I've never shared this story publicly before—how I convinced HP's board to acquire Palm for $1.2 billion, then watched as they destroyed it while I was confined to bed recovering from surgery.
This isn't just another tech failure analysis. I was the HP Chief Technology Officer who led the technical due diligence on Palm. I presented to Mark Hurd and the HP board, making the case for moving forward with the acquisition. I believed we were buying the future of mobile computing.
Then I watched it all fall apart from the worst possible vantage point—lying in bed during a eight-week recovery, helpless to intervene as everything I'd worked to build got dismantled in real time.
This is the story of how smart people destroyed $1.2 billion in innovation value in just 49 days. It's about the brutal personal cost of being blamed for a disaster that happened while you're recovering from surgery. And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.
Making the Case: Why I Believed in WebOS
In early 2010, HP was desperately seeking mobile platform capabilities. We knew the computing world was shifting toward mobile, and our traditional PC business faced real threats from tablets and smartphones. We needed to be there.
Palm was struggling financially, but they possessed something genuinely special in WebOS—true multitasking when iOS and Android couldn't handle it, elegant user interface design, and breakthrough technology architecture buried inside a failing business.
As CTO, I led the technical due diligence process. I spent weeks embedded with the Palm engineering team in Sunnyvale, crawling through their code base, understanding their platform architecture, and assessing the quality of their technical talent. The deeper I dug, the more convinced I became that this wasn't just another mobile operating system.
My conclusion was unambiguous: WebOS represented a breakthrough platform technology that could differentiate HP in the emerging mobile computing market. The technology was solid. The team was exceptional. The platform vision was compelling.
I presented this assessment to Mark Hurd and the board with complete conviction. This wasn't about buying a struggling phone company—it was our strategic entry into the future of computing platforms. I believed every word of my presentation because I had seen the technology's potential firsthand.
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