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."
But that's ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But that's ok... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a significantly better story than that, with lots of money and talent tied up in it. Really smart people, some real assholes, some serious bad luck, and Apple cutting you off at every turn.
I know it's a long article, but it was really interesting.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a feeling RIM and Nokia will be joining them soon enough as both have fallen behind the curve and in the fast paced world of tech once you are behind its hell to catch up, much less get back ahead of everyone else. That was the problem with palm in a nutshell, by the time they realized they couldn't just keep reselling the old OS the mobile world had passed them by.
I agree with everything you said except this because a lot of companies have found themselves in this position, and some of them (namely Apple and Intel) have managed to dig themselves out. Not that I have much hope for RIM or Nokia, but don't count them out till the fat lady sings. The Lumia 900 was a decent piece of hardware, and... I'm trying to think of something awesome RIM has done lately, and can't... Lol.
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It wasn't just Apple doing the cutting-off.
If that story is fully true, then Mercer is the main source of blame, coupled with the completely dick move by Verizon (promising a huge marketing campaign and massive purchases at a critical juncture, then quickly shifting to Droid and pretending Palm didn't exist).
OTOH, Verizon is a known quantity/quality - they're dicks, and everyone inside and outside of the industry knows that. That leaves Mercer - a classic example of being too much in love with his initial i
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Not exactly a Palm fan here, but I do like the idea and the (albeit half-assed due to time constraint) implementation they had with making the UI HTML-based. I wonder what could be done with that now, considering HTML 5 is complete enough to be useful...
They were the first to bet on HTML5 as the UI layer for touch devices, but they're not the last [microsoft.com].
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BB 10, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, etc.
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Well, Tizen and BtG are pretty much vaporware as far as actual hardware is concerned - or at least I don't expect to see them there anytime soon.
BB10, though, yes, that's another one. It's interesting how it's those who are playing catch-up who focus on HTML5 for apps. I think that for both MS and RIM, it's really not about the advantages of technology as such, but rather an attempt to grab the attention of as many developers as possible to target their platforms with minimal training. For myself, I'd take
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There is a difference between iPhone web apps and what webOS, BBOS and Win8 are doing. In iPhone, a web app really had very limited capabilities to it outside of stock HTML5/CSS3/JS - practically no way to interact with other apps, for example, or use a good chunk of phone's hardware (say, camera?). Simply put, there was no way an iOS web app would be a first-class app - there were too many things it simply couldn't do.
The rest of the line-up, though, are not like that at all. They use HTML5 as a presentati
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Well a lot of Apple Cutting Palm off was because Palm wasn't always playing by the rules.
We have seem to forgot the iTunes fiasco. Where the Web OS in essence hacked its software to make iTunes think it is an iPod so you had iPod compatibility, without Apples permission. Such a hack is clever and cool for the normal hacker, because this was all fine and good, and the fact this wouldn't be used for profit. But the same hack by Palm, was very dirty playing, first being that is was a hack not a partner ship
Re:But that's ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the fact that it supported iTunes was basically saying that it was just a cheap rip-off of apples os.
Oh my god. This sounds like something written on an engadget comment thread. I agree it was a bad move, because they were reliant on Apple's goodwill (i.e, none at all) to keep it functioning, they were relying on a third party service where they got none of the revenue from, also they were providing a feature that was likely to be unreliable and make them look amateur. But no, that doesn't make WebOS seem like a cheap rip-off of iOS, if anything, iOS 5 and Android 4 show lot of features the were inspired by WebOS.
Not the whole story... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not enough to just make a great OS , you need the ecosystem with hundreds of thousands of apps, retail presence, the buzz factor in the marketplace etc. etc. Miss any one and you're toast in the Post-PC world led by Apple.
WebOS is(was?) a great OS and the UX is MUCH better than Android (Google hired the WebOS team, so lets see what happens, Android design is all over the place right now). But if people don't even know that, how can they even consider the UX? They look at someone's iPhone and want one themselves that runs "Draw Something' so they can play it with friends.
The hardware was not too bad (I have a Touchpad that I loaded ICS on for apps). It was too expensive to compete with the iPad(Apple was able to keep it low with economies of scale and supply chain management) so it didn't make sense for people to buy a new platform with a few apps when for the same amount of money you could get an iPad or iPhone. Unlike Android, WebOS was tied to only HP/Palm's h/w.
That's why Windows Phone is struggling even with MS's push behind it, a nice Metro UI and Nokia's great h/w(though it overtook Blackberry and WebOS with a 100K apps available now) and RIM is all but finished even if their upcoming BB10(based on QNX) is leaps and bounds ahead of BB7. It has to have exclusive killer features or apps to succeed in this dog-eat-dog world. In line to die are AMD(Apple doesn't care about them), T-Mobile(no iPhone), Nokia(unless Windows 8 tablets and WP8 save them), HTC(doing badly these days) and some of the PC OEMs(most of them are doing badly thanks to the iPad).
So the CEO did really make a great OS with dev friendly dev tools(RIM usually makes TERRIBLE dev tools), but failed at the marketing and buzz factor. The fact that he walked away a rich man doesn't really matter to understand why WebOS failed.
Re:Not the whole story... (Score:4, Informative)
(Google hired the WebOS team, so lets see what happens, Android design is all over the place right now)
They hired the Enyo team, not the WebOS team. Enyo is a web framework, and reports indicate those employees were put into the Chrome team, not the Android team.
Google did pick up a few WebOS employees, most notably WebOS's UI designer, but that happened well before even Android 3.0.
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The second distinction (Chrome v. Android) may be less significant that it appears on casual inspection, given Google's oft-stated (and increasingly frequently stated) plan to converge ChromeOS and Android.
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Google did pick up a few WebOS employees, most notably WebOS's UI designer, but that happened well before even Android 3.0
And you can certainly see quite a few webOS influences in Honeycomb and ICS. Like the new notification drawer and task switcher, where you swipe things out to remove them. Or Chrome beta for Android, where tabs work a lot like webOS cards.
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And now RIM (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing is happening to Research In Motion.
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And soon Facebook.
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Actually, RIM is probably going to stick around, as a solid third-place platform. BB10 (BBX) is just around the corner, and many of the features coming will (finally) get them comparable with iPhone/Android.
And besides phones, QNX has a solid market in in-car systems, and other embedded systems, guaranteeing at least another DECADE of life to come.
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That tends to happen when next-gen products are being developed, but haven't hit market yet...
Or the BB10 launch will turn everything around...
Or maybe it won't, they'll see that they aren't going to turn it around, and they'll back into a maintenance mode, shed all the huge costs, and get back into profitability that way.
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Agreed, but only for as long as it takes enterprises to start dumping their BES servers and start looking for alternatives with the same level of reliability, lock-down ability, and security.
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I'll take that bet.
As much as I hate to say it - both because I'm a Canadian and I actually know several people who work at RIM - RIM is doomed. They are going to lose "third place" to Windows Phone this year, and will never gain it back.
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I'm thinking of a major telecommunications company who are betting significant amounts of money that you're wrong... I'm sure they're betting vastly larger sums than you could cover.
Re:And now RIM (Score:5, Informative)
... except RIM isn't actually making a decent product.
You miss the point and the similarities: RIM started with a superior product, gained a dominate position, cruised on auto pilot while competitors passed them and finally began a last ditch scramble to return to relevance just as their resources and market share evaporate. Oops, too late.
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You miss the point and the similarities: RIM started with a superior product, gained a dominate position, cruised on auto pilot while competitors passed them and finally began a last ditch scramble to return to relevance just as their resources and market share evaporate. Oops, too late.
Agreed, save for two points:
1) RIM didn't have a superior product, per se... they had the only workable product at the time in the small form-factor, at least as far as the US market was concerned. This leads me to...
2) Symbian dominated the global markets, and did for a very long time.
Otherwise, yeah, Palm sat on their asses too long. There was also that stupid idea of becoming a WinCE-derivative licensee. Yuck.
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MS may be in the same position, but they have this nice stack of "Get out of jail free" cards (bank) that has kept them at least appearing to be a player in the phone/tablet space.
I am not that sure about MS's future
No one gets too many second chances. No one. Not even Microsoft.
Re:And now RIM (Score:5, Insightful)
BlackBerrys used to be so popular, there was a time (just a couple of years ago) that it was unheard of for any CEO or politician worth their salt not to have one. Or several. They used to be called "crackberries" because of how popular they were. They were considered so tippity top of the line that their main competitors (such as Nokia) mad their best smartphone money with straight up BlackBerry clones.
Their current products look dated compared with the rivals that are killing them- but that's not because of inherently bad design, it's because they're designing products that look and feel like they're from a previous decade.
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True, though the only thing which got all the CxO attention was the one thing Blackberries excelled in - push email. Blackberries were essentially glorified email clients you could carry around with you. Everything else at the time was considered to be neat accessories, but nothing justified the purchase order like push email.
Nobody else really had anything like it (at least at the same fully-reliable caliber) for a long time.
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The old Blackberry, or the new QNX-based phones?
IIRC, BB 10 has HTML5 with Qt under the covers on top of a RTOS. If they pitch it right, it's a pathway for both webOS and Meego/Symbian devs.
Perhaps 2 years late to the party but give them some credit for trying...
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They will never beat iOS or Android in terms of apps, features, or interface
Not apps, yet. On features and interface, however, RIM already has the competition "beat".
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A minority player like RIM will never compete on the number of apps. It's basically a 2 horse race between iOS and Android (and perhaps a late challenge from MS-Nokia).
What they need to focus on is building 'killer' phones and focus on their strengths in the enterprise. And selling them at a reasonable price point to consumers. i.e. not $60/m on a 2 year contract as per the flagship Samsung/Apple models - which is a fair wad of cash for the average consumer in tough economic times.
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.
Palm Pilots could have been as... (Score:2)
...ubiquitous as pocket calculators (as was remarked years ago by other Slashdotters) but the drive to change/fuck with their product ensured that would never happen.
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not true. I just bought an hp15c (they are going fast, get one soon if you want one!) and even though I have an android 'phone', it sucks and touch screens, uhm, well, they blow goats (to put it in a colorful way).
yes, there are lots of 'apps' for phones. so what. they all use that aweful touchscreen and have no local buttons of any real sort. cheap to make phones like that, very general purpose but its not USABLE in any tactile sense.
I think I learned my lesson. my next phone will be a button phone, n
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yes, there are lots of 'apps' for phones. so what. they all use that aweful touchscreen and have no local buttons of any real sort. cheap to make phones like that, very general purpose but its not USABLE in any tactile sense.
There are nice smartphones out there with a real physical keyboard. They are getting harder to find because few purchase them, but a few do still exist.
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I think I learned my lesson. my next phone will be a button phone, non-smart and simple.
and when I reach for a calc, I grab a real physical one. or, if I'm on a computer, I just echo stuff to 'bc' and at least I have a real keyboard when I do that!
my prediction: touch screens will fade in interest and we will return to button pads some time in the future. we will have learned our lesson and the fad will have faded. TS's are sexy but they are BAD to use. admit it.
The market has spoken and you choose not to hear.
Dedicated keyboards on smartphones are never again going to lead the market. It's over. Dedicate keyboards won't disappear altogether, but you won't see them dominating the form factor. Bank on it.
Sort of stunning how you blithely ignore the empirical evidence of people voting with their dollars. Good thing you're not in charge of a smartphone company! FWIW, I like my iPhone's touch screen just fine; it's actually the physical buttons that annoy me.
Re:Palm Pilots could have been as... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dedicated keyboards on smartphones are never again going to lead the market. It's over.
Outside of "flagship" phones, phones with slide-out keyboards are becoming increasingly popular, especially among women.
Sort of stunning how you blithely ignore the empirical evidence of people voting with their dollars.
Touch screens are just the current fashion. Remember pen computing? That lost out to RIM's brilliant screen+keyboard smart phones. Touch screens were in, out, now they're in again -- just like every other fashion.
Current touch screens, as others have pointed out, have serious short-comings. They're not the future, they're the present. 10 years from now, we'll have something better and we'll all wonder what collective insanity made us want to use an all-touch interface in the first place.
Two recent innovations that attempt to overcome the usability nightmare that is the capacitive touchscreen include the Galaxy Note and the Bold 9900. The Bold keeps the incredibly good physical keyboard and trackpad for tasks that are better served by those input methods and offers a touchscreen on top for the few tasks that are well served by finger-fondling. The Galaxy Note gives users a stylus for precision work; absolutely brilliant for jotting quick notes and tasks that require precision (think working with text, hitting small targets on websites, etc.) The Note is optimized for two-handed use, the Bold for single-handed use.
I expect both approaches to find their way in to competing handsets over the next few years. I'll make my prediction to counter yours: The all-touch UI fad will be dead in 5 years and replaced with interfaces that don't sacrifice usability for the illusion of 'ease of use' -- they'll actually be easier to use.
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You may not be able to use an iPad extensively for "work", but I can't see the form factor going anywhere.
Everybody I know with a tablet (no matter who makes it) is using it to surf the web, watch movies, listen to music, read eBooks ... stuff like that. They're not using it to write code or manage servers. Which is what most users do most of the time anyway; they're just watching You Tube videos.
When I travel on business, my iPad sees far more use than my laptop. Check
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Re:Palm Pilots could have been as... (Score:5, Informative)
Doubt it all you like. I can vouch for the fact that I still use mine a lot after two years.
Well, the people I know who own tablets aren't for the most part die-hard techies, or mostly just not interested in fiddling with technology if they don't have to. They also tend to be 40+.
It's only people here on Slashdot I hear saying this, and unfortunately, we as a group tend to be completely incapable of seeing the world in any other way than as a geek who wants to ssh into a server. You might discover that the vast majority of people use computers differently than you do.
When I travel on business, I tend to be smack in the middle of the business district, in an upmarket hotel mostly used by business travelers.
My experience is more like seeing 2-3 iPads in the hotel lobby/bar in the evenings, a couple of people on the plane watching movies, and usually 1-2 waiting at the gate at the airport. Not as many as people with laptops, but definitely not an empty set. Being able to flop my iPad onto the bar in the lobby and check my email, look up a restaurant, check the news ... all of which you can do with a laptop, but in a lighter package.
Feel free to believe anything you want about tablets and if people will buy them. But as someone who owns a tablet, and knows at least half a dozen other people who have tablets, they get used, but they get used differently.
Hell, the main thing my wife uses her BB Playbook for is google from the living room when we're talking about stuff and want to pull up a quick browser. Whip it out, do a quick search, put it back on the coffee table.
My personal favorite was keeping my work webmail open in a browser, while I was sitting in the backyard in the sunshine. Pick it up every now and then to see if you've got email.
For those of us who don't own smart phones, a tablet has a lot of use, just not for the same kinds of things as I'd use my desktop or laptop for.
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That's the funny thing about HP touchpads. The exact same thing is applicable since most users use the devices the way you said. Except the Touchpad only cost $150 on blowout. Ever since my wife got hers, she hardly uses her desktop anymore. Heck, she doesn't use her nook any more either. She uses the nook and kindle apps on the Touchpad.
Re:Palm Pilots could have been as... (Score:4, Interesting)
You'll notice I said "no matter who makes it" -- I'm talking about the generic idea of a tablet, not a specific product.
My brother has a cheap ass Android, my wife and a few friends have BB Playbooks, I know people who bought the HP one, and I think one or two have Samsung tablets.
It's the form factor I'm talking about here. They all give you the same kind of functionality. A fondleslab with internet access, and the ability to play videos and the like.
In all cases, the people who I know who use their tablets largely don't use it the way you'd use a desktop, and aren't going around saying how they can't update the quarterly spreadsheets with it or file the TPS reports. They're passively consuming stuff instead of creating it.
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Agreed. It is a consumption device. I think the folks that think they need an IPad or IPhone or some other Apple branded device don't realize that other other ones do a fine job for 99% of what they want. BTW, I have a nook color running CM7 that we keep next to the TV for looking up stuff while we are watching. Nook colors can be had for around $100 (though you have to be a nerd to run Android on it). On the phone side, she has a simple pre-paid flip phone, and mine is a work provided Blackberry.
It's happened before. (Score:5, Informative)
Commodore was once the #1 selling computer of 1983, 84, 85, 86. A mere seven years later it ran out of cash and filed for bankruptcy (and the new #1 computer was the IBM PC). It all comes down to mutton-headed managers making bad decisions, whether it happened in the 80s with Commodore or the Present with PalmOS.
Other companies that were once number one were Radio Shack with the TRS-80. Atari with its VCS/2600 console and Atari 800 computer (but went bankrupt). The perpetually third place Apple (1977-1995) flirted with death due to a lot of bad management decisions. Steve Jobs: "When I became CEO in mid-1997, we were only two months from bankruptcy. We were running out of cash." Until Bill Gates bought stuck and gave them extra liquidity to pay their bills. Maybe Microsoft can now save Palm??? (Doubt it.)
Re:It's happened before. (Score:4, Insightful)
"It all comes down to mutton-headed managers making bad decisions"
This is actually the problem with all companies...
RIM is suffering that one. Nokia is about to slide down that slope with it's Mutton-Headed CEO.
Microsoft is survived it's current Mutton Head simply because it has giant trucks full of money.
Re:It's happened before. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft is survived it's current Mutton Head simply because it has giant trucks full of money.
That may be partially true but I think it has more to do with Bill's philosophy of hiring A-level people (who hire other A people, whereas B people hire C, D, etc). He also pushed hard for an own-it management style - if you were in charge of some area then he let you get on with it. Management interference was kept to a minimum.
It takes a long time to strangle the culture out of an organization and that seems to be slowly taking place at Microsoft.
It remains to be seen if Apple can continue in the long term but it has one thing most others in that situation don't - the original visionary came back and rescued the company, followed by success after success. That visionary also faced his own failures and matured as a person and manager (compare Steve Jobs terror stories pre-departure and his management style after returning).
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Also, didn't Palm end up owning what was left of the Amiga at one point?
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s/saving/killing/
Stupidity *always* flows from the top. (Score:5, Insightful)
Greed too. Hire a CEO or manager who is incompetent (e.g. Carly Fiona) or simply willing to gut a company for personal gain (e.g. Carly Fiona) and its eventual destruction is assured.
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And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.
Poor Hardware (Score:2)
I had a Pre, and and loved the OS. It was a work of art, and I still think it's more intuitive than anything else available today. Unfortunately, Palm cheaped out on the hardware. The phone scratched at anything more than a gentle breeze, and the plastic began falling apart in a couple of weeks let alone 2 long years. Had Palm worked with HTC to put Web OS on some decent options, the company might be in an entirely different place today.
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History repeating (Score:2)
Neat (but flawed) technology (Score:3)
An outfit I used to work for had a go at doing peripherals for Palms, back in the Palm Pilot days. I found the devices amusing, so I bought a newer Palm to play with, one of their ARM-based Tungsten units.
I found the general design of the unit to be good. Decent graphics, good selection of applications, the handwriting recognition basically worked. I had a go at writing my own apps for it, using the free gcc-based toolchain. Again, it basically worked. The programming environment was idiosyncratic, but mobile devices always are.
What killed it for me was the shocking battery life. With the fun bonus that since all your apps and data were in RAM, if the battery went dead, you lost everything.
Sigh...
...laura
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But that was true for ALL similar PDAs back in those days... The battery life for anything with a color screen was under 3 hours, which is one reason I loved my black & white Psion 5mx with 1 month of battery life on a pair of AA batteries... And a CR2032 backup battery was the only thing keeping your data safe on any PDA of the time.
In tr
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That's ancient history; back in the PalmOS4 days. Palm's were great then, but they were engineered for 90s hardware and didn't scale well to leverage naughts technology. That's how Windows CE caught up. Not by being a better OS, but being a slow, crummy OS that was properly positioned when hardware caught up with its requirements.
WebOS was a different beast.
Irrelevant before 2009 (Score:5, Interesting)
Palm's problem was with their Palm Pilot and the trickle roll-out of upgrades they offered. I remember seeing "new generations" of Palm Pilots being released with nothing more then 4 more mb of RAM, all specs and even style of the handset was identical to those a year ago. While competitors like Microsoft offered color screens and support for music (way before iPod), Palm stuck with black and white screens and no multi-media support for several generations. When they finally offere color screens and music support, it was almost grudgingly done.
Then when the iPod came out Palm did little to offer enhanced music support. Their one change to create something better then the iPod, LifeDrive, was the final nail in the coffin of an incompetent company that could not innovate and compete to save their lives.
When they finally dumped their hardware group and went OS only, their efforts were lazy and inefficient. It is almost laughable to assume that PalmOS could have even stood up to iOS or Android. PalmOS was killed off while those OS'es were only in their infancy.
Palm is simply an example of a company that created the "darling" product for a given generation and then got lazy and arrogant. In spite of disrupters in their industry (such as Windows CE and iPod), Palm remained steady on a course to oblivion by assuming their name alone will drive sales.
BTW, RIM is in EXACTLY the same condition as Palm was, having created the "IT" product of the late 90', early 00's and then resting on their laurels while the mobile market changed dramatically around them.
There is no mystery why Palm failed just as their is no mystery as to why Rim is failing. You can't maintain success without continued innovation; the moment you assume you have ample market penetration, the moment you assume your name alone will sell a new generation of product, the moment you dismiss disrupters ad "trifling" competitors and then strive to catch up to them, you are dead in this industry.
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Nice summary.
It seems tech companies constantly need to keep innovating or slowly be made irrelevant by your competition.
It sucks (Score:2)
I'm still rockin' an unlocked gsm pre2 on straight talk, though. The OS is great. The homebrew community is amazing. And linux is easily accessible, no jailbreak. A shame developers have abandoned it, so we have to limp along with existing applications, but it does all that I need for the forseeable future. I moved from ATT to Sprint to get the original. FrankenPre'd the pre2 for sprint, then unfrankenpre'd it to move to straight talk for $45 a month.
My only gripe is WebOS 2.x bluetooth sucks hard com
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I would kill for (Score:2)
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You might find buying an Android 4 phone/tablet easier than committing a felony. Except you flight things to the right and they're properly spaced out so you don't end up accidentally closing the wrong thing like in WebOS.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Hubris (Score:5, Insightful)
The death of most companies can be traced down to a single word...hubris.
Some of these are paraphrased quotations.
“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
"The one thing that Apple provides leadership in is colours"
"Right now we are selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, and Apple is selling zero phones a year"
"I left RIM back in 2006 just months before the iPhone launched and I remember talking to friends from RIM and Microsoft about what their teams thought about it at the time. Everyone was utterly shocked. RIM was even in denial the day after the iPhone was announced with all hands meets claiming all manner of weird things about iPhone: it couldn’t do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc. Imagine their surprise when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was [a] battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it. It was ridiculous, it was brilliant."
"I don't think that what we have seen so far (from Apple) is something that would any way necessitate us changing our thinking when it comes to openness, our software and business approach," Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told a conference call with analysts.
The reason companies fail is that they don't challenge their beliefs in their way of operating. They don't seem to realise that they are where they are with a large helping of luck, and that they could easily fall by the wayside. The list of mobile phone makers who fell by the wayside is 2000's who's who of the entire mobile phone industry. Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel etc. Only Nokia survives as an industry giant and it is struggling, attacked on all ends by the likes of Samsung, Apple, HTC and hordes of Chinese companies.
The motto is evolve or die. The Apple of today heeded that lesson. That is not to say hubris won't get them. It always does, sooner or later.
Always shaky (Score:2)
I remember when WebOS was a darling of the internet chatter. But even at the time it all looked very shaky. The product was rushed to market. They company didn't quite have the resources to push it out firmly enough, even in the US, let alone the rest of the world. Apple was biting at their heals. Palm finances were very dodgy. If a bigger company had the product at the time with enough resources to really push it, it might have survived and thrived. But the whole thing just didn't have enough momentum in t
Squandered BeOS (Score:3)
I used to love Palm until they became the company that acquired, sat on, and ultimately squandered BeOS. Good riddance and hopefully the door smacks your ass on your way out.
At least now there's open source darling Haiku.
palm was dead much earlier (Score:2)
Somehow the market seems to be a rather late noticing when platforms die. It was clear in the early 2000's that PalmOS was a dying platform and Palm should have started moving to Linux right away.
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Quoting somebody I can't remember, "Palm couldn't market a cure for death."
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I remember a lot of "iPhone Killer" hype in the news at the time of the Pre's launch. It did not last long.
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Yep, jumping on the convergence bandwagon was the stupidest thing they could do, which was pointed out by quite a few smart people.
They had a good thing, and decided to drop it for the chance of becoming a big player on the smart phone market.
Then they sold the sinking ship to Carly.
If I could get a device in Palm V size and quality with today's technology that isn't a phone, I would love it. A tablet is just too big for the pocket, and the battery life sucks compared to what PDAs had.
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Carly was long gone by the time Palm sold to HP.
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Carly was long gone by the time Palm sold to HP.
The company didn't stop being called Hewlett-Packard when Bill Hewlett and Frank Packard were long gone.
When Carly Fiorina took over, the company changed so drastically that I think it deserved a name change not to dishonour Messrs H and P. If not calling it Carly, how about Fiorina-Hurd (FH)?
The only product I've bought from them since the aughties was a FH-15C LE, a cheap quality product not even made by them. These days, they seem to be a middle man brander for far east designed and produced products;
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Yep, jumping on the convergence bandwagon was the stupidest thing they could do, which was pointed out by quite a few smart people.
They had a good thing, and decided to drop it for the chance of becoming a big player on the smart phone market. Then they sold the sinking ship to Carly.
If I could get a device in Palm V size and quality with today's technology that isn't a phone, I would love it. A tablet is just too big for the pocket, and the battery life sucks compared to what PDAs had.
iPod Touch?
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iPod Touch?
That's a phone without calling - IIRC, even Jobs called it training wheels for the iPhone. Complete with the walled garden of iTunes + App Store, and a focus on consuming data.
Palm never told me what I could or couldn't install on my PalmOS devices, and its main functionality was always input oriented, not output. In short, a personal assistant, not a personal entertainer, which is what the iPod Touch truly is.
But I guess it's about the closest thing there is these days, except for paper organizers.
Re:rode the wave, then got off (Score:5, Informative)
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 ...
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They bought Compaq to get DEC's class A IP address block.
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Yeah I was surprised at that, more traditionally you'd expect HP would wait until after the IPv6 transition.
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voodoopc.com [voodoopc.com]? (one of HP's "high-end" desktop brands)
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They also collect uber-fail CEOs.
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.
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Ok, new plan. Figure out a way to get HP to purchase IKEA.
Let's put it this way: Were that to happen, Ikea furniture would stop being named $NORDIC_NONSENSE_WORD$ $SIMPLE DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE$ and start having names sufficiently complex to be described in 20 pages of tables [hp.com](seriously, pages 1-2 through 1-21, inclusive)...
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I'll be happy with whichever way the beast is killed.
NO MORE CRAPPY FURNITURE!!!
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Palm's death was very similar to Amiga's death.
Both had... interesting... marketing, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Both Palm and Amiga used some very clever hardware and software tricks to do something that no one else could do at the time. Unfortunately, their solution was very hardware-dependent and could not be moved to the more advanced technology that their competitors started to use without completely killing backward compatibility or running a resource-chomping compatibility layer (chomping both hardware resources and engineering resources) that their competitors did not have to deal with. By the time each learned to just cut the cord, or by the time the state-of-the-art progressed to the point where simple emulation worked well, it was too late - the moment where they had a special capability passed.
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:4, Informative)
As somebody who formerly wrote Palm programs (Weasel Reader [weaselreader.org]), I don't really agree with your hardware assessment. Like most small systems with both an API and a method of direct hardware access, the amount of portability depends almost entirely on how well you use the provided API.
Up through Palm OS 4.x, the hardware all ran on m68k series processors, but there was nothing in the API specific to this hardware. Then, with Palm OS 5.0, Palm began using ARM hardware and provided a translation/emulation layer so that the new devices could still run all the old Palm OS programs. If you wrote your software according to the API guidelines then the emulation layer would run your old programs perfectly fine. In fact, because the new ARM hardware was so much faster the old Palm programs ran better than they ever did on native m68k hardware.
Of course, if you did direct hardware access then things were rather different. Most likely your program wouldn't work at all. Even then, though, the OS provided a method for checking for OS capabilities and underlying hardware. If you wrote your program properly, and checked for these option bits, then you could gracefully turn off direct hardware access if you weren't sure it would run correctly. Most likely, if you really needed that sort of access, you would add new hardware specific code for the ARM hardware.
The move to WebOS need not have killed off the old application ecosystem. There was no reason they couldn't have written another translation/emulation layer so that existing Palm OS programs could be run. Keep in mind that, even with OS 5.x, most of these apps were not that complex and most users would never have noticed a speed decrease, if there even was one. And in the worst case, they could have axed support for OS 5.x programs and provided support to run anything pre-5.x (m68k binaries), knowing that the WebOS hardware would be able to run those programs at a fast speed.
I don't know why they chose to completely ditch existing apps. If they had kept support, WebOS could have launched with the ability to run the many thousands of existing programs and that would have been a big plus, especially for businesses which might have company-specific Palm programs (inventory, point of sale, etc.) and would then have had an upgrade path.
But, as this article and numerous others have made clear, the history of Palm is overflowing with bad choices...
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The problems predated WebOS, which was really just a last-ditch hail-Mary. The problem is that the original Palm system held everything in RAM... there was no separate storage. Applications were always in memory, and all of their data sat there, too. This gave them a tremendous advantage compared to Windows CE, which was a more traditional architecture that depended on extremely expensive (in 1996) flash RAM and needed more components.
Later versions of the devices added things like external storage, but the
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:5, Informative)
They died when "smart" phones got popular
I used their PDA in the 90s to keep track of everything, and the software to sync with the desktop was glorious and everything Just Worked.
Four steps to the death of PALM:
1) Then everyone and their mother started computerized and later online address books and none every worked really well to sync with Palm PDA devices. Close sometimes, but never perfect. The only software that ever really worked perfectly to sync a palm was palms own software.
2) "smartphones" came along and theirs was pretty much a super expensive dog. Of course, all smartphones were like that until the iphone.
3) Sony made a better licensed Palm PDAs than Palm. Loved my Clie until the battery died and it started going bonkers. Sony's licensed Palm-like PDAs smashed Palm's PDA market, then Sony exited the market (WTF)
4) So my clie is finally dead after years of faithful service, I'm not using my execrable unsync-able dumb phone, I'm not paying $120/month contract for a smartphone, what to do? Ah a ipod touch. Near perfection as a PDA for only $186 or whatever it was. Ipod touch in left pocket and $8/month pay as I go dumbphone in right pocket was almost paradise, until I got into the republic wireless $20/mo beta which is, in fact, paradise.
For kids who don't know what a PDA is/was, its basically was a smartphone that can't make phone calls. Since I almost never talk on my current phone (only a couple minutes in the last 6 months, seriously), its basically a PDA anyway.
Re:Palm didn't die then (Score:5, Insightful)
For kids who don't know what a PDA is/was, its basically was a smartphone that can't make phone calls. Since I almost never talk on my current phone (only a couple minutes in the last 6 months, seriously), its basically a PDA anyway.
Except for the lack of graffiti and a battery life measured in hours insted of weeks.
Re:looked at Palm stuff several times. nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
They hit the ball out of the park with the Palm III back in 97, and they couldn't shake off the success. That's why everything they did, right up till the '10s, was right outta the 90s. Palm is like the middle aged person reminiscing about how high school was the pinnacle of their existence and not doing anything since then, while everyone else passes them by.