In many ways, Palm’s acquisition by Hewlett-Packard (HP) is the end of an era because the handset maker was critical in building early demand for smartphones.
At these moments, it’s common for some in the industry to wax nostalgically about the accomplishments of the company and that’s exactly what Palm’s ex-CEO Donna Dubinsky did in an editorial for the Mercury News.
In particular, Dubinsky pointed out several innovations the company pioneered that are still impacting smartphones today.
– A computer based on synchronization — first with PCs and later with the web — rather than a stand-alone device, the norm at the time.
– A computer that turned on instantly with the press of a button, going against the trend of bloated software that created a slow user-experience.
– A large-display hand-held computer with a touch interface and no keyboard, with a new way of entering text, called Graffiti.
– A graphic interface for hand-helds where every pixel was analyzed to reduce steps and confusion. Prior hand-held products were character-based.
– The first successful mobile computing developer platform with tens of thousands of applications.
– The Palm V, where style and form factor were as important to users as functionality.
– The web-enabled Palm VII, in which an application on the device synchronized with data in the background, as is common today.
– One of the first mobile browsers that could view most Web pages in a satisfactory fashion on a small display. Previous approaches were text-based and extremely limited.
– An integrated personal information manager where voice calls could be dialed from an e-mail message and text messages could have photos attached.
– The Treo smartphone, a breakthrough form factor that made the combination phone and handheld computer truly pocketable.
– WebOS, under the direction of Jon Rubenstein, with its unprecedented ability to integrate personal information on the Web with information on the device.
These are all great things that we should be thankful that Palm was able to bring to market but it’s far easier to judge the company with rose-colored glasses. There’s a reason the company’s stock was headed toward $0 and Dubinsky can’t escape all the blame.
The company’s muddled software strategy in its middle years (licensing the OS off, spinning off into a separate company that was eventually purchased back by Palm) set it behind. Palm also could have had the business market but it could never deliver an integrated solution like Research In Motion. It also whiffed on the consumer market and when it finally had a credible iPhone competitor with the Pre, the hardware was not up to snuff and it was a failure.
There was a lot of woulda-shoulda talk about the Pre but the launch was too late, the hardware didn’t do the software justice and Sprint was a weak launch partner. You can’t control what Apple and RIM do, but many of the Pre mistakes were the result of poor leadership decisions at Palm.
So, shed a tear for Palm if you must, but I’m going to hope that HP throws its weight behind this one-time innovative company and gives us something that really drops our jaws. And no, I’m not talking about webOS printers.
[Via Mercury News]