Palm chief addresses poor TouchPad reviews, compares webOS to Apple's early Mac OS X - Page 3

But will it ever come to a point where it passes the currently shipping iOS and iOS devices?

The latest Zunes are rather nice - in many ways better than the iPods. The problem is Apple changed the game and conversation to smartphones. So the latest Zunes are, to be blunt, dead. Not because they weren't good products, but good products too late.

HP doesn't have 3-4 years. There is a high likelihood that Apple (or some other company) will have once again moved the goal posts and changed the conversation.

HP-12C? You're such a |ˈn(y)oōbē| ... I still use my HP-11C, an engineer's bestest friend.

The problem with Rubensteins quotes is that 10 years ago Apple was competing against a sluggish and complacent Microsoft and a legacy-constrained Windows XP, but now HP and webOS are competing against a dynamic and innovative Apple run by the smartest CEO in the business and iOS which is part of a fully integrated hardware/software 'ecosystem'. That is a much tougher ask for HP and its software engineers!

This point is really huge. After the Intel transition people could run Windows on Macs so there was less hindrance for high end buyers to make the leap. The equivalent for webOS would be enabling webOS to run Android apps or the entire Android operating system in a virtual enviroment atop webOS. RIM kinda did that with the PlayBook but that didn't quite help them...

All of these high profile challenges (and subsequent failures) to the iPad worry me a bit. It indicates to me that Steve Jobs is responsible for so much more of the success of Apple than some would like to admit and that his driving force, once removed from Apple will be a very sad day.

How is it possible that in almost every case, a high level Apple employee once removed from the stratospheric conditions at Apple then fails in a spectacular fireball at a competitor?

Agreed - and Jon should be fired for allowing such a lame 1st gen device to be launched setting it up for failure knowing full well that it wouldn't be competitive with the market leader.

I've come to learn that this site is great for Apple news, but going to the forum is like a bunch of guys desperately trying to perform bukkake over each other at any mention of Apple. Seriously, you guys need a towel or are you just going to hit the shower?

Had a 25 and a 67 for the longest time. I still have a 15-year-old 32S.

Go RPN!

No need to scold us using such totally inappropriate terminology. We know who we are and what delight we take in reading articles such as this but to compare our delight to something as gross and demeaning as bukkake is to stoop to a really low level. <plonk>

Jon should've never left Apple. Web OS is nice, but the Palm Pre hardware and keyboard sucked and people moved on. When I think HP and Palm I don't exactly think cutting edge. There's a reason why they are giving tons of these things away to enterprise customers and notable tech people from the web.

Rubenstein should have compared the TouchPad to the launch of the Pre. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And Pre is still behind, um, everyone.

I don't know the history of how Rubenstein performed at Apple but after the past few years at Palm and HP, you have to wonder what the heck he's doing.

Towel first. If you shower straight away everything gets sticky all over, don't ya know?

The towel comes first. A towel is the most important and useful thing to us hitch-hikers. It makes sure we don't panic when we perform bukkake.

Has he never seen one of the trillions of flame wars around the internet?

Steve Jobs clearly matters enormously because it was him and his hand-built team at NeXT that rebuilt Apple. For years he has been like a top chef, checking every new dish that leaves the kitchen for quality and instilling his incredible high standards on the entire organization. There's no doubt that he continues to contribute enormously, but the failure of Apple execs who join other firms doesn't really tell us anything about how much.

There are other possible explanations for that than the idea that it's all about Steve. One would be that Apple has a unique corporate culture - other hardware firms are either management led or engineering led, Apple is a combination of engineering and design led. Now obviously that unique sensibility came from the Steve originally, he's a tech guy with a strong design sensibility, but after all these years it has permeated the entire company.

Another point is that the low level stuff matters. A decade or so ago I was working in a team under a very high flying manager in the finance industry. He had run a big part of Morgan Stanley's front office IT development and he had an outsize reputation and a personality to match. He was recruited away to work for a firm then called BZW to build a new trading system for them, and they hired an 'A-team' of contractors in the market who were some of the most talented people I've ever worked with.

An early technical architect made some really bad choices. For starters the infrastructure that they'd chosen to build everything on was immature, he'd also incorrectly applied software patterns to use cases where they didn't work. We could have managed that though.

The biggest problem was that the manager didn't understand that you can't expect the same kind of development cycle from a team working in C++ on an immature code-base with some fundamental architectural problems as you can from a team working in a higher level interpreted language on a tried and tested code-base with a fundamentally good architecture. The manager thought that he was a good manager because he'd run a good team, but it was the team and the codebase that had made him effective. He had no answer when faced with a completely different set of problems.

Both of you. HP failed. WebOS being great on smart phones, and HP/Palm tablet coming so late in the market, you can not come with beta product. nobody is serious about this business.

If HP can not handle phones/tablets, keep away. be happy with consultancy, servers and helpdesk. No need to fool people and give false hope for a life changing experience.

Apotheker has said a bunch of things. Like they won't ship products until they are ready and won't announce products and ship months later. Lo and behold, that's exactly what HP did with the whole raft of HP webOS products.

HP is not like Apple where Jobs is basically at the center of everything. It's a structured organization with silo-ed divisions. He's more of the traditional CEO who only deals with matters at the high-level. The personal systems group contains both PCs and Palm. The bottom line will come calling.

Mock their PCs and printers all you want, but they make the only calculator I will ever buy. RPN is the most natural way to calculate there is. Learn it and you'll never go back to parentheses in your formulas again.

I used to use a postscript emulator as a desktop calculator precisely for this reason

And we also have to remember that Jobs failed at NeXT. And his early years at Apple weren't that great either. You definitely learn more from failure than from success. The timing, the technology, the market strategy, the design all have to be right to make a homerun product. It's really hard and Apple in all its power today still strikes out. This is true for any high performance organization.


Yup! It's quite arguable that Palm (Rubenstein and has team) made a few bad decisions with the design of webOS and webOS hardware.

1. They believed that a cell phone needed a hardware-based QWERTY keyboard. In 2009, when the Pre launched, maybe there was still some doubt. By 2010, it was blindingly obvious. A software QWERTY keyboard on a slate style device is the form factor of choice. They are the halo device for basically every company. Sliders with thumb boards are niches. Palm and HP has stuck to their guns on this. I believe they will only shoot blanks until they drop the thumb board and go with a slate device.

2. The Pixi was un-necessary and diverted precious resources. It cheapened the brand and may have reduced sales of the Pre. Hp continues to make the same mistake with the Veer.

3. An all out disastrous device strategy for a company who was living quarter-to-quarter. They were always 3 to 6 months too late. The Pre was released in June. It was basically a prototype device with serious fundamental design issues with its slider mechanism and the quality of its components. It was underpowered compared to contemporary devices. In the Fall 2009 they release the Pixi. In February, they release the Pre+ with design fixes (slider, no ball home button), double the RAM and double the storage on Verizon. The Pixi+ and ATT devices followed. This is seriously wonky. The Pre+ was essentially the same device architecturally as the Pre: same everything except for a correctly built slider and more RAM and storage. Plus they maintained the Pixi and Pixi+! They could have released the prototype-like Pre in June; never spend anything on the Pixi, nothing; use those resources to release the Pre+ in November before Black Friday, and sell the old Pre for cheaper. Who knows what they are doing now with the Veer and Pre 3.

4. They chose to use HTML/CSS/Javascript as their platform. In 2009, it was 3 to 5 years too early. They should have went with a C derived language or Java. The language is not important. It's the application frameworks and platform frameworks. If you don't have good frameworks, you won't have a good platform.

5. webOS was never polished. Awesome at demo, but had bugs and perplexing issues in real use. The software process or original architectural design is broken somewhere for a lot of things not to be cleaned up after all this time.

And I haven't even talked about advertising or carrier strategy and what not.

The disappointing thing is that after HP bought them out and Rubenstein got a second try, he basically followed the exact same thing: Pre:Pixi::Pre3:Veer, keyboard and all. The Touchpad is a clone of the iPad as much as they could make it. The basic shape, weight and feel of a tablet is fundamental to how a customer reacts to a product. But HP just went with a glossed over "riverstone" Pre-style version of the iPad 1 shape. Craziness.

You call Mac OS X a failure?

No. It's quite obvious I'm calling NeXT the company a failure. NeXT failed to maintain a business selling hardware, then it failed to maintain a business selling an operating system and its development tools, then it failed to maintain a business selling Internet business tools with WebObjects. I can't see how one can call it a success. This is coming from someone who absolutely loved the NEXTSTEP UI. The whole design aesthetic of the hardware and software wasn't matched until 15 years later with Mac OS X 10.5 and aluminum + glass hardware.

Yes, Mac OS X is essentially NEXTSTEP 5, 6 and 7, but that is Apple. The MenuBar is still there. I still don't have a Shelf. The fact that Jobs engineered a reverse takeover of Apple with NeXT people in critical positions (CEO, VP of software, VP hardware, counsel et al) at Apple is interesting, but it is still Apple.

NeXT was in the business of selling NeXT hardware. Jobs failed to deliver and had 4 years of stepping back and stripping the company down trying to make it a successful business. It never was successful. I think it is inarguable that Jobs wouldn't be the manager he is now without this failure. (Pixar also played a critical role too).

1) If selling a company makes it a failure then I guess Pixar is also a failure and hope to have such failures in my life.

2) If NeXT hadn't lived on as it does then I think you could call it a failure but the foundations of Jobs' efforts at NeXT are all throughout Apple and so well engrained that I find it impossible to call NeXT a failure.

You're using failure in a different way then I am. We agree on the merits but not the words. Just leave it that.

You can't decide what words mean just because they don't fit your argument.

Actually he can; it's semantics v. syntax. I don't concede to his point but I certainly see it.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.'

Lewis Carol, Alice's adventures in wonderland

Unlike computers, humanity does not have a uniform understanding of what "words" mean. One person can take a word to mean one thing and another could take it to mean something else. We have volumes of legal documents written in pedantic and virtually unintelligible prose for a reason. And it still takes an entire justice system to decide on some things.

Solipsism is using a more longer range, metaphysical take on what it means to be "NeXT Computer" and what failure means. I'm using a rather shorter range take on it: NeXT as the business entity and the original goals for being in business.

Whether NeXT was a failure or not, we both agree that what Jobs learned at NeXT was instrumental in his later success at Apple. Don't need to have any discussion after that.

For what it's worth I'd agree with you, NeXT succeeded in making a great product, but they failed as a business in that they clearly didn't reach their ambitions. We were all very lucky that Gil Amelio decided Apple should buy NeXT and not BeOS.