Inside the Death of Palm and WebOS 188
SomePgmr writes with this excerpt from an article at The Verge:
"Thirty-one. That's the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract. Understanding exactly how Palm could drive itself into irrelevance in such a short period of time will forever be a subject of Valley lore."
Re:Palm is still relevant? (Score:2, Funny)
Quoting somebody I can't remember, "Palm couldn't market a cure for death."
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:5, Funny)
I think HP collects dying hardware companies for some voodoo ritual. Maybe they make $20K/gallon printer ink using dying companies "red ink". Why else would they buy Compaq (which held DEC) and 3com and Apollo and Convex and Palm and ...
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:4, Funny)
HP buying them was just further evidence that Palm was already dead, because HP wouldn't know what to do with a viable hardware company if it came with instructions.
Ok, new plan. Figure out a way to get HP to purchase IKEA.
Re:And now RIM (Score:5, Funny)
Whereas Palm actually assembled a team and put in a decent last ditch effort to make a revolutionary new product, RIM has done nearly nothing.
Except migrate to a new, best-in-class, operating system, revamp their management tools (which were already the most sophistocated on the market), dramatically improve their developer tools (providing numerous ways for devs to build apps, including an NDK) update their UI completely (they've redefined the touch-interface -- it makes Apple's UI look like a joke from 1994). Oh, and created brilliant solutions to new problems like BlackBerry Balance.
Really, they were never resting on their laurals. The much-loved Pearl line made the transition from feature-phone to smartphone simple for users used to the form-factor, sure-press turned users off but was undoubtedly innovative, the style never took off, but the clamshell style smartphone was just one of many dramatically different from-factors that RIM offered to the consumer market while they were still undeniably the #1 smartphone manufacturer in the world.
They weren't slow to change, they did nothing but change!
Their new technology is well ahead of the competition both technically and in terms of UI. Tools like Bridge take integration to a whole new level. Balance and Fusion set new standards for managed devices -- and that's an area where they were already the unquestioned leader-of-the-pack. Now their users can get freedom and security, something you'll never get from Apple.