Daily Tech News 14 June 2025

• How Palm died for a second time. (Substack)
  
  Written by Phil McKinney, who was the CTO of Hewlett Packard at the time HP bought and then promptly murdered Palm.
  
  The CEO at the time of the acquisition was fired by the board before HP's new PalmOS products could launch, and the new CEO wanted nothing to do with hardware, and killed the entire lineup seven weeks after launch.
  
  While the CTO was out recovering from emergency surgery.
  
  And the new CEO was in turn fired by the board just months later, after spending $10 billion on British software company Autonomy and then being forced to write down its value by 80%.

  My first day back at HP will be burned into my memory forever. I was simply trying to grab lunch in the cafeteria at HP Labs when I found myself surrounded by what felt like the entire technical staff. They weren't there to welcome me back - they were there to hold me accountable.

  The scene was intense and unambiguous. Engineers and researchers who had watched the WebOS disaster unfold were pointing fingers and raising voices. Their message was crystal clear and brutal: "You can never take leave again - EVER!"

  Their exact words still echo in my mind: "The CEO and board need adult supervision."

  Indeed they did. Those were dark days at Hewlett Packard.

• AMD just announced its cheapest and slowed X3D CPU yet - the Ryzen 5500X3D. (WCCFTech)
  
  Expected to retail for around $150, it might be a decent option if you have an older AM4 system you want to upgrade.
  
  
  
• AIs are designed to tell us what we want to hear. Let's fix that by designing them to tell us what we don't want to hear. (Substack)
  
  Oh, yeah, that'll definitely work.
  
  
  
• Corporate adoption of AI is slowing as it turns out that it's expensive and kind of useless. (The Register)

  Gartner warned last year that end user organizations adopting AI could discover "500 to 1,000 percent errors of AI cost estimates are possible," because of vendor price hikes, not paying attention to the cost, or simply inappropriate use of AI.

  Yeah, beancounters love it when bills are unexpectedly ten times higher than you told them.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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