Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: “Well, I’m not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That’s for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don’t get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.”
Don’t do unto Be Inc. what you doesn’t want HP do unto you.
Nice try. Google Palm, then google Palmsource. 2 companies. One was bought by Access and owned the BeOS IP, one didn’t and was bought by HP. So, Palm had zero to do with BeOS.
Facepalm
WebOS go to HP. It’s not even in HP corporate culture to do software.
The Palm Pre 3 was cool. The UI was and still is unmatched. Only Metro comes second close (except the fugly Live Tile screen).
WebOS had a lot of issues, which I attribute to a lack of polish that it sorely needed, and us WebOS afficiandos believed HP would give it.
WebOS had so much going for it. WebOS proved that multitasking on a smartphone can be easy and desireable – apple now copies their card like design, and android(starting with 4.0) has a similar view, with apps you can slide off to close.
WebOS had notifications that can have controls on them like the music app, and you could slide away notifications that you didn’t care for. Android resellers added those features in and Google added them in proper in Android 4.0.
Synergy enabled unification of contacts from different sources into one meta contact, with access to all their information in one source. Companies like HTC quickly added this feature to their android phones shortly after.
Like with synergy, your contact communications were in one place. You didn’t have to think about which messenger you wanted to open to talk to your friends. You just opened messaging, chose your contact, and it gave you the option to use whatever IM client you wanted, be it gtalk, yahoo chat, facebok chat, or plain old SMS. Android and iPhone STILL require going to different apps to talk to your contacts depending on what service they are using. They are APP centric instead of people-centric.
WebOS had plenty of problems. It’s apps were slow, and though they added the ability to run native apps, instead of web based apps – they always felt like second class citizens on their phones and tablet. Their version of webkit was aging and websites were getting broken and loading slowly.
WebOS was brilliant. It deserved polish and a chance to be a competitor that drove others to innovate. Dammit it deserved better than this.
…. Like meamo/meego
No. Meego/Maemo was nowhere near WebOS.
In what ways?
I have both, my ex n900 and my n9 is way better than my pre3
Don’t bother, the Meego/Maemo fanboys won’t listen to reason because they’re too bitter/jealous about all the praise that webOS gets. And no wonder! Nokia had been trying to build a Linux-based mobile OS for what, 3-4 years before webOS’ development was started? Then along came Palm, who took less than a year from the initial announcement to public release – something that Nokia STILL hadn’t managed by that time. Palm beat Nokia at their own game, despite Nokia having a huge head start, so of COURSE Meego/Maemo fanboys are bitter about webOS (though they’re much more butthurt over Windows Phone, of course).
like every large acquisition
Fully agree.
I went through two such process in my work life, so I think it was a bit naive from the involved parties to think it could work as they were expecting.