“We Were Screwed Left and Right”

June 5th, 2012

Palm’s webOS platform failed because of a lack of investment. From Chris Ziegler’s excellent piece about the downfall of the Pre and webOS:

At that time, Apple was almost singlehandedly dominating the smartphone supply chain and it took an enormous commitment — the kind of commitment that only a giant like HP could offer — to tip the scale. “We told HP we needed better displays [for the Pre 3]. They’d come back and say, ‘Apple bought them all. Our suppliers tell us we need to build them a factory if we want the displays’ and they weren’t willing to put the billion dollars upfront to do that,” one source said. “The same thing happened with cameras. We’d pick a part, turns out Apple picked the same part. We were screwed left and right.”

HP’s acquisition of Palm should have provided—at the least—a larger investment to get better hardware. After all, there was no reason to acquire Palm if that wasn’t HP’s intent. But Apotheker had little interest in investing in webOS as a long-term growth prospect:

The first prototype TouchPads — a device made of “cast-off reject iPad parts,” to hear Palm’s software staff describe it — didn’t arrive until late November. Meanwhile, members of the software team were leaving in droves, including original Luna architect Greg Simon who’d left (along with several others) for Google’s Chrome and Android teams. The TouchPad helped replenish those ranks to an extent, but not to anyone’s complete satisfaction. It felt like the run-up to the Pre all over again, and Palm wasn’t getting the assistance it needed (and had assumed it would get) from HP, either in financial support or staff. “Léo wanted us to be cash-flow neutral,” one source said, meaning that Apotheker wasn’t willing to sink money into the business that he couldn’t immediately get back out; it wasn’t a long-term investment for him.

Sad. WebOS was incredibly innovative and is still superior to iOS and Android in significant ways, but it never had a chance to succeed.