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We're Not Walking Away From Continuum, Says HP (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: While Windows roadmaps purportedly leaked to a blog last week appear to have a big hole in them where mobile should be, HP Inc tells us it has been assured by Redmond there are no plans to drop Continuum. HP is the sole major mobile vendor committed to the Windows Mobile Edition of Windows 10 and bet big on Continuum, the multimode "use-your-phone-as-a-PC" feature on which some of HP's ambitions rest. El Reg was impressed by HP's plans to build an ecosystem around the multi-mode capabilities of the HP Elite x3 phone, which doubles up as a PC replacement. (Or tries to.) Launching in over 50 markets, the ecosystem includes a streaming apps service HP Workplace to fill in the app gap, and even a "lap dock." HP pitched it at field workers and verticals. The only thing letting Inc-ers down was the quality of the software from Microsoft. Spring came and went without the expected improvements to Continuum. Unauthorised briefings last week suggest the Windows Mobile branch of Windows 10 is now an orphan.
Continuum is an application. It includes power/performance/connectivity/mode variations in presenting its UI.
It would need hooks, and functionally it closer to a custom skin than an app.
Google isn't going to absorb MS code, so this is another platform war.
At this point, I do want an alternative to Android because Google is going bad---but damn, could we please get someone besides Microsoft?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
WebOS's timing wasn't nearly as bad as its execution.
WebOS came to light in 2009. Apple's App Store was only a year old, Android was still trying to find its footing, Microsoft was busy with their first revamp of WinMo, and Blackberry still owned the business market. Android being the second horse in the mobile race was far from determined at that point.
WebOS's first problem was that it was Sprint-only. Carrier exclusivity is a relic of a bygone era *now*, but nobody was switching to Sprint for a Palm phone. It might have done better at Verizon, but Sprint was a bad move. Next up, their app ecosystem was incompatible. Now sure, webOS was such a radical departure from PalmOS that it's unsurprising there wasn't compatibility, and even though Palm's days were clearly numbered at the time, they made no attempt to leverage whatever ecosystem it did have. The market was ripe for a Blackberry competitor; BES was overpriced and overcomplicated, but it would be another year or two before Activesync was supported on either iOS or Android, and more comprehensive MDM features for either were still very immature.
The place where the ball was really dropped, however, was the hardware. The Palm Pre couldn't stand up to *anything*. They had very high insurance claim rates, and very high return rates, because they couldn't handle real-world usage at all. They tried cramming a Blackberry-reminiscent keyboard into a thinner frame, and the screen was too small for a virtual keyboard to be a good idea. The mobile browser was okay, but wasn't Safari, and even if it were, mobile websites weren't much of a thing at that point.
Once HP bought Palm, they promised "WebOS Everywhere", and it really would have been a great preinstallation environment for their laptops - anyone remember the 'Quickplay' idea that HP tried but took longer to boot than actual-Windows? WebOS was well ahead of its time in the context of competing with Chromebooks, and the idea of seamlessly moving between devices was the kind of thing HP could have executed better than anyone under those circumstances. However, I think you're spot on with the "CEO Revolving Door" being its undoing. Apotheker seemed to think that 'tablets == massive profits', and didn't leave the Touchpad on the shelf for even two months before scrapping it because it didn't sell like the iPad.
Had WebOS launched alongside an MDM software stack (maybe even including five free CALs with a server purchase), run on phones that didn't bruise like a cantaloupe, mastered the seamless cross-device data sharing that was demonstrated at their keynote, and done so with some support from the top...it's entirely possible that we would have a three horse race right now.
As an owner of the Pre (who actually did go begrudingly to Sprint), I'll agree, though WebOS at least was more robust UI and multitasking wise compared to Android and Apple, though frustratingly enough Palm was too invested in javascript+html only app, and only later added native app support (which was kind of neat in a way since it was SDL and very familiar to a Linux game developer, but only neat to Linux game developers really...)
And yes, the concept when they announced WebOS promised seamless capability that wouldn't appear for years in reality, and if they had pulled that off, that would have been neat.
I'm skeptical there was room for another monolithic vendor, though. Apple certainly is that, but I think that is the good fortune of being peerless when launch. If iPhone launched 2 years later, I suspect even Apple wouldn't have broken into the market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We're halfway there =).
I can understand Palm's insistence on HTML/Javascript because the alternative at the time was writing to lower level APIs that would have limited their appeal. Additionally, that announcement was made at a time when Apple's like was "web apps are the future" and encouraged browser based functionality. It was a way of minimizing the effort to code for multiple platforms prior to IDEs handling the lion's share of the cross-compilation that would have otherwise been necessary. An inefficient use of resources for sure, but no one was going to bet the farm on Palm, either (well, except HP).
I think there was room for another monolithic vendor for two reasons. First, there were three tribes prior to the iPhone - WinMo, Blackberry, and Palm. Each had their pros and cons, but there was a solid three-horse race to be had at the time. Post iPhone, and I'd argue even up until Android's Ice Cream Sandwich release, there was still a niche to be had by dethroning Blackberry. If there was polished hardware tied to a good MDM that did the cross-device syncing in a self-hosted manner at 1/3 the price of BES with availability on every carrier and Palm were to be content holding a 20% niche marketshare, I think they could have held the business market that no one seemed to want to target. It'd be a tall order to get to a mature level in a short period, but HP wasn't doing anything groundbreaking at the time anyway.