[Wurdan]

A CTO shouldn’t be “hoping”, a CTO should have been influencing those decisions (including pricing) all along. If he only realized the price was wrong when the product hit the shelves (while he was in bed recovering), then he has no place in lecturing others on their lack of strategic perspective.

[ToucanLoucan]

I don't think there's a world where you can hold the CTO responsible here. I get his colleagues anger and understand it. That said, this is IMO as clear cut as you can get for a case of absolutely ludicrously poor decisionmaking on the part of Apotheker. Bad strategy from bad principles, brought in from an unrelated and way smaller company. I genuinely can't fathom doing such a radical pivot with a business that size that had built a damn near cult following off the back of it's hardware to utterly sell that hardware business off on the notion of being a software company, with NOTHING in the business to back that. What in the world did HP even have for software at this time?

I'm not even saying WebOS was a slam dunk the way the author says. Maybe. We'll never know. But it's clear Apotheker didn't think the acquisition was worth it, and decided to kill WebOS/Palm off from the day he arrived. It's the only way the subsequent mishandling makes any sense at all, and same for the acquisition he oversaw too, which was also written off.

The part that makes my blood boil is this utterly deranged course of action probably made Apotheker more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. I wish I could fail up like these people do.

[fakedang]

Apotheker is basically everything wrong with the EU non-startup tech scene today. Not him personally per se, but you see a lot of characters like him on a much more regular basis in EU companies than you will find in US companies.

These kinds of folks only seem to fail upwards in the EU, whereas in the US, they would have been laughed out.

[Twirrim]

I think you've got some "grass is greener on the other side" thinking going on there. There's lots of people just like him, failing upwards in US tech.

[fakedang]

Obviously there are. But you still have a higher proportion of engineer types leading multinational companies, whether they are tech or finance businesses, etc. In Europe, except for France (thanks to the Grand Ecole system), I have yet to see a large proportion of companies where non-founder leadership also has a technical or engineering bent.

[impjohn]

Interesting thought. Do you have any anecdotes regarding it? Seems you're basing it off personal experience or something you've heard many times, curious to know what that is

[fakedang]

Mostly from personal experience and interacting with a lot of them, who form their little boy's clubs. It's especially bad in German Europe and Italy where the vast majority of leadership of extremely technical companies are largely business or law graduates.