In 2010, HP’s Mark Hurd spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm, an early pioneer of the portable device market. His disgraceful replacement, Leo Apotheker, miraculously fumbles Palm’s webOS revival, rage-quits the project, gets away with far too many other asinine decisions, and destroys 45 percent of the company’s stock value in just 11 months before getting kicked out of the company with a $25 million consolation prize.
Meg Whitman, Apotheker’s replacement and current CEO, began scuttling what’s left of Palm’s personnel in fall 2011 and damned the once-great webOS to the open source community.
Now Whitman says HP has to build its own brand new mobile OS and get back into the smartphone market. I am not making this up, but I kinda wish I was.
