That’s all folks: Palm is history
August 18th, 2011, 7:56pm by JakeWow. Shocking, but as noted in my tweet, it seems HP effectively adopted Palm’s S.O.P. of overpromising, underdelivering, shipping late, incomplete products then continually breaking promises and hosing loyal customers as they focused on the next late, incomplete product. Not sure what else there is to say, other than I’m pretty psyched to own what will no doubt become the Tucker of this generation… 2 of ’em technically. Hopefully the rest of the crew can pick up a TouchPad in a few months when they crack the $200 barrier.
Dieter has a more thorough breakdown. Sad days, indeed. http://thisismynext.com/2011/08/18/hp-failed-webos-whats-next/
August 18th, 2011 at 8:49 pm
It’s sad — HP got a bargain on a fixer-upper in a nice neighborhood, and everybody assumed that they’d throw their considerable wealth into it and build one of the nicest houses on the block. Instead, they did.. not much at all.
HP is a company in trouble — no recent history as an innovator, any existing brand recognition is as a printer maker (at best), no existing dominance in any field to leverage (unless, as they promised, they put webOS on a printer). As a company, they’re in a tough spot. They need a reinvention, and mobile could have been it. They sat at the table, made their bet, held a pretty decent hand… saw one card, then folded. So they get to leave the table with a little of their money left, but to what end? Now they’ll have to sit on the sideline and try to survive until they can be an also-ran in some other race.
So what if they’d stayed in?
Personally, I think there’s just no room for another also-ran in the race right now. Apple, despite not owning all the marketshare, has the majority of the mindshare, and Google is taking whatever they don’t have. There’s simply no oxygen left in the room — customers don’t perceive any need that one or the other doesn’t fill. I really don’t think that webOS fulfills any unmet need — but that’s partially due to HP not selling it, at all. Of the remaining other players, I think that only MIcrosoft has a slight prayer — they have a tremendous installed base on Windows/Xbox, and if they can figure out how to sell the integrated ecosystem, they can compete. If they can’t leverage their desktop dominance, or they’ll never grow, either.
Bottom line — the world doesn’t need another phone UI, and thanks to HP, that’s all that webOS appeared to offer.
August 19th, 2011 at 12:57 am
Yes, I weep for my HP investment, probably my last act as a bonafide Palm fanboy. What a disaster. I can’t believe HP doesn’t have a better way to predict the consumer response to products and set more realistic expectations. If they thought the Touchpad would sell in the millions just because Apple does it, they were seriously deluded.
In the end, Palm’s legacy will be defined by Palm OS and Graffiti more than by webOS, which never lived up to it’s promise. Good UI though. Hopefully, it will resurface as an official Android skin. Maybe HTC is the best home for it (and they’d certainly love the patents).
Any concerns as a current user? How long is HP obligated to keep the cloud servers running? Will they keep approving apps as they come in?
August 19th, 2011 at 9:49 am
This is interesting. Wonder if it was the hardware or just an awful Javascript interpreter?
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/19/hp-tested-webos-on-an-ipad-it-ran-over-twice-as-fast/?awesm=tnw.to_1ARaD&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=tnw.to-other&utm_source=t.co&utm_content=spreadus_master
August 19th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I’m kinda purplexed by this comparison. HP had been talking up this stripped down version of webOS that would run in a browser (what they planned to ship with PCs). I assume they loaded this in Safari and voila, that runs faster than the native OS on the Touchpad, which is responsible for actual Operating System functions in addition to UI/Application Layer. Doesn’t sound like an apples-to-apples comparison.
August 19th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
That’s exactly what they said in an article liked from the TNW article that Jake linked, along with some weird quote that HP thought they were more agile since they could change webOS without pissing off a world full of users and developers.
Yeah, those damn revenue-generating customers, such a burden! Won’t have to worry about them anymore, I guess.