HP's touchpad was bound to be a flop

Everyone can see that the touchpad is a major flop, so it's easy to just write some hindsight fluff piece about it. It's ridiculous to write about the inevitability of the device's failure after the fact; the only way to write in this tone is to write the article before the fact, unless you intend to revel in someone's failure.

Even so, they use weasel words like "... some say", which they no doubt will use to hide their snipe piece behind. In other words, as certain as it seems that the touchpad was a complete and utter dud, and how ever epimethean and arrogantly the piece reads in its hindsight and rationalization, they still waffle on arguing their point rigourously and confidently.

I can only hope Brian Chen himself didn't write the headline, because that would at least serve to redeem the intention of the article.

Regarding the Pre being slow, I for one never felt it was slow. I returned mine for two reasons, each of which had kept me on Treo and prevented me from moving to iPhone, each of which were horribly botched by Palm, and thus destroyed any barriers to switching I had. First,the keyboard on the Pre was terrible, just incredibly awful, and that was one of its big differentiators, and a huge reason I liked my Treo. Second, I had at that time many critical Palm apps that I'd spent a good deal of money on, as did most of Palm's existing customers, and absolutely NONE of them ran on WebOS, nor was there any upgrade plan in place.

The phone didn't feel slow, and on the contrary, the UI was way above its competitors.

This may be true:

"a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P."

At the time, IIRC, JWZ was very enthusiastic about the platform, but he could make almost no headway into writing apps for the damn device, but the failure seems to be one of Palm's leaders who didn't see the need to evangelize and recruit developers.

They didn't like the keyboard, and the fact that I could grab the top and bottom half of the phone and twist them at least 10 degrees relative to each other was rather worrying. The Touchstone was fantastic, and I assume the only reason no one else has done it was because it's patented. However since the Touchstone cost $70 the only person I know who had one got it for free when their phone (when they were given away at some sales conference long after it was clear the phone was dead).

I though WebOS was very nice, and my siblings liked it. I did just a teeny bit of development for it, and thought it was a decent environment. I liked the documentation, and it was pretty easy to do. The simulator, which ran on VirtualBox (IIRC), was slow as hell. The phone liked to use gestures to trigger things, which was a bit unintuitive and was very difficult to trigger in the simulator.

However, I thought the card metaphor was fantastic. At the the time the iPhone didn't allow any multitasking at all. I still think the card metaphor is elegant. My mother has had an iPhone for two years and still doesn't know about the multitasking or how to close apps if she wanted to. They Apple or Google could buy just the card metaphor patent for a few million, I would say "do it".

But I always thought the main failing was apps. By the time the Pre came out the iPhone app store was already huge and the reason to get an iPhone. After a few months, Palm finally announced an app store and... nothing happened. It took months and months before they actually opened the store and let people download things. After it was open, only one or two apps would come out each month. The ones that did gave the impression the internal developers were making them as demo apps. If Palm had paid a few big app developers to port their apps, it would have gone a LONG way.

From the end user's point of view, the app market situation was a fiasco. The time between the announcement of the store and starting to get any recognizable apps was eons.

It doesn't surprise me that HP didn't fix things. The Touchpad was nice, but overpriced. The fact the first thing HP said was "We're putting it on our printers" wasn't reassuring in any way.

My own personal feeling is that the decision to put a web interpreter at the heart of webOS was inspired, I mean as an app developer what would you rather code in?

1. iOS - objective C.

2. Android & RIM - Java.

3. webOS - HTML5/CSS/JS.

webOS the platform is fantastic, but has never been seen on decent hardware (with the exception of the Pre3 which is an amazing phone, but was never officially released outside of a limited European release). If the open sourcing of webOS leads to decent hardware manufacturers like Samsung or HTC releasing devices, it still stands a chance.

This sums up how I feel--I should make it my motto.

You groom platform for a several years and only then you harvest fruit, but once you do, you have a huge preference over those who didn't invest in one.

It demands patience. Apple understand platforms. MS does. Google sort of. HP do not have the required guts. Mindset costs 0$, is a main asset and they haven't got it.

That's the reason software companies always win and hardware companies always help them to win while being barely profitable themself.

They expected to make a huge push of a new platform to market and make a top sale right away. I can imagine people at e.g. MS laughing.

webOS definitely had its rough edges. The phone app will be sluggish (what jwz was referring to, try answering a phone call by tapping "pick up" several times without any response as the phone keeps ringing), in USB mode the phone shuts down and directs all voice calls to voicemail, the entire OS does not have a position indicator to tell you how long and where you are in the page, etc.

However, all initial releases of software are buggy. As someone already mentioned in this thread "I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out". I think everyone at Palm expected to be able to release updates and get the OS up to speed.

However, Google started cranking up on Android and left everyone (including iOS) in the dust. I am not talking about UI here. I am talking about sheer speed in the software turnaround cycle. In seemingly no time, Android had Cloud syncing, Maps with Navigation, features in the photo app like red eye removal etc. etc. They just blasted away with these updates. To me it is astounding that a complex mobile OS used all over the world can be developed in such speed. After this effort, webOS just had no chance.

You need apps for the tablet but without a successful phone ecosystem, the touchpad was definitely a tough sell. HP thought their "channels", "marketing" would amount to something. It just wasn't. A CEO wanting to get out of the consumer space finally stopped the bleeding. Maybe if HP had been going for another 6 months and risked another $1 billion (I feel stupid just typing that clause :) ), webOS could have gotten lucky.

But I can understand how and why it flopped, Palm was haemorraging money like anything. Its investors were doubtful at the best. And the lack of backwards-compatibility (or a planned roadmap to implement it) forced the Palm faithful to take their business elsewhere.

I would argue that webOS and Palm in the greater sense failed because of mismanagement, and maybe not so much due to technical issues/inabilities. The fact that the Phone app (the most important part of a smartphone OS) wasn't stable when the product was out the door casts some serious doubts on QA. Palm has handled the one product that might've saved them from extinction with a "Ship it, then fix it" mentality.

Palm has had their focus all over the place. They wanted to out-do Apple, which given their finances was the one approach they shouldn't have taken. They could've focussed their resources on the core product, the OS and the phone itself. Rather than on accessories and creepy marketing campaigns.

Questioning the technical ability of the team seems unfortunate, but an inevitable outcome of the product being flawed. If the developers, architects, evangelists of webOS knew what they wanted they would've settled on a set of objectives before beginning to work on an entire Operating system. And clearly if they were opinionated they would've nudged the h/w team in the right direction.

Articles like these make me wonder if webOS might've had a totally different fate had it ended up with a company like Facebook which has had a huge success in developing and nurturing one of the largest platforms on the web.

Oh, it did take forever to boot. Bad combination, that, frequent crashing and slow booting.

I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out. I guess they were too busy adding features.

Clearly that number includes more than the engineers... but wow.

Title fix?