I can see why he said it and all that from his perspective but it is a poor comparison and is lame to say the least. iOS was ground breaking and original. Apple were not copying someone else. It would be like a bunch of Englishman landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts today and having a hard time getting a meal saying, Oh well the Pilgrims had a hard time too.
Even some sort of success and failure is being compared to Apple. They really can't be original. I mean Windows Phones don't look anything like iPhone and I give a big applaud to Microsoft for looking in a different direction (good or bad). But I don't see anything radically exciting or new with this bought up Palm project. The vision is there, but that vision was Apple's back in 2007.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
I completely agree. So many here are so quick to write off his argument when in reality everything he said was true, and I for one think that webOS has potential.
Kudos to Jon and he makes great points. Hoping the best for him and webOS.
One of HP's problems is that they lack the vision to compare their operating system with OS X. When OS X came out, Apple still had several years of development planned.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
I only have Snow Leopard running on Win 7 x64 in VMWare. I have never used OS X. My understanding is that OS X is Next, but it was also the first version after quite a bit of work. WebOS is the third version of WebOS and, after a year of work, on much faster hardware than the Pre, still suffers from performance problems.
HP released WebOS in 2009. So, they had *ALL* of the development time up to 2009 and the 2010 to 2011 time to put it on a tablet, PLUS much faster HW and a gig of ram(probably 4 to 8 times the original) and it STILL is slow.
That doesn't bode well for WebOS. Apple did not release quick releases of the iPhoneOS for iPad. And it came out the door fast. The TouchPad had all the benefits of time, hardware, hindsight and good-will and it still fell short.
As for coming up with all sorts of things that people see as negatives in the iPad? Who cares? It is selling 25+ million units. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there.
Finally, it took eighteen comments to get to some common sense. From what I remember OS X didn't really get usable until about 10.3. I thought it was funny when someone said they have OS 9 to fall back on. How is a quite old legacy OS like OS 9 a fall back plan? I fail to see how OS 9 could compete around a time when MS finally started to get their act together with the stable Windows XP. I know people here don't want to give credit to anything Windows but the one thing you could say about XP was that it finally got stable. OS 9 would have had a hard time competing.
Maybe it's time for HP to start reselling the iPad as they did the iPod back in 2004. A quote from that era:
Quote:
HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina said in a statement that the company had explored other alternatives in making its own digital player and jukebox but "concluded Apple's iPod music player and iTunes music service were the best by far."
Back then, MacOS X 10.0 leapfrogged the competition [Win98]. It may have been incomplete, and not particularly stable, but it laid the foundation of things to come. It wasn't just an attempt to get something out there to try to join the party everybody else was having.
WebOS is just trying to latch onto the party. It's trying to catch both Android and iOS, both of which are currently better supported and significantly more established.
HP WISHES the situation was like they describe, but it's not. They aren't revamping their products to stay ahead. They bought an OS to try to catch up (and to try to more closely copy Apple's VERY successful business model).
HP plays a long, slow game. Even if TouchPad doesn't sell at all, they will probably keep at it for a few years at least before they give up.
I like their chances myself.
WebOS is so much better than Android in terms of a fit to the market and the users. Android is proprietary, invasive, and primarily only useful for the young techie males it's aimed at. WebOS on the other hand is completely open (to balance the proprietary Apple system), and aimed at the entire market, not just the "I'm a tech head" subsection.
Overall, since Apple is likely to get the Lion's share of the entire market over time, having an alternative system that's very similar, but open, flexible, and based on open technology would be a great fit.
I too think webOS has some strong potential, and HP has the legs and the resources to make it happen. HP also has a vested interest in seeing if webOS can be supported on the desktop as well - giving them some leverage against Microsoft, or at least an alternative. Of anyone, including Google, HP is best positioned to be an ecosystem competitor to Apple, and a serious threat to Android. If webOS can deliver performance, a nice GUI and a solid set of scalable apps - it could threaten Android, RIM and cut the legs out from under WinPhone 7 as well. There's certainly room for webOS in the "tablet" space, and if they can bring a solid ecosystem to challenge the ChromeOS, they could potentially own what remains of the netbook niche.
Whether Jon can bring the focus and demand for quality over time remains to be seen. There's plenty of potential here for HP to squander. It will be HP's corporate culture that may end up undermining webOS, more than anything else.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
Grow up you dim-wit... what have you done with your life so far? You also clearly know nothing about HP, which as well as building 'cheap-a** calculators' also builds printers, offers consulting services (I have two HP consultants working for me right now) as well as systems architecture solutions, server solutions, support desk implementations etc.
Apple doesn't offer any of that, and doesn't want to either - but the comparison with the 10.0 and even 10.1 versions of OS X is extremely valid. One could argue that OS X wasn't really OS X until 10.3 or even 10.4 (Core Audio, Core Animation, Expose, Spotlight) - basically all those things that people today would argue 'defines' the OS X experience. NONE of them existed in 10.0...
Some of the other posts here are even worse than yours; I can't even be bothered there.
Whether you fan boys and girls like it or not, Web OS has potential. It will take time, let's say 3-4 years. But in the end, it will come.
It is indeed a marathon and if they improve the UI, make it stable and please developers, it'll be successful. You guys need a good reality check!!!
Apple does not do everything right. Look at how tight they keep the grip on apps. They decide what is on YOUR phone. This is wrong. Wake up people.
Now don't serve me the reason that it's about quality!!! They can easily make a button leading to a section on your phone for "non-appstore" app.
Then if the user is willing to go that road, no Apple support would be provided for these apps. Basically the users would be on their own on that path.
If HP design such a solution to maintain quality and freedom, then Apple has competiion. The market can't afford 1 single dominant player anyway.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
While I agree that some are being somewhat short sighted, there are a some counterpoints to your argument.
First, as has been mentioned, when OS X first shipped, there was the Classic fallback. You could experiment with OS X while still being productive with OS 9. Throughout OS X's development, Apple has been mindful of transitions. Also, OS X had a few key features that differentiated it enough to Windows users, including security and ease of use, not to mention Apple's unique hardware products that were fully integrated with the OS. There aren't enough differences between webOS and iOS right now to sway the general consumer on taking a rather expensive bet on a unproven platform.
More importantly though, is the fact that the landscape of when OS X entered the market and when the TouchPad/webOS have entered their respective market, is vastly different. OS X came into a market that had a slower pace of change and only one dominant competitor. Desktop operating systems haven't truly changed at their conceptual core for quite some time. Mobile is changing at a much quicker pace.
Sure, when iPhone/iOS were first released, they weren't perfect, but they were good enough compared to the rest of the markets offerings at that time. Now iOS has had years of optimization, strong market share and more importantly, massive mindshare. While HP is working on optimizing webOS, the rest of the market, including Apple, will also be aggressively improving their products. The mobile space is quite different than when OS X came to market. Competition is much tougher and the stakes right now are much higher. HP has the cash to go all in if it sees fit, but it's hard to know how long it will take to gain serious traction. Apple is exponentially much further in this race and HP has some serious catching up to do.
I will say this. I think webOS has great potential. I hope HP sticks to its guns and is focused on making webOS a serious competitor. It has the foundation to do well, it just needs some good guidance. Having said that, I am a little worried with their talk of licensing webOS so soon after releasing the TouchPad.
In the end, competition will only benefit the consumers.
1) Whether you think it's an apt comparison or not, don't ignore the free press WebOS and HP is getting just by comparing to Apple.
2) I'd think iPhone OS would be a better comparison since Apple didn't have another OS and the number of apps was considerably more limited since there wasn't an SDK and it not a decade old OS fork.
3) Off topic: has Sprint ever sponsored a marathon?
I thought he sounded like a good leader, hitting the right notes. His job is hard, the product he's trying to schlep is half-baked, but it probably could be good with enough time. He has to try and keep morale up at his company, he has to try and retain talent and prevent a brain drain. At this point its the only way they'll ever be able to compete, especially if competing for them is still a couple years off.
Just what I was thingking. Also I'm not super sure, but I think the 10.0 version was called a "beta" and was free (or $20 with a discount on the first paid release.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by gprovida
In other words, its OK to bring a new beast to the table, but WebOS does not have OS9 fall back. This would be like saying iOS in 2007 was like 10.0, and 10.1, it was not. It was fast, smooth, and slick, yeah there new features desired and they came along, but the version iOS1.0 was pretty good and operational on day 1. I know I got one and it just kept getting better and better.
So HP is doing the Rim and Google Android/Chrome, that is, release a beta and eventually release a final product version 1 in a year or so. Its ironic that MS is more like Apple in trying to get out a quality product versus a beta and let the users sort it out.
This is tough call, it takes time [Apple took years and a lot of money, ergo their being pissed with Samsung copycats not competing] to master the performance in the meantime Apple gobbles up market and worst keeps moving the goal posts with improvements.
So HP, RIM, and Google have chosen get to market and fix the product later. Hopefully, Apple's inability to meet demand will persuade users to grab a beta and live with it.
I do find it ironic that HP and RIM get poor to middling reviews on their products and Google with equally poor hardware/software on tablets gets a pass, 'grading on the curve."
Observations may be reviewers are now embarrassed by their leaning over backward on Google and nailing HP and RIM.
He's right about the start of OS X. But it's also a fact that OS X and iOS share 85% the same source code, so by saying how much OS X has improved he is inadvertently complementing the iDevices too, and that can't be great for morale!
Comments
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
I completely agree. So many here are so quick to write off his argument when in reality everything he said was true, and I for one think that webOS has potential.
Kudos to Jon and he makes great points. Hoping the best for him and webOS.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
I only have Snow Leopard running on Win 7 x64 in VMWare. I have never used OS X. My understanding is that OS X is Next, but it was also the first version after quite a bit of work. WebOS is the third version of WebOS and, after a year of work, on much faster hardware than the Pre, still suffers from performance problems.
HP released WebOS in 2009. So, they had *ALL* of the development time up to 2009 and the 2010 to 2011 time to put it on a tablet, PLUS much faster HW and a gig of ram(probably 4 to 8 times the original) and it STILL is slow.
That doesn't bode well for WebOS. Apple did not release quick releases of the iPhoneOS for iPad. And it came out the door fast. The TouchPad had all the benefits of time, hardware, hindsight and good-will and it still fell short.
As for coming up with all sorts of things that people see as negatives in the iPad? Who cares? It is selling 25+ million units. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there.
Finally, it took eighteen comments to get to some common sense. From what I remember OS X didn't really get usable until about 10.3. I thought it was funny when someone said they have OS 9 to fall back on. How is a quite old legacy OS like OS 9 a fall back plan? I fail to see how OS 9 could compete around a time when MS finally started to get their act together with the stable Windows XP. I know people here don't want to give credit to anything Windows but the one thing you could say about XP was that it finally got stable. OS 9 would have had a hard time competing.
HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina said in a statement that the company had explored other alternatives in making its own digital player and jukebox but "concluded Apple's iPod music player and iTunes music service were the best by far."
HP may well fail, but despite the noted weaknesses, I think this looks like it has some definite potential to eventually compete.
WebOS is just trying to latch onto the party. It's trying to catch both Android and iOS, both of which are currently better supported and significantly more established.
HP WISHES the situation was like they describe, but it's not. They aren't revamping their products to stay ahead. They bought an OS to try to catch up (and to try to more closely copy Apple's VERY successful business model).
HP plays a long, slow game. Even if TouchPad doesn't sell at all, they will probably keep at it for a few years at least before they give up.
I like their chances myself.
WebOS is so much better than Android in terms of a fit to the market and the users. Android is proprietary, invasive, and primarily only useful for the young techie males it's aimed at. WebOS on the other hand is completely open (to balance the proprietary Apple system), and aimed at the entire market, not just the "I'm a tech head" subsection.
Overall, since Apple is likely to get the Lion's share of the entire market over time, having an alternative system that's very similar, but open, flexible, and based on open technology would be a great fit.
I too think webOS has some strong potential, and HP has the legs and the resources to make it happen. HP also has a vested interest in seeing if webOS can be supported on the desktop as well - giving them some leverage against Microsoft, or at least an alternative. Of anyone, including Google, HP is best positioned to be an ecosystem competitor to Apple, and a serious threat to Android. If webOS can deliver performance, a nice GUI and a solid set of scalable apps - it could threaten Android, RIM and cut the legs out from under WinPhone 7 as well. There's certainly room for webOS in the "tablet" space, and if they can bring a solid ecosystem to challenge the ChromeOS, they could potentially own what remains of the netbook niche.
Whether Jon can bring the focus and demand for quality over time remains to be seen. There's plenty of potential here for HP to squander. It will be HP's corporate culture that may end up undermining webOS, more than anything else.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
I second that.
Grow up you dim-wit... what have you done with your life so far? You also clearly know nothing about HP, which as well as building 'cheap-a** calculators' also builds printers, offers consulting services (I have two HP consultants working for me right now) as well as systems architecture solutions, server solutions, support desk implementations etc.
Apple doesn't offer any of that, and doesn't want to either - but the comparison with the 10.0 and even 10.1 versions of OS X is extremely valid. One could argue that OS X wasn't really OS X until 10.3 or even 10.4 (Core Audio, Core Animation, Expose, Spotlight) - basically all those things that people today would argue 'defines' the OS X experience. NONE of them existed in 10.0...
Some of the other posts here are even worse than yours; I can't even be bothered there.
I second that one also.
Maybe it's time for HP to start reselling the iPad as they did the iPod back in 2004. A quote from that era:
Carly Fiorina was a good CEO haha, but nowadays Apple doesn't need anyone else to sell their products for them
It is indeed a marathon and if they improve the UI, make it stable and please developers, it'll be successful. You guys need a good reality check!!!
Apple does not do everything right. Look at how tight they keep the grip on apps. They decide what is on YOUR phone. This is wrong. Wake up people.
Now don't serve me the reason that it's about quality!!! They can easily make a button leading to a section on your phone for "non-appstore" app.
Then if the user is willing to go that road, no Apple support would be provided for these apps. Basically the users would be on their own on that path.
If HP design such a solution to maintain quality and freedom, then Apple has competiion. The market can't afford 1 single dominant player anyway.
Seriously guys I love my Apple hardware but you guys have extremely short memories.
For one he is right about OS/X, as nice as it is now it took awhile to get there. There where significant bugs that didn't get removed until Snow Leopard. However does anybody really expect bug free releases of things as complicated as an OS and the attendant SDKs?
The same goes for iOS. If any of you where involved in the first SDK release you will know what I'm talking about. Apple had many iOS releases in quick succession to deal with significant bugs.
IPad is actually an exception for Apple as it has had a very stable OS from release. Most likely that is due to all the "public" debugging seen with iPhone. In the end this tablet is no different than any other rev one product.
On the otherhand people do gave some very positive things to say about HPs new tablet. Sadly we have deteriorated into a culture of negativity, so much so people can't even balance pros and cons anymore. Frankly I could come up with all sorts of things people see as negatives with the iPad, but why reinforce defective thinking?
Worst people have already made up their mind that TouchPad is a failure. That is a big mistake in my mind. You can be pretty sure Apple is already looking over TouchPad if for nothing else to better understand their weaknesses relative to TouchPad.
Being a fan boi is one thing but blinding yourself to what is happening in the rest of the industry is pretty stupid. Besides it is in Apples best interest to have an non Android competitor.
While I agree that some are being somewhat short sighted, there are a some counterpoints to your argument.
First, as has been mentioned, when OS X first shipped, there was the Classic fallback. You could experiment with OS X while still being productive with OS 9. Throughout OS X's development, Apple has been mindful of transitions. Also, OS X had a few key features that differentiated it enough to Windows users, including security and ease of use, not to mention Apple's unique hardware products that were fully integrated with the OS. There aren't enough differences between webOS and iOS right now to sway the general consumer on taking a rather expensive bet on a unproven platform.
More importantly though, is the fact that the landscape of when OS X entered the market and when the TouchPad/webOS have entered their respective market, is vastly different. OS X came into a market that had a slower pace of change and only one dominant competitor. Desktop operating systems haven't truly changed at their conceptual core for quite some time. Mobile is changing at a much quicker pace.
Sure, when iPhone/iOS were first released, they weren't perfect, but they were good enough compared to the rest of the markets offerings at that time. Now iOS has had years of optimization, strong market share and more importantly, massive mindshare. While HP is working on optimizing webOS, the rest of the market, including Apple, will also be aggressively improving their products. The mobile space is quite different than when OS X came to market. Competition is much tougher and the stakes right now are much higher. HP has the cash to go all in if it sees fit, but it's hard to know how long it will take to gain serious traction. Apple is exponentially much further in this race and HP has some serious catching up to do.
I will say this. I think webOS has great potential. I hope HP sticks to its guns and is focused on making webOS a serious competitor. It has the foundation to do well, it just needs some good guidance. Having said that, I am a little worried with their talk of licensing webOS so soon after releasing the TouchPad.
In the end, competition will only benefit the consumers.
2) I'd think iPhone OS would be a better comparison since Apple didn't have another OS and the number of apps was considerably more limited since there wasn't an SDK and it not a decade old OS fork.
3) Off topic: has Sprint ever sponsored a marathon?
In other words, its OK to bring a new beast to the table, but WebOS does not have OS9 fall back. This would be like saying iOS in 2007 was like 10.0, and 10.1, it was not. It was fast, smooth, and slick, yeah there new features desired and they came along, but the version iOS1.0 was pretty good and operational on day 1. I know I got one and it just kept getting better and better.
So HP is doing the Rim and Google Android/Chrome, that is, release a beta and eventually release a final product version 1 in a year or so. Its ironic that MS is more like Apple in trying to get out a quality product versus a beta and let the users sort it out.
This is tough call, it takes time [Apple took years and a lot of money, ergo their being pissed with Samsung copycats not competing] to master the performance in the meantime Apple gobbles up market and worst keeps moving the goal posts with improvements.
So HP, RIM, and Google have chosen get to market and fix the product later. Hopefully, Apple's inability to meet demand will persuade users to grab a beta and live with it.
I do find it ironic that HP and RIM get poor to middling reviews on their products and Google with equally poor hardware/software on tablets gets a pass, 'grading on the curve."
Observations may be reviewers are now embarrassed by their leaning over backward on Google and nailing HP and RIM.