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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); }
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"
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 ...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They bought Compaq to get DEC's class A IP address block.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yeah I was surprised at that, more traditionally you'd expect HP would wait until after the IPv6 transition.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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(seriously, pages 1-2 through 1-21, inclusive)...
voodoopc.com? (one of HP's "high-end" desktop brands)
I'll be happy with whichever way the beast is killed.
NO MORE CRAPPY FURNITURE!!!
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
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.
They also collect uber-fail CEOs.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
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.
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
It's too late when the last bus has left the station and you're looking up at the incoming tidal wave. RIM may actually be under the shadow of a breaking tidal wave - it's a matter of months before they're gone, they don't have the resources to try again.
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. That too, may run out finally, we'll see. They could barely give away tablets last time around before those tablets had Android installed on them instead. Probably why ARM / Win8 has locked down UEFI.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
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.
As somebody who formerly wrote Palm programs (Weasel Reader), 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...
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
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.
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 OS was not easily extended to this more traditional use... it was always kludgy to use storage on a Palm. Sony did a better job than Palm, but it was still a hack. When they finally got around to solving the OS problems with an emulation layer on ARM, it was 2002 and the world had left them behind. If they hadn't picked up Handspring to get the Treo, I doubt they would have lasted much longer.
The user interface also struggled to keep up with the new functions as the device became more powerful... it looked like an organizer first-and-foremost right up until the end when they punted it for WebOS.
Don't get me wrong - I was a Palm fan and my wife was using her Tungsten until this year when her work got her an iPhone... but their devices got progressively kludgier and harder to use with time. The quaint, simple user interface that meshed so well with the original 1996 hardware was a huge turn-off in 2004 when we bought the Tungsten. Nothing is more tedious than uninstalling ePocrates on a Palm, I can assure you... :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I should sell thern 192.168.0.0
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
I agree, Win8 is a make or break for the company (and Nokia too). I predict Nokia will fail, and Win8 will largely end MS as the dominant OS. MS peaked in 2001 with XP and has been falling ever since, however slowly, Win 7 not withstanding. If organizations move to *nix systems, which honestly can serve as excellent desktops for most uses in the enterprise these days and be relatively easily managed, the end will come even more quickly as the lucrative licensing contracts MS currently holds disappear like vapor.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
One very worriying thing for me is the fact that in Montreal airport, international duty free section, you find not one but many iPad stores, while none showing a RIM tablet.
I went to Canada a couple of times these last two years, and with the dawn of non-apple tablets and my love for canadian things I definitely was waiting for buying one in the airport. Nothing.
Once I got a lot of luck: a full free afternoon downtown before leaving. I started checking internet, calling, visiting stores. I wanted the large-memory RIM tablet with 3G. None available, only the smallest possible one, and wifi only.
But really, the fact there is none at the airport, a place flocked with blackberry-equipped managers...
Herve S.
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?
And whatever you do, don't cut them round, or Apple will sue you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."
It's mathematically impossible to have more than one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really? The ones I owned were more like miniature laptops.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."