Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Death of Palm and WebOS
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."
...because the CEO of Palm walked away a rich man. And that's all that matters to businesses these days.
When I think of Palm I oddly enough think of the edutainment push in the late 90's and early 00's.
The same thing is happening to Research In Motion.
They chose the wrong fork (no pun intended)
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Palm Pre was my first smart phone starting in 11/2009. After the two year contract was up, off to join the android herd. It did the job, kept a checkbook, streaming audio, maps and gps, lookup stuff online, played angry birds.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
none of the webos developers had beards.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
They died when they spun off the hardware division. Palm was only popular in 2009 because everyone liked to watch the zombie flail around.
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.
Try 10 years.
From the time they acquired the Be, Inc. IP & remaining engineers, to the time they died, it was a long-slog into irrelevance.
Having value because you're popular has not provided a significant defense of shareholder value for services companies such as RIM and Facebookin the past. The herd always moves on. While other social networking sites (Orkut, anyone?!?) have fallen to desuetude in the wake of Facebook's massive success, there is always someone on the way up to take your place if you stumble, and then the herd is working against you instead of for you.
I would argue that's the biggest difference between Google and Facebook - Google's search is actually *better* than its rivals, not just more popular.
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.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
they just got something close to fixed, then dumped the line. time after time. and they kept that "lose me now" stylus through all of it.
how very 90s.
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Used OS/2, Maemo and WebOS, had the same kind of fate.
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
Can't say dead yet. Sure there aren't any devices being worked on currently, but we must retain faith that someone (*cough* HTC *cough* Samsung *cough*) will take the open source version this fall and figure out how to slap it on some better hardware. There is still a small fire, more smoldering than kindling I guess.
31 months hurts. I've had my Palm Pre for 36 months and it's still alive on the knife in the back jabbing Sprint network. True, I have a more reliable iPhone for work that I am able to abuse more and keep my personal line Pre alive longer, but it's just not as nice of an interface to use. Also, my aunt has a Pre - that somehow still looks like new - on Verizon and she loves every bit of it. I wish I was on Verizon, I would have made sure to find a Pre3 to have running on there. That way I wouldn't have to keep looking down the road for something better.
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.
This space for rent.
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.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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 compared to 1.4.5. and that likely is never going to be fixed. But who knows what will happen when we get a mature Open WebOS release later this year.
Graffiti
It's never too late to do the right thing. All they need to do is find out what the right thing is. Has it got anything like what it needs besides a florid history?
the ability to "fling" apps up off the screen to close them, and to see multiple running apps at a glance. I thought things were suppose to get better. I still keep my pre for some reason, I miss using it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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 the face of bigger players.
He said that right from the get-go. They bought Palm for the patents, and because (as the article said) they wanted to look at putting WebOS on more devices.
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.
Cheers!
Sean
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.
In line to die are ... HTC(doing badly these days) ...
I believe that there is a great lesson to be learned from the failure of HTC
HTC had a promised start, but they ended up a big failure, not because they didn't play catch up --- HTC failed because they produced PHONES THAT ARE TRULY NO QUALITY
In other words, HTC failed because they cut-corners - and ended up producing phones with shitty batteries
It's a lesson that every future entrepreneurs should know before they get their feet wetted in any high tech adventure - Never Cut Any Corner
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Let's see... where do I start with my Palm Pre that retired just a couple of weeks ago to my new Droid Razr?
1) The music software was garbage. You couldn't fast forward or move a little scroll thing to go to the place you wanted and if you were listening to an ebook, well, if you didn't have time to finish it, you got to start all over from the beginning. Stupid.
2) Headphone jacks were notorious for going out on very moderate usage. Mine went out twice. Plus, there was a bug in the software that didn't turn the phone mic back on so you HAD to use the headphones if you wanted to talk on the phone unless you plugged and unplugged it dozens of times (you can goggle all this!)
3) No updates. Like almost ever. Like... nothing. We just had what we had from like years ago.
4) The cameras sucked. Plus, if you wanted to send a text message with a picture, it didn't resize the gigantic files that the camera produced - and there was NO OPTION AT ALL to what size picture your camera took. Plus, they all looked so grainy, it was a joke.
5) PDF crashed and couldn't go portrait to landscape - hell... a lot of stuff *cough*email*cough* couldn't go landscape.
6) The whole stupid rigamarole with the app store and rooted phones. They were control freaks and actually shot themselves in the foot by screwing over their own app store. So many people had to root their phones so they could put on a third party app that you downloaded so you could access myriads of other "app stores".
7) The phone would just crash. No updates. No nothing. I had to install an app that rebooted the phone each night at 4am. That's sad.
8) No SD card slot or any way at all to upgrade or increase your storage space while Android phones had this.
9) You would press the "Hang Up" or "Answer" button and it would take freakin' forever for it to actually do anything. The whole phone lagged. Never a single update for it either.
10) If you even barely accidentally touched one of the missed call alerts (and this was pretty much the only way to clear them), it just started immediately dialing up that number! Like... I don't know how many times I was like... "Nooo! Don't call her!! Hang up button stop lagging you @$%^&* phone!"
11) No ring per contact. You just got one. Same with text messages.
12) Sprint installed spyware and a limit cap on the download speed on the phone that made doing anything at all on the internet a joke.
13) It took freakin 10 minutes to just boot my phone. I'm not even exaggerating! So when it crashed (which it loved to do), rebooting was a nightmare. Many times you had to take the battery out.
14) Lack of any real options. You were stuck with all the defaults. No configuration was even possible for stuff like the icons per screen, auto-replace words, date format, roam controls, reset options, auto-showing the dialpad on a call instead of the contact view, battery icon as a percent, caller id size (it was microscopic), lack of call duration in the call log, no character counter in the chat, no timestamp in chat, default view on the calendar, dialpad vibration, GPS options, sync times, thumbnail preloading (which actually was a problem), shutter sound on the camera, standby times, and the list just goes on... all of it had ZERO options.
15) Palm sold the company to HP and scared the hell out of all it's customers.
16) Can I add that the battery like was like a few hours? And that's if you didn't use it.
I'm sure I could find more stuff that just drove me up the wall... but that's also a huge reason why they failed. I mean, I still miss the awesome way the phone handled multitasking... and... ummm... uhhh... ya, that.
Refreshing to see that someone can actually think two steps ahead and see the obviously illegal.
HP's spiral down, is continuous and unabated. In related news, RIM (of blackberry fame), is going through a death spiral. No new products, not as much 'oooh' factor as apple, not as cheap, nor as free wheeling, as android, and lacking apps that people really like.
Palm led the way to the mobile revolution. They had connectivity with the Palm VII before there was any such thing with any other device. When BB started, I scoffed. When Apple re-started mobile after the failure of the Newton, I scoffed. But from there it was a long, downhill slide for Palm. Just idiocy after idiocy. The Handspring/Palm split made it tough for a developer to choose sides. Then they refused to follow the "touch the screen with your finger" trend. You had to have their stylus.
For me, the end, the utter end, was the CREEPY strawberry blond girl in their Pre ads. I ran from that.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
UX specialist
Noun. Someone who combines the practical, methodical and scientific approach of a graphic designer with the aesthetic sense and artistic talent of a programmer - but who thinks it's the other way round.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."