On the heels of the long article "Research, No Motion, which I talked about earlier, the site The Verge wrote a new fascinating article about the 31-month death of Palm entitled "Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS".
What I found so fascinating about this is that even though they poached some of the best talents in Silicon Valley, clueless executives managed to squander one of the industry icons. As Palm was struggling in a battle of life and death after a difficult launch of the Palm Pre in June 2009, Palm let itself sold to HP, which in absolute sheer incompetence just abandoned the whole company altogether rather than even bothering investing ("doubling down", ugh) in it to become a viable platform. The more I read about HP, the more I see that it is lead by a bunch of incompetent fools, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it slowly dies in the next few years.
Which does bring a good lesson: Talented employees cannot save a company from incompetent and stupid management. Worse, executives tend to get away with millions of dollars, while those talented employees, meh.
Published on June 8, 2012 at 21:27 EDT
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