and facebook applets in Metro. That would quickly change if MS viewed Facebook as a competitor.
A very dumb move to buy them out indeed.
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It's not that. I'd imagine that all of HP's touchscreen-based printers run WebOS under the hood. If so, then HP is so dependent on WebOS that they can't afford to sell it without requiring the buyer to license it back to HP. This makes any sale problematic from both ends of the deal.
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It's not that. I'd imagine that all of HP's touchscreen-based printers run WebOS under the hood. If so, then HP is so dependent on WebOS that they can't afford to sell it without requiring the buyer to license it back to HP. This makes any sale problematic from both ends of the deal.
Where did you get that? They've had touchscreen printers way before they bought WebOS. From my limited exposure to them, it appears they run under CP/M..
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I got that from the stories about the sale that said that printer licensing was one of the conditions.
I very much doubt the current crop of web-enabled printers run anything remotely resembling CP/M. They have built-in Wi-Fi hardware, Ethernet, and full-color, full-motion playback of help videos. That's way, way, way past anything you could do easily in many RTOSes, much less something as primitive as CP/M.
If they aren't running WebOS, it is inevitable to assume that they will. They'd have to be idiots t
Re:It's simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
They'd have to be idiots
I think you've identified the problem.
Its good to want things, builds character. (Score:3)
Google could snap Palm/webOS for patents (Score:2)
Look at this "iPhone like" color Palm [palminfocenter.com] from 2001.
what patents? (Score:2)
...how much patents are were left anyhow? why does everyone assume all the companies have patents - or that they have them left without licensing.
palm os was owned by palmsource, one version sold to garnett.. the only ip palm was sitting on was pretty much webos - I guess they thought they were smart fooling garnet to buying palm os from palmsource and then ditching it.
webos was then developed inhouse at palm(not palmsource).
that's how I gather it anyhow. so who owns the ip, the little there was to begin wi
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It's not an assumption -- I've seen it written very specifically about Palm a number of times (but couldn't tell you from memory).
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I've seen it written about palm very specifically too. that's why I wrote that. the palm that hp bought was _just_ webos, that is my understanding, it is my understanding that palmsource ip(what was left of it) wasn't enrolled back to webos palm.
Almost all the time in articles which forget how palms ip was split over the years many times - and not once I've seen a license deal or lawsuit news(that I can remember) about them.
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OK, yes, that I don't know. I know Palm had lots of patents, but I don't know their disposition when HP bought them.
Pre3 (Score:2)
The summary sucks (big Palm fan here, BTW). The Pre3 was never even released. It probably could have done alright. In any case, something that's never released cannot be a failure. I'd personally love to get my hands on a Verizon model (but not enough to pay $500).
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Me, I'd love to get my hands on Kim Kardashian's shaved pussy. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose...
I take it that you'd pay $500?
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Yeah, that's right -- and apparently it was one day. But yeah, nothing in the US.
Looks like a great phone though.
Maybe They Should Try Selling it on eBay (Score:1)
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It's been all downhill (Score:1)
Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
They considered selling off their hardware business (accounting for 33% of their revenue), and now they don't want to take a loss selling a company that they bought and ran into the ground.
Who, exactly, is running this company, and why?
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They considered selling off their hardware business (accounting for 33% of their revenue), and now they don't want to take a loss selling a company that they bought and ran into the ground.
Who, exactly, is running this company, and why?
Palm wasn't exactly doing very well before HP bought them; so they didn't exactly run it into the ground.
Now, I'm not saying that the lack sales, etc. of any products they have produced through the Palm unit has not hurt the price at all - it probably has.
Just saying, it's not entirely HP's fault. They probably overbid on it to start with.
So from their perspective, the unit has not gained anything but hasn't really lost much of anything either; an trying to get the same price is taking a big of a hit -
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This was the equivalent of a lot more than a faulty transmission. This was "no transmission, no brakes, and no tire treads". Palm botched the promotion of the Pre badly. They managed to take a smartphone people were excited about when they saw it, and through ridiculous marketing ("creepy Pre Girl") turn it into a joke. They alienated longtime Palm customers by not providing a free way for them to run all their old Palm OS apps (and instead asking them to pay for Classic). And they alienated developers
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These decisions were made by different CEOs. The last HP CEO wanted to turn HP into another SAP (his previous employer) and turn HP into a totally different company and sell its hardware division. He also decided to spread fud about webOS not being supported which made consumers not want to buy them as he wanted to leave the tablet market. The other CEO Hurd bought it.The board fired him within a week which was the right thing to do.
You can't just become something else unrelated as it has failed many many t
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HP's problem is worse than just having a bad CEO. They have a screwed up board of directors which means they are in the process of hiring a stream of bad CEOs, or if they should happen to get a decent one, firing him for a minor transgression when they should be working to keep him.
There is no way that I would purchase anything significant from, work for, or invest in HP at this point in time.
It would be good however to short their stock.
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HP's problem is worse than just having a bad CEO. They have a screwed up board of directors which means they are in the process of hiring a stream of bad CEOs, or if they should happen to get a decent one, firing him for a minor transgression when they should be working to keep him.
Agreed, maybe someone should keep an eye on the them [wikipedia.org]?
There is no way that I would purchase anything significant from, work for, or invest in HP at this point in time.
This is the damn truth. I pity HP's employees as well because they undoubtedly have a morale problem.
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Leaving its core strength's and biggest revenue generator is not a minor transgression. That would have been the worst business deciscion in history right up with IBM letting MS market DOS to competitors and creating the clone market.
It is funny because CEOs keep justifying outsourcing and doing things to harm employees as a fudiciary duty to the shareholders and how they need the board of directors needs, yet no one can fire the ones at HP. Believe me many hedge fund managers have tried but do not have the
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The current board is different from the one that hired and went along with Leo. In case you are concerned about the board but haven't bothered to pay attention to its changes. It helps to keep track of these things if you care.
Not saying it's any better, you'll have to decide for yourself. Just update your database first, please.
Greedy exec + access to loads of money = Problems! (Score:1)
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Actually Palm is not that bad. Blackberry gave it a black eye, but tablets is where WebOS could have made a difference. WebOS was a great OS in 2009 and HP didn't want to let Apple and Google eat up the market leaving HP out of computing.
When Hurd left, the new CEO viewed it as a failure and never invested heavily into the product. He then went on and told customers, BestBuy, and suppliers he has no plans to sell it. Gee, that really makes me want to go out and buy one now. lol
So BestBuy got nervous and pul
I had a friend like that... (Score:2)
I had a friend like that... bought a bike for eighteen grand, rode it for eight years, when he went to sell it, he insisted the price was eighteen grand. Didn't get any takers.
Smartphone pioneer? (Score:2)
What? Smartphone pioneer? How do they figure that?
They were a PDA pioneer, but did very little, if anything revolutionary or pioneering in the Smartphone space. They just did what everyone else was doing... they did not pioneer anything in that space. They were already pretty much washed up and a has-been by the time the smartphone revolution rolled around. Not saying their phones weren't nice or quality or anything, just saying they weren't anything revolutionary.
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They were already pretty much washed up and a has-been by the time the smartphone revolution rolled around. Not saying their phones weren't nice or quality or anything, just saying they weren't anything revolutionary.
Exactly right. Palm in the 1990s was pioneering, but they stumbled once smartphones came along. Not sure why, really - I mean, everyone could see that manufacturers would put more and more stuff on phones and eventually everything a Palm Pilot could do, a phone would one day be able to do. But Palm was a one trick pony that didn't adapt (or at least, didn't adapt fast enough).
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I'm pretty sure the Palm Treo 650 was the first smartphone bought by a ton of people (released in 2004, the 600 was released the year before). Touchscreen interface, tons of apps. It was the first smartphone for the masses.
smartphone pioneers? (Score:2)
smartphone pioneers? That's not how I remember Palm, they were the people that made PDAs cheap and popular.
have they asked Nokia? (Score:2)
LoB
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Windows phone 7 mango can and is a decent OS. Windows 8 and Windows 8 phone will be there by the time they make a webOS product.
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people don't want features anymore, they want shiny. so why should nokia bother?
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Nokia's world ended in mid-2010. They are just in the prolonged slide into bankruptcy at this point.
doomed to fail? (Score:3)
It was doomed to fail from the start despite being technologically superior at one point.
It was cuter than the first iphone and was way more usable, but it lacked the cult following required to sell the cute factor. It was better hardware than whatever crappy selections android had at the time, but it wasn't as open and it didn't have the native plethora of google apps so it didn't get the geeky nerdy following. It was a million times more useful than the blackberry, but it didn't have the support of businesses.
Another company HP bought and wrecked (Score:2)
Look at the track record:
1) Compaq: bought 2002: Product line disappeared, brand name wrecked.
2) Digital Equipment Corporation: bought 2002: Product line disappeared, brand name wrecked.
3) Palm: bought 2010: Product line almost disappeared, brand name almost wrecked.
If a company is bought out by HP than that is the end. My guess is that HP suffers from a very, very serious case of “Not invented here syndrome.”
I fully support the efforts of Apple and Google (Score:2)
One of these days, a lawsuit-proof mobile OS might prove extremely valuable. Imagine the next generation of mobile OS products based on WebOS and Maemo rather than banned-from-sale iOS and Android.
And an object lesson as to why tech companies should compete on technology and ma
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Well, you can't blame HP for trying. If the folks at Facebook think the masses will clammor for a Facebook phone when the mobile market is already saturated, maybe they'd take the bait on acquiring WebOS, something that is more or less device-ready and which they could own themselves?
Owning an OS puts them on the same footing as Android - not as advantageous as Apple who owns the OS and the device, but it would be a step up from licensing a phone to customize for your app. Facebook today is still just an ap
Re:Probably (Score:4, Insightful)
So far, Facebook has seemed content to grow their core business rather than branch out into other offerings. They also don't currently sell any physical items at all (as far as I know), so going into a really tough market like mobile devices would be a huge investment without any guaranteed payoff.
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Well, apart from the fact that they are sneakily becoming an off site communications platform, have payments transactional volume reminiscent of paypal some 4 years ago (this one I'm guessing based on zynga reported revenues), have released couple of completely flopped 'facebook' phones already (Reminds of Motorola ROKR anyone?) and have free access agreements with quite a few mobile operators around.
What is their core business again?
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That depends on whether you consider your privacy a physical item. They routinely sell access to user accounts, their content and their connections to others. They make a pretty penny selling all your personal information, who you know and what you think and do to anyone willing to pay for that access. The Governments of the world are some of their biggest clients. For example, the US government may be bared from collecting this information without a warrant but they aren't bared from purchasing it from a p
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Probably (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no such thing as a 'saturated' market - only if the market is selling a commodity, with no room for the price floor to drop or the feature/functionality ceiling to be raised.
In this case, the 'smartphone market' is anything but saturated. There are a half dozen or so competitors (HTC Sense + Android, Windows Phone, Android, iOS, Symbian, Blackberry), and they each have a non-trivial percentage of the market. There is room to improve on each and every one of those platforms. webOS improves in a number of ways on each of those platforms, some of which Android 4.0 -tries to implement.
webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them. Its downfall is shit hardware: well designed handhelds have never, ever been HPs strength (and they've fucked it up consistently since they bought Compaq for the iPAQ line).
IMO, if anyone were to be a good buyer for Palm, it'd be HTC. That would be a pretty picture, IMO.
Re:Probably (Score:4, Funny)
Now you've gone and pissed off the HP calculator people. Kiss you karma goodby. I hope they can't track you down IRL.
Re:Probably (Score:4, Funny)
Now you've gone and pissed off the HP calculator people. Kiss you karma goodby. I hope they can't track you down IRL.
Yeah, they're gonna chase him around with their wheelchairs.
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Fiona got rid of the calculator division a decade ago. The last good calculator that HP ever developed was the HP48 and that was more than 20 years ago. They still sell a few of the old good models but for the most part they don't have a calculator division anymore.
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Duh.
Like that matters to those fanatics. The GP said HP never made good handhelds.
Re:Probably (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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TV sets aren't saturated.
I take that back: TV display units are saturated. However, that's not what Apple would conceivably make. They'd make something white and beveled (everything out there is black and square), with something Logitech Revue-like built in (such as the Sony TV - IIRC the only one out there with Android on it at the moment). There's not much out there like that yet.
Apple wants to get into the ad revenue market. It's simple: they've only got a couple possible vehicles for doing so, short of
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> webOS is simply superior in a number of areas - hardware requirements and performance being one of them.
Where did you get that feeling from? The TouchPad has the most powerful CPU of any tablet, and yet it takes nearly 2 minutes for WebOS just to boot. Starting applications is a pain, and the web browser is not exactly fast either.
webOS has great potential, but it is not a finished product. That's the main problem.
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Some might call it sociopathy of course, but Apple did a lot better with Jobs than without, and I dare say facebook would struggle without a clear leader.
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So where's that Facebook IPO?
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Not going to disagree with you, but there's a certain skill to spotting the right idea to steal, as well as actually committing the theft. Whether they deserve their success or not I make no comment but I know I'd not be able to be successful in the same way.
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Yeah, I'd have to agree. People are quick to call Zuckerberg a genius for the groundbreaking idea that was Facebook, yet Facebook was nothing more than a slightly less tacky MySpace, and before that we had Friends Reunited which was almost identical.
There was absolutely nothing groundbreaking about Facebook, Zuckerberg just had the contacts and the business sense to be able to cash in on it and grow it better than even the likes of Rupert Murdoch failed so hard to do with MySpace.
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But also the sense to execute it in a way that people wanted to use it. There /is/ something to that.
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Woz has had little impact at Apple since 1978 or so. I don't think he had any involvement in the creation of the Mac.
Don't get me wrong
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Actually Steve Jobs too, since Wozniak was the brains behind the actual technology.
That's not totally true at Apple, and it certainly wasn't at NeXT. Jobs was very good at identifying trends. NeXT, for example, shipped the first workstation with a general purpose DMA controller because Jobs looked at how mainframes got better performance than workstations and said 'copy that idea' to his hardware people. The CPU wasn't stellar, but the fact that the network, disk, video and sound systems could all access memory without needing the CPU to get involved meant that a NeXT workstation with
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So where's that Facebook IPO?
Delayed. The problem with an IPO is that you end up with a lot of stock holders which means that you have to do things like publish financial reports. Facebook and Goldman Sachs worked out a nice scam where Facebook sold a big chunk of stock to GS for a hugely inflated bubble value, giving them a single large shareholder. GS then create a fund backed by these shares, still giving Facebook a single shareholder (because they're not selling the stock) and allowing them to sell shares in the fund. The sold
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Zuckerberg does have that killer instinct for business that Jobs had.
Um, no. He's a 27-year-old who sweats so much when asked a mild non-softball question on TV that he has to wipe the perspiration off his head and take off his jacket. [youtube.com]. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were mature adults when they were 27 (1982). Zuckerberg is a child.