Derek Bodner’s Blog

I was an original owner of the Palm Pre, and have since become a fan of webOS. At the time it came out, there weren’t very many Android options on Sprint, and the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive, and I had no interest in changing carriers. The demos I had seen of the Pre looked intriguing, and I had previously used PalmOS in the past on their treo line, so I was interested in how their new OS would perform.

Over the time, I’ve grown to love it. I switched to Android a little over a year ago when my Pre died of a hardware failure, and since then there have been aspects of webOS I missed. I liked my Android, and its nearly flawless integration of Google Voice and gmail (two services I’ve become extremely reliant on) has made it an incredibly useful tool, and developers actually making apps for it was nice as well. But it feels rather non-intuitive to use compared to the Pre I was previously on. Powerful, configurable, but non-intuitive and clunky.

I’ve now used iOS, Blackberry, Android, and webOS for lengthy periods of time. I can honestly say that webOS was the one I enjoyed using the most, perhaps better stated as the one that frustrated me the least.

But this post isn’t so much about me waxing poetically about how elegant of a UI webOS has, although I could talk at length about this. I could go on and on about how intuitive the multitasking was, about how great and unique of a feature Synergy was, about how useful Just Type is, and about how my apps, data, and settings have been in a “cloud” (Palm Profile) 2.5 years before Apple’s iCloud. And, ultimately it’s something everyone will see first hand very shortly. Blackberry’s QNX is a straight out rip off of the webOS’ card multitasking metaphor. Once Palm was bought out by HP, Google hired Palm’s director of human interface and user experience, Matias Duarte, to be their director of user experience for Android, whose impact will be really felt in earnest starting with the Ice Cream Sandwich release of Android. Or you could look at iCloud and Apple (finally) joining the multitasking bandwagon as influences of Palm’s innovation.

But that’s not what this is about. This is a look into why it failed. And by failing I don’t mean why webOS the operating system failed to be good, but why webOS failed to gain traction in a highly competitive mobile landscape.

Say what you want about Apple and it’s products, and I could write many posts on my thoughts on Apple products, business practices, and the distinct positive and negative qualities of Steve Jobs, but they had marketing vision, something Palm has never had. The original iPhone didn’t invent the market, nor was it even a market leader in terms of features. But its presentation was top notch, and perhaps more importantly, it built upon the success of iTunes and the iTunes store. It expanded the smartphone market by appealing to a new audience, and built value on top of its previously existing products.

This is why the Amazon Kindle Fire has a chance to succeed. All other tablets, outside of the iPad, have failed. Apple built that market, and it’s going to take a reason for users to switch beyond a little more flexibility or a better interface. There needs to be real value added.

With Amazon’s ability to leverage its enormous library, from books, to movies, to magazines, it has a chance to compete. I already have an Amazon prime membership and get free Instant Video streaming, and already have a TV that has an Amazon app. I can start watching on my Fire, pause it, and continue from that very moment on my TV? Cool. I can subscribe to Magazine’s and not have to go download a separate app and sign up for a new service? Nice. Amazon will always be a leader in digital content, and leveraging that will be a big win for them, and provide a compelling reason for new users to get a tablet. This was something Palm/HP was never able to do. They were never able to expand the tablet market, their only strategy was an uphill fight to pull users away from the existing juggernaut in the tablet landscape.

Add to that hitting a price point that had previously only been reserved for less-than-stellar hardware and you have a new market segment being opened up that previously didn’t exist. Amazon has the vision, resources, differentiation and name recognition to finally compete with the iPad.

That’s something Palm, and HP, never had.

Rather than trying to expand the smartphone/tablet market to new users, Palm/HP always seemed determined to take customers away from Apple. It was going to take more than a fancy, perhaps even superior, UI to drag users away from Apple, iTunes, and the ecosystem they’ve built, especially when competing at the same price point.

Oh, the mistakes they made.

webOS was incredible to use. The stack metaphor was revolutionary, and extremely intuitive to use, much more so than the double-tap iOS adopted (after arguing that users didn’t want multi-tasking) or the long press an Android, neither of which really had any way of allowing you to organize running applications, allowing you instead to just cycle through your last used. The deck of cards just added more functionality on top of that. Combine that with Just Type and Synergy, along with the amazingly useful touchstone, and there’s a heck of a lot of innovation there.

And Palm generated a lot of hype during its introduction in January 2009. Then waited 5 months to release a device, did so in only one form factor, to only one carrier, and with cheap hardware. Palm was in financial turmoil and webOS was its last chance, its hail-mary. And, by and large, it nailed it. It was never going to take down the iPhone, not by playing the iPhone’s game. Not with a single handset and at the iPhone’s price point and without the iPhone’s app collection, and without an already in place service to add value to it. And it didn’t have the financial resources to compete from a hardware perspective.

webOS was a terrific operating system with crappy hardware and little third party apps. Third party apps weren’t going to come until users did, and users weren’t going to come until the hardware, and choices — both in carriers and form factors — increased. They needed to be sold.

I’ll concede that HP didn’t have time to properly release the Pre 2, which brings us to early 2011. They announce the Veer, they announce the Touchpad, and they announce the Pre 3. They are released in that order, which was exactly backwards.

The veer was a niche device. It needed a successful counterpart to increase interest, then fill a niche for people who wanted a (slightly) different form factor. It wasn’t going to be a success without interest, it was going to build off pre-existing interest.

The Touchpad seemed to be at the crux of HP’s strategy, and at the point where they decided to bail ship, even before the Pre 3 (which should have been the flagship webOS device) was ever released in US.

It’s not that the Touchpad was a bad device. Sure, it had its faults, and was a very “first generation” device. Heavy, poor camera, no hdmi out, no external storage. Things that it could get away with if it were the first mainstream tablet. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t competing against the iPad, it was competing against the iPad 2, its app store, and its hardware sets. So it tried to do so at the same price point, with hardware that’s a generation behind and a lagging app store.

Here was Tom’s Hardware’s retrospective on the TouchPad:

HP’s webOS is a beautifully-crafted piece of work. Synergy is nothing short of genius. But ingenuity counts for less when you’re making up ground. At this point, tablet manufactures are setting themselves up by comparing their first-generation devices to second-generation iPads.

It was a failed strategy from the beginning. Who knows whether Mark Hurd, the CEO of HP when it bought Palm but dismissed in August 2010 due to expense-account irregularities, would have had a more well thought out strategy. HP needed to create new customers, ones who didn’t want to pay the price for an iPad and weren’t tied to Apple’s ecosystem. It needed more then a wonderfully elegant UI and OS design. It needed to compete at a new price point, drawing in new users. Build brand loyalty, attract developers, then release higher margin devices. Palm was always too cash strapped to sell devices at a loss to build a user base, but HP should have been able to.

But they wanted a quick win. A wonderfully intuitive UI was wasted on a user base that barely knew it existed.

Then they killed the Pre 3 a mere two weeks before releasing the AT&T version. A fan of the OS, I bought one off Ebay. Finally, this is the hardware that can fully utilize the OS. Slick, smooth, fast. And it never got the chance, killed because HP didn’t have the vision of how to succeed in the tablet industry.

Which brings us full circle back to the Kindle Fire. In reality, it doesn’t look much different than the 7″ Android tablets that have more or less failed. But it’s marketed by a recognizable name, at a price point that will expand to customers not previously interested in tablets, with a digital ecosystem that can compete, at least content wise even if not fully fleshed out, with Apple.

Finally, a company with vision. If the Kindle Fire succeeds and webOS ultimately dies, it will not be because of the underlying OS. This won’t be Android winning and webOS losing. This will be the stark contrast between a company with vision and one without.

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