Palm's refusal to admit errors

I have been using PalmOS and now WebOs for ten years. A handspring visor for 5 years, totally stock, then a T|X when I got back to the USA in 2005. I watched the Treo descend into irrelevancy compared to Blackberry. I watched them buy BeOS (my favorite dead OS) then split off the OS department as PalmSource; it was then sold to Access. Palm then refused to use the pda/phone OS that the BeOs guys developed. PalmOs 6 it was. Ready in 2004 but never used by anyone.

When WebOs and the Pre were unveiled at CES in 2009 I, along with lots of other folks was totally stoked. Palm had tons of mind share in 2009. Remember Roger Macafee famously saying that everyone who bought the first iPhone in 2007 would be buying a Pre? It did seem not unreasonable to me. Then the Pre came out a few days before the iPhone 3GS and all those folks who were to get the Pre got the newest and Kulest iPhone instead.

I got a Pre that first week. It was not ready for prime time. The iPhone wasn't ready at first either, but by 2009 had completely changed people's expectations. A not ready new device would not cut it. Hardware reliability problems, software needing to be rebooted, etc. People buying a telephone do not expect to have to reboot it.

I still use that Pre (actually, my first was replaced under warranty) and love it, but many of those early adopters moved to Android or iPhone. I still see more Palm Centro's (I had one) than Pixi's. Sprint invested a lot in the Pre/Webos rollout as the next hot thing. Now they won't carry the new Pre +, probably due to bitterness.

Android was just coming out at the same time as WebOs. There was one Android phone with a troublesome OS. A year later Android was ruling and Palm was leaping into the arms of HP to avoid slow death.

Jon Rubenstein was brought out of retirement to shepherd the new OS into a device to put palm back into relevance. They designed this Kul device to go with the OS. I like the Pre form factor. The keyboard is a bit small, but all the designers seem to have thought this was a killer design. The market has ruled against it. Everyone wants bigger phones. Bricks. Rubenstein here refuses to admit that anything was wrong with the Pre/WebOs rollout at all.

Hey, go ahead and say that our design did not meet with favor and we are working on it! The "portrait slider" form that the Pre introduced is now being used by Blackberry and a Dell android phone. They have bigger keyboards and bigger screens.

People complained about the introductory advertising campaign. I liked it, but most people didn't. He says here "we changed it". Nothing about trying a different type of campaign to create buzz, but it didn't work out right.

Hey, people do not like it when a leader needs to admit errors and refuses to do so.