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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Somehow this doesn't add up. He was out for 8 weeks which is 56 days. In that period the product launched and was cancelled after 49 days. How does he claim the failure wasn't his fault? They shipped 270,000 units that mostly didn't sell, but that had to be planned in advance. You can't say "Phil's out, lets ship this thing now!" The only thing they might have done different than he planned is setting the price and canceling the product too early. Am I missing something? The fact it was rushed to market was on him unless he left out a bunch of story prior to his surgery.

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The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut. The failure he has to refer to was cancelling WebOS completely, instead of giving it another go. The right decision would have been to price cut the existing devices, provide fixes for the existing issues (there were small usability issues like the web browser reloading after inactivity, which means reloading when you got stuck for a long page download) and meanwhile work on the next generation, which then would have more apps and less early issues to have a better chance at the market.

But that is only obvious if you were there back then. If you saw how bad Android devices were in comparison, how big the lead of webOS was.

I loved my TouchPad, was super stoked to get one through a friend of a friend who bought two. It had the feel of “this just needs a little polish”, what I would expect for any new to market device with zero prior ecosystem. I was heads down learning to write apps for it when they killed it off and I was super bummed, just kind of shelved it for me.

I think I still have the TP and wireless charger (which was, for me, unheard of at the time) in a box somewhere.

It was great hardware and a very good OS. In fact, I'd say that Apple has copied a number of the ideas from it in the way they now handle multiple applications.

The issue really was that the ecosystem was completely lacking. It's perhaps my favorite tablet OS to this day. Very intuitive.

Both android and iOS copied their exact multitasking UI YEARS after webOS had it lmao.

> The devices sold like hot cake after the price cut.

Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/aug/22/hp-touchp...

I bought one, and ... honestly even at that low price I regretted it. The software was trash. I don't know why WebOS got so much praise, it was clearly not fit for purpose.

I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.

That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.

> I have an LG TV now that also runs WebOS and... it's still trash! 14 years later. The fundamental idea of using web technologies for an entire OS is bad.

I don't think the idea is flawed; in fact, I think modern software development has proven out this whole idea. If WebOS sucks I believe it's more because it simply doesn't get enough development attention.

Fundamentally Android also sucks but they've managed to hammer it into the platform that it is today. The same could be said for Windows. Look at Linux, fundamentally a sound platform, but nobody is there hammer the rough edges to success.

Companies do exist to try and hammer Linux into a good desktop/laptop product. I would say that it's just not easy to do given the lack of vertical integration. Redhat centralizing everything into systemd has probably gone the longest way towards improving things. Of course that is odds with the perceived benefits of having many competing options to perform the job of any given piece of software.

> That's what really killed it. This guy gushes about how amazing WebOS was but the performance was - and continues to be - too poor.

We certainly do have the performance in such devices to run an OS application layer with web technology now. Many people do anyway, just directly in the browser and with electron. Easier on a PC, but completely possible on TVs and phones. If webOS is slow now on your TV that's because of LG's development capabilities, not because of the technology.

I had both a Touchpad and a HP Veer. The performance was completely fine, especially after the mod scene provided kernel updates with overclocks, plus tunings for the UI. Especially compared to common devices of the time. Those were very good signs for the cut next hardware iteration.

The great thing about webOS was the usability, just how the interface worked was awesome. It's no accident that Android copied the card interface a few years later, with Android 5 I think, and the gestures again a few years later, with Android 10 or 11. Probably coming from Palm were also some nice ideas about how to integrate apps and core functionality.

I distinctly remember the Autumn day of 2011 when we stood in the line of the local Best Buy in West Des Moines to grab one of these. It was miles ahead of anything that was in the market that time. It could do multitasking and had a lovely intuitive UI (cards!!). I remember being blown away by it. Android and iOS freely stole features from it later.

I still have the device and it’s one of my cherished vintage devices.

yeah it was years ahead of apple and android (this was and2.3 days if i recall, or 4.3 which typical google was worse than 2.3)

and the emulator was better dev experience than anything else. but actually putting things on the device that had anything more than js was impossible.

and the hardware was garbage. buttons would stuck. I don't know what sort of museum you live but mines lasted 4 and 2 years before turning to literal bits (used by adults)

I might be lucky because mine’s still chugging along.

May horde contains: few old MacBooks running Linux, old Kindles running dashboards, Android phones & tablets, iPhones from OG era and even a Chumby. All of them are still working fine.

Hey. I wrote some of that trash.

I think this is a bad take because I don’t think the core issue of the platform was that it was based on web tech. The web tech basically worked fine. However the bugginess and challenging user interface (which is actually standard today) was a huge issue. The leadership decision that was needed wasn’t to kill the touchpad 49 days after launch, it was to kill it before launch.

Palm was a raccoon backed into a corner and it was using all its cleverness to get out. But it was willing to ship stuff that wasn’t ready and couldn’t be ready with the resources we had. HP had the resources. They could have taken a good start and given it the space to become great. Maybe.

webOS really needed low-level help. It took over forever to boot because (seemingly) nobody ever bothered to optimize even the low-hanging fruit. The webkit version used was slow and way behind standards and (as was the JS JIT). This was crippling for a web-first system.

That aside, the actual UX of webOS itself is still better than anything we have today and I liked my Touchpad despite the flaws.

Yeah, there's a lot of context there that isn't obvious from the outside and is behind my feelings that Palm just had too little too late. They shouldn't have been blindsided by the iPhone, but with that happening they really did the best they could. I'll make some brief points, but maybe I should write a blog post at some point.

- Kernel talent was never a problem at Palm. The ex-Palm folks lead or are technical leaders at many mainstream unix-ish OSes today, plus Fuschia (Android, Apple, Chrome, Fuschia)

- Boot times weren't the highest priority (though we did spend time on it since they were _so bad_). Battery life was. We didn't even do that well by launch date, but if Android hadn't mainlined their power-management framework before the Pre launched it would have been a joke. It was all hands on deck to get that stuff integrated in time for launch.

- The webOS platform was actually a thin UI layer on top of an Android-like Java-based platform that never launched. The Java-based OS wasn't derivative of Android (it predated Android), but it had no differentiating features with Android already live. Booting the Java runtime _and_ the JS engine and webkit was a lot.

- We knew we couldn't have Java running on this phone long-term, so tons of effort was going into nascent node services instead of Java ones. So all those were launching too.

- Your memory is incorrect on the JS jit, or mine is. My memory is that we were adopting the latest v8 engines as fast as they would come out (although not as fast as chrome) because they were the only ones that could keep the thing performant.

- Webkit was a mess, I'll give you that, but I'm surprised you noticed. Were you at palm too? Did you build apps? We generally provided UI components that were the way to build apps that, hopefully, allowed you to ignore the intricacies of exactly which webkit version you were on (at least to build an app).

Boot times for alternative kernels were a lot faster. I can't recall exactly (it's been years), but I seem to remember that there were some simple config settings in the bootloader that could cut boot times by a lot.

Was battery life the reason stock clocks were 1.2GHz instead of Qualcomm's recommended 1.5GHz? I used to run mine at 1.7-2GHz without any trouble (aside from battery life).

Maybe I'm wrong about the JIT, but as I recall, the JS benchmarks under webOS were significantly worse than Android (preware ultimately wasn't enough to keep up with things and LuneOS wasn't really viable without a lot of effort, so dual-booting to Android extended the life of the tablet for quite a while).

I wasn't at Palm, but it was noticeable during browsing (especially vs Android) and was extremely noticeable when it came to missing features. I did some EnyoJS work, but that was actually targeted at web apps rather than a webOS-specific app.

WebOS LG TV owner, and TouchPad owner here.

As far as I can tell, there's nothing obviously connected to the UI experience of the TV and the TouchPad.

The TV is a lot more locked down and filled with ads, but still snappy. Sideloading IPK's is limited. I would love to neuter all the ads and auto-updates, that's my main gripe.

I don't remember the touchpad performance being all that bad for the time. Was pretty snappy IIRC.

My LG TV, on the other hand, definitely struggles particularly running apps. That might just be due to the age of the tv.

My observation, after using LG TVs at countless hotels (occasionally internet-connected), AirBnBs (usually internet connected) and at home (never internet-connected) is that even in quite old TVs the UI is blazing fast until you connect it to the 'Net. At that point... It spends a painful amount of time waiting on requests with no visible feedback and the whole UI starts to chug, with some apps becoming almost unusable until the thing has been on for long enough for all the background stuff to finish.

Granted... If they aren't 'Net-connected, most "apps" aren't of much use. But, fast access to settings and inputs is sorta nice too.

> but still snappy

It's about the least snappy thing I've ever used, apart from cheap Android tablets (we made the mistake of buying an Amazon Fire Kids tablet which is the only device I've ever used that was literally unusably slow).

I even bought the higher spec version of the TV because apparently the cheaper version is even slower. Great image quality but I'll definitely never buy another LG TV again.

I have no explanation of what's going on with your touchpad. They really only had one model with different storage options. I guess I'd speculate there's something wrong with it.

As far as the TV, here's my model number:

OLED77C2AUA

No complaints about performance ever from me or my wife. Just the ads and software/features I don't care about. (No I do not want to update... Stop asking, I have auto-update disabled for a reason)

> Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.

That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.

I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_

I'm pretty sure I bought one for 99$ but I can't remember if that was directly from HP. I LOVED that thign

as someone who still remembers the hype around the deal, most people bought the tabs to "jailbreak" and install another OS into it (ubuntu touch?). perhaps i misremember things but neither os had a great tablet experience.

Those devices predate Ubuntu Touch's first release by a few years ;) But you could install Android on them, which kept the Touchpad specifically useful for a few more years after the webOS software got too stale (but now it's a shame to not have webOS on that device).

(as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)

The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.

An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)

A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).

The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.

Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.

I don't think he's saying it went from great to awful, I think he's saying they canceled the project because the new CEO didn't like it and nobody was there to defend it. He claims the underlying tech was good but there was a market/product mismatch; instead of taking the information and trying again, they just canceled it.

That said, this article really doesn't dwell on the mistakes he made. He sort of implies his work was great and it was marketing/other departments who messed up.

He wasn't acting alone. HP bought this whole company not long before this (HP bought Palm in April 2010, the 49 days seems to start around July 2011). Most of the blame for shipping 270,000 units that didn't sell has to go to Palm. Even if he correctly predicted that Palm wasn't going to sell that many (I'm not sure if that is possible), he wouldn't have been in power long enough to change things. Predicting the size of the market probably wasn't even his job.

I wouldn't even call this rushed to market, though expectations were likely too high for reality. Still it takes years of investment to build a platform like this.

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