Nokia for the past year or so has been on a crusade to dig the company out of irrelevancy in today’s super competitive mobile business. The Finnish-based phone maker teamed up with Microsoft to jazz things up on the operating system, shifting attention slightly away from its own OS Symbian. Now the company has its sights set on acquiring some talent on the development side.
On his blog this morning, Josh Marinacci, a developer/designer for Palm, announced that he would be leaving the troubled company after two years of service. He went on to explain himself as to why he came to the decision to leave, saying:
I spent the last two years doing my best to make webOS a success. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and the platforms I’ve helped, but quite frankly I’m damn tired. It’s a lot of fun to champion something you are passionate about, but also exhausting.
He also went on to suggest spending more time with his family and that he’d taken a research position at Nokia, which allows him to “play with cool future stuff and stay involved with the industry,” but at a much slower pace. Life changed drastically for many webOS workers, as parent company HP laid-off 270 workers who were key in the development of the maligned operating system.
That said, I thought it was interesting that Marinacci felt compelled to mention that the failed TouchPad had more native tablet apps than Android had after six months. As I read between the lines, this suggested that webOS as a software wasn’t the issue, but instead, the hardware and marketing was the problem [duh].
The former Palm dev also noted that he planned to stay involved with the platform by offering his own apps in the App Catalog. He ended his blog post saying, “I love my TouchPad and will continue to use it until they pry it from my cold dead hands.”