As an old HP fan, the rebirth of WebOS is painful to watch. Palm, after missing the ‘‘App Phone’’ transition was effectiv ely taken over by an investor group led by Elevation Partners. They promptly installed Jon Rubinstein as CEO, banking on his successful Apple experience to breathe new life into Palm. He did: In June 2009, Palm 2.0 launched the Palm Pre smartphone based on a new and very promising platform called WebOS. For reasons still in doubt (imperfect hardware, Sprint as the chosen carrier partner, young software, a perceived lack of applications, unusual ads…) customers didn’t vote with their wallets. Palm 2.0 investors got tired and the company was sold to HP in April 2010 for $1.2B. (At the time, I predicted no one would pick it up…)
HP immediately positioned WebOS for a broader role: it would also run on devices such as the company’s printers, improving their UI. On the surface of things, a good idea. And buying Palm was a declaration of independence from Microsoft: HP would control its smartphone (and tablet) future.
Back in September 2010, addressing the “Apple Problem”, Todd Bradley, the senior exec in charge of HP’s Personal Systems Group, took pains to dismiss ideas of direct competition with Apple: “… emulating Apple is not part of our strategy…”
When HP’s WebOS tablet, the TouchPad, was finally announced on February 9th, comparisons with Apple and Android couldn’t be avoided. (YouTube video here.)
In a BBC interview, HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, kept the Apple comparison alive: “I hope one day people will say ‘this is as cool as HP’, not ‘as cool as Apple’.”
This is a worthy goal, one with the potential to motivate the troops. In principle, it can be done: some call Apple the new Sony; others see Samsung as having taken Sony’s place.
But… Isn’t this type of goal better kept quiet, working and working until the market says you have dethroned the incumbent?
We now go back to last month’s D9 conference and its proven formula: captains of industry softly interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. The “softly” part is a bit misleading: these two journalists don’t do attack interviews, they might ask the occasional follow-up question, or let a pregnant pause signal BS detection and, on occasion, push the careless fabulist to dig deeper. But they mostly let their audience of industry insiders judge for themselves.
We, too, can do this.
For example, we can turn to Leo Apotheker’s on-stage performance at the conference. (See the video here.)
When asked about what took HP so long to come up with a tablet after Palm’s acquisition a year ago, the company’s CEO replied he wanted the TouchPad to be perfect when shipped. A friend sitting next to me in the audience turned and asked, sotto voce: ‘Why his he doing this to himself?’ And to his people, one might add. What is the benefit in setting up such a high bar?
Bill Walsh, the legendary football coach, used a better approach: before a game, he gave detailed praise to the adversary. Great quarterback, sharp throws, hard defense, and so on. If Bill’s team won, they did so against a worthy opponent. If they lost, well, this had been a hard fight against a clearly superior opponent. Safe and gracious.
Last week, after setting lofty expectations, HP launched its WebOS TouchPad.
None of the first reviews contained the word “perfect’’. Most praised WebOS features such as the Card UI, the Synergy integration of information sources and its unrestricted multitasking. But, too often, the praise was followed by criticism of poor execution.
Walt Mossberg, the Walt Street Journal “gadget guru” and arbiter of high-tech taste ended his detailed review saying: ‘I can’t recommend the TouchPad over the iPad 2’.
Gizmodo’s review is best summed up by its opening paragraph:
“I am so goddamned tired of the iPad. Which is why I was so excited for the TouchPad. And that’s why I feel so completely crushed right now.”
Last February, when the TouchPad was first announced, CNET UK gave it a very positive review:
“If you’ve been hankering for a credible alternative to Apple’s iPad, hanker no more. We’ve sat down with the HP TouchPad, a new contender to the tablet throne — and it is, for desperate want of a better word, amazeballs. It promises a host of advantages over the all-conquering iPad, including a dual-core CPU, no-nonsense media handling and, joy of all joys, Adobe Flash playback.”
This was then. Last week’s CNET’s review ends with this bottom line:
“The TouchPad would have made a great competitor for the original iPad, but its design, features, and speed put it behind today’s crop of tablet heavyweights.”
As for Flash performance, while Ars Technica gave the TouchPad a more “fair and balanced” hands-on, it nonetheless joined other review sites in noting flawed rendering:
“One big problem with browsing is Flash. Yes, it’s nice to avoid non-functional gray or black pages every time you visit a restaurant website, but we encountered far too many instances where some site’s Flashy goodness brought the entire TouchPad to its knees.”
(I just found out I’m not alone in pointing to the trouble with making promises of perfection. In a June 1st Market Watch interview (video here), Walt Mossberg opined the claim to a perfect-at-birth TouchPad “might come back to haunt Apotheker as HP tries to penetrate the market dominance of the iPad with the TouchPad.”)
This launched HP into damage control mode. First, a by-the-book response: The less-than-perfect features widely remarked upon by reviewers will be taken care Real Soon Now. According to Walt Mossberg’s TouchPad review, “H-P acknowledges most of these problems and says it is already working on a webOS update, to be delivered wirelessly in three to six weeks that will fix nearly all of them.”
But, wait a minute, if the bugs can be exterminated so quickly, why didn’t HP wait “three to six weeks” and execute the perfect launch promised by their CEO? Did Apotheker get to test the product himself and decide it met his standard for perfection, or did his staff tell him bedtime stories?
Then, Richard Kerris, the exec in charge of Developer Relations re-assures us: “We think the world of Apple and have the utmost respect for their products,” said Kerris. “It would be ignorant for us to say that we are going to take it [the market] away from Apple.”
Next, we’re told the TouchPad isn’t an iPad killer, but an “enterprise play”. By the same Richard Kerris: “We think there’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs.”
In the meantime, another HP exec, Eric Cador, claims his company’s TouchPad will become better than number one: “… in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.”
Jon Rubinstein comes to the rescue and compares the TouchPad’s teething problems to Apple’s early versions of OS X. In his memo to the troops, Ruby, as he is affectionately known, shows leadership and reminds everyone of Apple tribulations when rebuilding the Macintosh software foundation after Jobs came back to power. True.
But… Apple had a following HP lacks today. The adversary was Windows, great market power and not especially respected for its technical prowess. And today’s competitors are of two kinds, the huge iOS monolith and the even larger and proliferating Android.
In his D9 interview, Apotheker argues WebOS gives HP the ability to control better control its destiny by making both hardware and software like, you know, Apple. A few weeks later, we’re told HP is looking for WebOS licensing partners — thus opening itself to competing on price and features with its licensees, something Google, Apple and Microsoft have studiously avoided. (In the mid-nineties, Apple briefly tried to have it both ways. Profits plunged, Jobs came back and put an end to the bleeding.)
Unfortunately, I’m not done with the complicated positioning message.
Earlier this year, HP’s CEO made the claim WebOS would run on “100 million” devices. To quote the ZDNet article: “Although that 100 million figure sounds crazy it should be noted that HP shipped more than 52 million printers in 2010 and 64 million PCs. Tablets and smartphones are gravy.”
On PCs, as discussed in the March 13th Monday Note, the idea, an old one, is to have a “mini-OS” that’ll boot much faster than Windows so you can quickly check your webmail or your Facebook page. Printers would get better a nicer touch-UI. All this leading to grand statements of a boon for application developers: 100 million devices! Write Once, Run Everywhere! Neat theory, unclean reality. Just take a look at applications written for smartphones when playing on a tablet. iPhone apps do run, technically, on an iPad. And developers prefer rewriting those to better use the full screen. And what about code written for a Pre smartphone running in a printer, or a PC laptop using WebOS in a “quick-boot” arrangement?
We even hear rumors HP might do a Windows 8 tablet after all. No warranties expressed or implied.
In any event, this is a sad display of a once and still mighty company badly messing up its WebOS and TouchPad messages.
The reality is simpler — and harder: HP decided to enter the smartphone/tablet fray. It thus competes with Android and iOS. The consumerization of IT renders the “enterprise-only” pivot null and void. In this new world, Google and Apple wage an ecosystem war: devices + apps + distribution. Add marketing, if you want, but Word Of Mouth is still more potent than ad dollars. Or merely reinforces it.
This is the war HP is in. Bragging, pivoting or denying will only hurt.
Related columns:
- WebOS Everywhere Tweetby Jean-Louis Gassée Where have we heard a similar mantra? Despite their apparent divorce from Microsoft, it sounds like HP’s brains have been infected with a mutation of the “Windows Everywhere” virus. Let’s recap. Late April 2010, HP acquires Palm for $1.2B. In July 2010, then-CEO Mark Hurd tells us he didn’t buy WebOS just [...]...
- HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb TweetWe strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead. Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community. …the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected [...]...
38 Comments
I don’t know if you have a TouchPad or not. If you do, I hope you’ll revisit this when they release that Unicorn Update. (If you can’t tell, I did not buy one.)
I would hate to see WebOS tank. All of us were hoping that HP would finally abandon Microsoft as an OS for thgeir PC’s so that that hated company finally starts going down. But alas it may not be so. We hate Microsoft so deeply.
I had expected the TouchPad to be a credible alternative to the iPad and various Amdroid tablets but the launch seems to have been disappointing and not well received
Those “quotes” about Mac OSX seemed awfully convenient, selected as they were to address specific WebOS weaknesses. I’d sure love to see attributions, so I could confirm they weren’t made up, and also look for “amazing,” “powerful” or other things that were said at the time.
.
But that niggle misses the bigger point: Mac OSX 10.0 (possibly the source for all these quotes) was clearly identified as an experimental version. I, a devout Mac user at the time, never dared touch it. After all, Apple *HAD* a functioning OS for their machines at the time.
.
So the intended audience, developers, bought into 10.0, and I suspect the majority of 10.1 users were developers, too. Mac OSX was a revolution, but fought by a few dedicated types.
.
This is all in sharp contrast to HP’s situation. HP has had WebOS under wraps for a year, during which time no “legacy” OS for tablets has been for sale (unless the FrankenSlate of last year didn’t get fully killed). And it was released, as Mr. Gassée notes, as a consumer-ready product.
.
The most curious thing for me: RIM made the –> IDENTICAL <– mistake, and got roundly blasted for their over-promising / under-delivering. How can HP be so unaware of their market and/or own product? Is HP management that detached from the guys in the trenches, as was said under the previous leadership?
Really nice article. I look forward to reading more of your work. Thanks.
You were the CEO of Be, one of the main root of the Palm OS. You had the pioneering vision of an OS for those devices and Be was so good at presenting its evolution. Here you comments are smart as usual but seems too much coming from an outsider.
You know, HP has always been good at grabbing the new-and-shiny while forgetting their core strengths. Case in point: The Personal Jukebox – the first disk-based MP3 player invented by Compaq in the late 1990s. After buying Compaq, HP had complete access to this brand/IP/patents. Instead what did it do? Shutter PJB and license and sell HP-branded Apple iPods through HP’s channels while Apple still had limited channel reach. Why help your competitor to grab dominant mindshare? That was just foolish.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Personal_Jukebox
“But, wait a minute, if the bugs can be exterminated so quickly, why didn’t HP wait “three to six weeks” and execute the perfect launch promised by their CEO? Did Apotheker get to test the product himself and decide it met his standard for perfection, or did his staff tell him bedtime stories?”
Wow.
This. In a nutshell, Jean-Louis, you have summed up the issue of competition for the iPad. Everyone, and that means EVERYONE, has rushed to market to try to get skin in the game. Then, when the shortcomings are pointed out, they ALL say, “Well, this is an easy fix and we’ll have an update real soon now.”
Guess what? That’s a lie. Just like the lie that the original was going to be a worthy competitor. Why? Because it is not easy. It’s NOT three to six weeks work. It is inventing stuff. It is getting it all working and in production mode. And if it really was easy, it never would have been a problem. They said the same thing about the iPod and iTunes.
Shipping with a bug? That’s easy.
An oversight? We’ll take care of it.
Significant functionality issues? I don’t think so.
The Macalope nailed it, and it applies to many more that Microsoft:
“Apple’s solution, available today, is limited compared to what Microsoft will ship sometime later. The Macalope’s said it before, but it’s always amazing how presently available Apple products continue to pale against future products from Microsoft.”
> And today’s competitors are of two kinds, the huge iOS monolith
> and the even larger and proliferating Android.
iOS is bigger than Android in every conceivable way.
> Those “quotes” about Mac OSX seemed awfully convenient,
> selected as they were to address specific WebOS weaknesses.
You obviously don’t remember that time. Mac OS X was a total critical failure for its first few years.
You have four developer previews of Mac OS X, a Public Beta, v10.0, v10.1, and v10.2, and THEN you get this:
- starts using the GPU, greatly speeding up the interface drawing and other tasks as drawing is offloaded from the CPU (“sluggish”)
- starts having enough of its own apps that SOME (not all) users can stop using the Classic environment and running 5-10 year old classic Mac apps (“no quality apps”)
- various improvements to the interface based on user feedback, as well as not having to run Classic, made the interface useful for day-to-day work for the first time (“it’s just not making sense”)
> I’d sure love to see attributions, so I could confirm they weren’t made up
Again, you obviously don’t remember the time. Here is the attribution:
“…overall the software is sluggish”
“…there are no quality apps to use, so it won’t last”
“…it’s just not making sense….”
– EVERYBODY
> Mac OSX 10.0 (possibly the source for all these quotes) was
> clearly identified as an experimental version.
No. The developer previews were for developers, and the Public Beta was experimental, but v10.0, v10.1 were real shipping products.
> I, a devout Mac user at the time, never dared touch it.
> After all, Apple *HAD* a functioning OS for their machines
> at the time.
When Mac OS X v10.0 shipped, Mac OS 9 stopped being an operating system and started being a subsystem of Mac OS X. Even if you ran the Classic subsystem alone without the rest of Mac OS X, you were essentially running Mac OS X. The fact that you, an actual devout Mac user, were voluntarily choosing not to use the rest of Mac OS X (all the new stuff) is indicative of the challenge Apple faced. There were too many downsides to running all the new stuff for the first few years, and so you stayed away. Apple gets no credit for that except to say that they persevered and eventually made Mac OS X truly great.
Apple also has a functioning OS for tablets today. Nobody is forced to buy an HP tablet at all. In fact, it’s not even competitive with iPad 1, let alone 2. So in the same way that you used Classic for a few years while Mac OS X experienced its adolescence, today’s tablet users are using iPads. So Ruby is right. Even in a best-case scenario, TouchPad is going to suck for a while. Could be 6 months, could be a year, could be 2-3 years. Even in a best-case scenario.
So back to the core topic which is WebOS positioning: Ruby and Richard Kerris (both ex-Palm and ex-Apple) were the only ones who don’t sound insane when talking about TouchPad. HP should be humble. They are nobody in mobile. People care more about the fact that most of Palm is ex-Apple than that Palm is now part of HP. They should be constantly lowering expectations until users and the press start giving TouchPad raves. Compare to Apple when they launched their first real server in Xserve. Steve Jobs specifically said: “we’re coming in humble to the server space … we haven’t done a lot of this and we have a lot to learn.” I’m pretty sure he said it was mainly for video people and schools who have a lot of Macs and want an all-Mac client/server solution. That is where HP needs to be in mobile. Lots of others, too, as the industry reorients itself as another follow-Apple market.
@ Hamranhansenhansen, thanks for filling me in. No, I don’t remember many details of OSX in the first iterations, as I said: I avoided it. OS9, problematic though it was, seemed more stable and I did not get the early OSX installs.
.
The fact that 10.1 was released as a free upgrade to 10.0 certainly suggests the sense that 10.0 was NOT ready for market. With essentially NO Apple-supplied or third-party apps, I still surmise that there was essentially NO reason for users to leave OS9, and that very few must have.
.
I think we agree that WebOS as it stands is unlikely to win over many users, and that it’s of interest to developers. But as @JLG describes, that’s not exactly how HP is positioning it. More the pity for a market that has become much more consumer-driven and much less from tech savvy types such as @Hamranhansenhansen. They’ll be getting a rather rocky, limited experience.
Call me naive, but speaking from the perspective of an iOS developer, I think there exists an opportunity for **some** tablet maker to penetrate the enterprise. Apple’s model of controlling the channel and software distribution is a decided anathema to enterprises — especially those working with VAR channels and system integrators.
The real question, which @Hamranhansenhansen nails, is whether a vendor other than Apple is going to properly set real expectations, and more to the point show the discipline to focus and iterate.
Until one of these folks stops talking about Flash as a feature (versus a bug until it work caveat free), or snapdragon processors (customers buy outcomes, not attributes), Apple is gonna remain the only game in town in tabletville.
HP, like many other companies, needs someone who can say “No, it’s not good enough”.
After all these years, Apple shows one thing : a good and expensive product is a good deal for your costumers and for your company.
@PJBLuvr said, “You know, HP has always been good at …”
.
I believe that corporate culture is important in understanding a firm’s actions, predicting how it will respond to new challenges, etc.
.
But I doubt that many of us outside of the firm can understand how completely the firm must have changed as it went thru multiple strategies, CEOs, and markets. While their printer and consulting businesses are relatively stable, the ground is shifting dramatically in PCs, and in their newly-acquired mobile business.
.
Can you show us how features you discuss are core values of HP, not coincidences that have been or will be discarded as convenient?
The comments made by the execs, which have been summarized here..show one of the problems that HP has. It thinks it’s simply amazing (and cool? Where did they get this one from?). My honest answer is ..it is NOT!
. It’s never been and it will never be with a strategy like this.
Oh “You’ll see, We will build the perfect tablet”, …oh “our tablet will be number one plus”.. you kidding me? “number one plus”? In kindergaden, this might be classified as “cool”, although I do have my doubts, but in the “Real Worl” (This is the wake the …up call!), this is not how things are, are they HP?
HP’s ignorance has always been their problem and to me personally, this is their biggest problem.
I am no Apple fanboy and I am still waiting for an alternative tablet at the moment just to try and avoid buying an iPad, but it looks like I might not have a choice!
Good day (HP!)
Excellent analysis. WebOS is a really good test case, and its timing is perfect for testing. With Windows 8 currently doing the rounds of future promises (which, in true MS style may or may or not turn out to be vaporware promises) it is great to see the largest PC manufacturer having a crack at going it alone, demonstrating a potential post-MS world. (or at least an alternative).
However, while it is a good effort, it is underdone in key areas. The most disappointing thing is the hardware, which is surprising. Or is it? HP is a veteran at hardware, but after spending so long designing for the staid and somewhat stale enterprise market, you wonder if they can really design a compelling consumer product, especially a tablet. I would like to think they can, but really their tablet is just an iPad 1 competitor arriving far too late to the ball. Which is a great shame, because WebOS is a genuine contender. It just needs a zinger of a hardware shell wrapped around it to make consumers sit up and take notice.
I know HP keep saying it is not targeted at consumers, but really, designing a heavy brick is not appealing to anyone, even conservative enterprise types. A sleek and light hardware body running WebOS is what is needed to showcase HP’s tablet efforts. I still hold hope that amongst their ranks HP has designers capable of providing truly compelling hardware designs, rather than just decent, safe efforts. But with this first tablet effort, a young and fresh soul is hidden under an old and flabby body. I hope their second effort is better, but that may be too late. It is hard to get a second chance, as first opinions only come once. Shame.
Are u kidding me with this article? Where’s the review part of this supposed review? I have a small business and have been waiting for months to finally be able to test drive HP’s tablet. I bought 5 touchpads this morning and here’s why:
1-We were completely blown away by true multitasking. In our business, having 5 or 6 separate websites continuously and simultaneously updating while we’re using another function is beyond amazing! I cannot believe iOS and Android are legally allowed to even use the same verb when describing their version of multitasking. I have to say, seeing a video of webOS in action is not enough. It absolutely cannot convey to the average user, such as myself, the true power of the OS. HP has got to figure out a way to have people experience this for themselves. There is simply no way to adequately describe it without doing it.
2-Full web browsing was a non-negotiable feature for our business. To be of any real value we need the machines with which we’re going to spend most of our daily life to be fully functional–not some wateredXdown
50G
Are u kidding me with this article? Where’s the review part of this supposed review? I have a small business and have been waiting for months to finally be able to test drive HP’s tablet. I bought 5 touchpads this morning and here’s why:
1-We were completely blown away by true multitasking. In our business, having 5 or 6 separate websites continuously and simultaneously updating while we’re using another function is beyond amazing! I cannot believe iOS and Android are legally allowed to even use the same verb when describing their version of multitasking. I have to say, seeing a video of webOS in action is not enough. It absolutely cannot convey to the average user, such as myself, the true power of the OS. HP has got to figure out a way to have people experience this for themselves. There is simply no way to adequately describe it without doing it.
2-Full web browsing was a non-negotiable feature for our business. To be of any real value we need the machines with which we’re going to spend most of our daily life to be fully functional–not some watered-down or cutesy interpretation of a webpage. And that also means with Flash in our case.
3- 50G free cloud storage for each one of our Touchpads for life! I thought they were joking when they told me. I was going to buy these before I even knew that, but that sealed the deal and basically turned me into a walking ad. The free storage alone will save our company almost $2,000/yr!
4- Wait til you experience what they’re calling Just Type. I cannot believe how many button presses and brain damage it saves.
5- Maybe it’s the entrepreneurial stubbornness in me that makes me bristle at someone (Jobs) handicapping a product I paid for. When I paid a hefty price for an iphone and then couldn’t replace the battery when it ran out of juice in the middle of my workday I was pissed-off. I’ve never forgotten how outraged I was when I found it was Jobs’ decision to seal the compartment.
I’ve actually been carrying forward a mental tally every time I’ve seen a cool feature I’ve wanted but haven’t been able to get because it would have required “jailbreaking” my device and voiding the warranty.
With these Touchpads, those days are over. “Homebrewing” is actually supported in webOS. That kind of openness and free collaboration is how something as great as webOS will only get better and better. This is an exciting time.
websos rants about his problems with Apple’s products. Fair enough. I’m going to rant about HP. I will never purchase an HP product again. The prices they charge for their printer ink is outright theft. Second, their printer control software is crap. I don’t care how many ex-Apple employees they hire, they will never get my business.
Have a nice day.
Note that this is the second major “I promise you the world” faux pas that Apotheker made. His first was to increase the financial outlook expectation when he arrived at HP, which he later had to back track on, resulting in the collapse of HP’s market value.
I was shocked that he took this approach, because as the new CEO following a slash and burn Mark Hurd, he could have taken a dour attitude by stating that investments needed to be made to bring HP back to greatness. Take the market value hit up front, then over-deliver. Instead, he took the completely opposite approach and look what happened. Now once again with the TouchPad.
Regarding your comments about “write once, deploy many”; webOS is structurally different from iOS and Android in this aspect, the apps do automatically re-size themselves quite well, without requiring a total re-write as iOS and Android require for tablets. Obviously there are going to be some apps where presentation will demand a different version for tablets, but much less often than iOS or Android.
Once again the Palm people release a new webOS version without the SDK proceeding the general release. What don’t these guys understand about developer support?!?!? They had many extremely capable and successful Palm OS developers chomping at the bit to get their hands on the webOS 2.0 SDK and Palm ignored them, thereby pushing the devs to Apple or Android. webOS app market not supporting developer revenue outside of the USA…..c’mon, these guys flat don’t understand the business model. Richard Kerris – the guy that is supposed to haul in developers, came from the CTO position at Lucas Films. Other than living in the Bay Area, what in the heck has he ever done that hints he understands the mobile developer ecosystem?
I’ve heard from HP employees that have tried to communicate what needs to happen to executive management and have been shut down. Apparently Apotheker is relying on the webOS team who have yet to demonstrate any ability to compete in the tough mobile marketplace. What little talent they started with took the exit door when Hurd bought Palm. We have yet to see anyone of significance be added to the team. Their claim to fame appears to be a few washed up ex-Apple people who Apotheker seems to feel have some Mojo. But as you rightly pointed out, it appears that instead, they are a NoGo.
To DD: I didn’t mean for my comments at the end to come off as a rant. Just a couple of issues I encountered that have since become well known problems for apple.
Thanks for the heads up on HP prin
Really didn’t mean for my comments at the end to come off as a rant. I just mentioned a couple issues that I ran into early on with apple–they have since become widely recognized drawbacks.
Thanks for the heads up on the hp printers. I’ll make sure I avoid those. I’ve never had a reason to buy an hp product until this morning. Frankly, after seeing what the OS does, I wouldn’t care if it was only available through Mattell or Fisher-Price. I just wanted the devices.
@Hamranhansenhansen: Your recollection of the MacOS X 10.0 days isn’t 100% accurate. MacOS 9 could still be bought and installed without MacOS X running under it for some time after X’s initial launch. It’s true that it could ALSO be run as a “box” on top of OSX, but it was fully bootable on its own. Other than that, yeah, hard days for a “beleaguered” company.
@BillSchmidt: “Regarding your comments about “write once, deploy many”; webOS is structurally different from iOS and Android in this aspect, the apps do automatically re-size themselves quite well” … Actually, Apple’s interface builder has really great support for auto-resizing of widgets and views. You can specify where things should stick, resize, etc, as screen sizes and shapes change. That’s not really the point to porting something to iPad. The DESIGN of the app has to change to really address the user’s workflow (playflow?) with a device like the iPad.
The Problem with WebOS not getting worldwide acceptance is that it isn’t being made available worldwide.
The US and a limited selection of European Countries does nothing to gain the support of the rest of the world.
@Hamranhansenhansen , I remember well using the MacOS X public beta on my ancient dual 450mhz G4. It was a bit sluggish, sure, but so were most Linux boxes at the time. It took essentially no time at all for me to figure out that MacOS X, however rough, was the future: It was the first OS that ran both public domain Unix-based software and mainstream proprietary software like Photoshop.
True, it was no fun to run the MacOS 9 compatibility layer, which I remember as sluggish and buggy. But it didn’t take long for me to convert almost entirely to the new OS. And yes, as Sam noted, you could boot into MacOS 9 for quite a while after X was introduced.
The problem with WebOS is that you need a really compelling reason to buy it instead of the default iOS choice. The multitasking should be one, but if my memory serves bad battery life is a problem. Apple has learned from its earlier premium priced products that if you keep your price low, you can own the market and make competition almost impossible. That is certainly what happened with iPad.
If your rival can build the Mercedes-Benz of the market for about the same as a Chevy, you’ve killed off Chevy entirely. (This is what happened with the various $499 Android tablets.)
So you can compete by becoming a Yugo (which is what the generic brands, like Coby, are) or you can become BMW or Ferrari. If I wanted to get into the tablet biz, I would see what could be done to produce a BMW or Ferrari. Not sure if it could be done but at least the question’s interesting.
I tried iPad 2 in the Apple store today and performance was pretty Ferrari-like. Maybe competitors could try a distinctive style for those who are allergic to Jonathan Ive’s designs?
D
@bill schmidt: richard kerris was running Apple’s own developer relations team at the same time they were dealing with a new, unfinished new OS and constant doubts about their viability. Basically he’s the only guy around who has done the same thing before.
as for new hires post-acquisition, they got Ari Jaaski and his team at Nokia who designed Maemo and Meego (which as we have now seen are quite nice). There are also some great people in the fields of node.js and js.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Rubinstein’s demotion by HP today (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/xhfA/~3/nE6FMoTsJNI) as that seems very relevant. He’s no longer heading the WebOS team, apparently due to the botched launch.
@WebSOS — Gosh, you were awfully enthusiastic about the features bundled with the TouchPad. To each his own; I certainly am free with MY opinions. But that was NOT what this article is about; @JLG was noting the distressing disconnect between Leo A’s over-promising and the reception. That’s a very interesting story.
.
There MIGHT be a story about the frenzy of “not ready for prime time” reviews being irrelevant to the actual success of the product; it might be that commenters here are in an echo chamber and need to wake up to a broader community; it might be the case that your personal priorities are more relevant than those voiced by Mr. Mossberg, Gizmodo, CNet and the others.
.
But you have come across as a partisan fan, perhaps a developer or HP consultant, by not actually addressing the issues raised in the original post, dragging a red herring across our trail of information, as it were.
.
Tonight’s news suggests that HP’s CEO has responded exactly as @JLG’s take would suggest: Leo A seems to have felt that Jon R, who would have led him to make those embarrassing “one plus” promises, was no longer the right person to be telling him how wonderful the TouchPad was. There may be another reason (although I doubt we will get a clear telling), but it sure looks like HP demands a bit more than you do.
.
If my rather out-on-a-limb conjecture is correct, I take it as a promising harbinger of HP’s future success with this product, a commitment to reality-based-marketing to its oh-so-serious client base who can’t tolerate BS, as well as consumers who are looking for innovation and freshness. Despite the stumble documented here, and the extended work to build developer relations that many others have commented on.
Excellent post @JLG.
I for one just can’t understand why HP released the TouchPad with the issues it obviously has – after refusing for so long to actually give a ship date and just sayin ‘Summer’. Three or four extra weeks wouldn’t have hurt or changed anything – unfortunately, releasing the TouchPad as they did, to the reviews it got, hurts tremendously. Crazy..
I’ve been looking forward to purchasing the TouchPad for months (I’m in the UK so still waiting – launching the end of this week) – but after reading the reviews I’m seriously unsure as to whether I should buy, hold on and wait to see how the TP performs after the OTA update (one is in beta, I know that for definite) or just go and get an Android tablet instead (the Toshiba Thrive is particularly interesting to me).
I’m kind of like the previous commenter who said they were sick of the iPad. Definitely world class and exceptional, but boring with it – I’m looking for something different and exciting.
I may be in for a long wait! Cheers…
Interesting… other article based in other articles, as gdgt.
It’s commom how many analysts are seeing the situation using the past mistakes as present problems. Until where I know, what has passed, has passed.
Many of this reviewers that has tried the Touchpad have a history “pro Apple”. For example, is not easy find in any place some columns talking about the IPad’s bugs, and I have an IPad that have bug.
Well, I’ll gonna be very happy when I see the somebody talking about the webOS after use directly…
If the HP is really making a big mistake, is not to sell worldwide…
@Mark Sigal – regarding iOS enterprise distribution… you should know that if developing an in-house enterprise application, your org does NOT have to publish thru the App Store, etc. there is a private distribution channel available to orgs to use.
@matt, that is true, but the model is incredibly constrained in the sense that you can not hire vendor x to build the software for you unless it’s using the enterprise’s credentials, which is somewhat at odds with the idea of outsourcing development. There are all sorts of complexities as far as distribution and updating go, and the case where it’s in-house developed but the target is customers or partners **seems** to fall outside of this bucket.
-
To be clear, if this was a focus of Apple’s they could readily solve it, but I think that enterprise application development is an area where there are a sufficient number of caveats, that the company would rather focus on the low-hanging fruit, of which there is a lot, and leave the dedicated enterprise play to someone else.
-
Where I think they’re missing the boat, and leaving a door open for others (HP, IBM, Oracle, RIM) is specifically in capturing the mindshare of the VARs and SIs that historically have been so integral to the enterprise solution eco-channel, something that I blogged about here:
-
Is the enterprise dead as a tablet strategy? (iPad wannabes and the “Puss-ification” of the Enterprise)
http://oreil.ly/pfaPI8
JL, I think HP has demonstrated, and Leo spelled this out rather carefully at the beginning of the interview, that HP is all about the enterprise – all of it’s goods and services drive enterprise ownership and then they bleed what they can into the consumer market. There is a world of difference, for example between their business- and enterprise-class printers and the disposable boxes they offer the consumer market. Enterprise is what drives the heart of HP operations and will for the foreseeable future. Microsoft is very much in the same boat as HP. They each have one or possibly two items that they can point to as honest-to-gosh sucesses in the consumer market. On the other hand you have Apple, which is all about the consumer market, and not so much about the enterprise market, as Mark so pithily noted above. And this is why HP will not be able to drive wide-spread acceptance of the TouchPad in the consumer market, except, like their low-end printers as a toss-off offering. It is the enterprise mentality that drives HP not the consumer mentality. It is the purchase order, IT department, VAR, and SP world – tightly controlled, predictable, and very slow to change. Which is why Jon, with his entrepreneurial approach, found himself at odds with HP management and culture in trying to drive WebOS and the supporting hardware. And we now see where that landed him. HP only wants consumer technology on it’s own terms, just like Apple only wants enterprise technology on it’s own terms – they are effectively polar opposites in this case. And this why Leo could proclaim the TouchPad “perfect” (in his enterprise mind), and why the consumer market has found it lacking. Perfect for the enterprise is exactly what websos, for example, is looking for – and what he got. Perfect for the consumer is a whole different beast, which while sharing some attributes, is not the same animal.
Hamranhansenhansen:
“When Mac OS X v10.0 shipped, Mac OS 9 stopped being an operating system and started being a subsystem of Mac OS X.”
Um, no. When OS X 10.0 shipped, it was completely 100% separate from the OS 8/9 OS. Mac OS “Classic” booted as a completely separate OS. It did not use any of the OS X kernel or libraries. It was OS 8 or OS 9 (I believe OS 8 was dominant when X shipped, but I might be wrong there), not OS X with a skin.
If you were using OS 9 instead of OS 10 it was because you chose to do so. Or rather, because you did NOT choose to change the DEFAULT boot OS to OS X. Yes, that is correct: until 10.2, all Macs sold DEFAULTED to booting in OS 9.
This is very separate from the “Classic Environment”, which ran inside/alongside OS 9, and within which the lowest-level OS calls ended up being OS X kernel calls (but at a very low level for that transition), as well as from the “Carbon” API which exposed the API familiar to OS 9 developers but called into the OS X kernel fairly high up in the stack. Those are the two go-forward integration layers, but the story with OS X 10.0 and 10.1 was “install this, play with it, report bugs against it, but don’t rely on it for mission-critical tasks yet”.
If you uninstalled OS X, OS 9 was still 100% available. If you uninstalled OS 9, Carbon was still 100% available. The only real chimera there was the Classic Environment, where OS 9 libraries were loaded but ended up calling into OS X kernel calls deep down.
I was there. I worked for Apple during this time. 10.0 and 10.1 were indeed shipping products (although 10.1 was a free update to 10.0) that people paid money for. However, I definitely recall the “troops” at Apple viewing those as not-ready-for-prime-time releases that were there primarily to iron out the issues so that 10.2 and beyond could be brought out. “Experimental” is probably too strong of a word, but I certainly didn’t get the impression that 10.0 or 10.1 were seen as ready for “the masses” in the way that OS 9 was. Internally, I recall several business support apps which required the “classic” environment (not booting to OS 9, but the Classic environment loaded as a shell) to run, so there wasn’t even 100% buy-in from Apple on OS 10 as THE platform until 10.2 came out.
You seem to be comparing the OS 9 / OS 10 situation to the iOS / WebOS situation. While there are some nice aspects of WebOS, I would not say that is built on a better architecture than iOS, which knocks one leg out from that analogy. More importantly, though, OS 10 was available for users to “play” with on the same hardware as OS 9 was, and they tended to (unless they bought the box in the store) get it for free alongside OS 9 in any case. This, too, is not the case for the iOS/WebOS “transition”; you need to buy completely separate hardware for the latter.
@ PJBLuvr – I too had a PJB. Heck, I moderated the PJB100 yahoogroup! It was a great piece of technology. It was definitely first to market and groundbreaking.
But it was no iPod. Now I didn’t own the first iPod – I wasn’t impressed, it wasn’t much smaller, was only 5GB (I had already upgraded my PJB to a larger drive) and the battery life was a wash. But by the time the second generation iPod came out, the writing was on the wall. iTunes was a much better syncing solution, the iPod was smaller, lighter and had better battery life. The scroll wheel was much faster to scroll than the buttons on the PJB.
Now HP did have a great genesis for a groundbreaking new piece of technology in the PJB, and I think HP could have easily beat Creatives offering (ha!) at the time – but I do agree with you that they totally squandered it. Much like Xerox squandered much of what was developed in PARC – instead of developing it, allowing others to pay paltry sums to come in, see the ideas and then build their own solutions. HP didn’t even do that in this case!
The fact that you cannot even get the name correct (webOS not WebOS), indicates you know nothing about the subject or cannot even check the simplest facts.
The visit was useful. Content was really very informative. From http://www.rightgadgets.in/items_subcat.asp?Category=Printers_India_Online&cid=9&brand=Samsung&scat=48*
Hello,
What a mess… I guess this is exactly why you shouldn’t fire/hire 3 CEOs within a 24 months timeframe for a 126 billion company. Now that strategy has been shacked for good and more or less, 31% of company’s revenue it at risk, let’s see if the new comer has some magical trick in order to give some direction again to one of the oldest tech company!
What a mess…
T
13 Trackbacks
[...] http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/07/10/hp%E2%80%99s-tortured-webos-positioning/ The reality is simpler — and harder: HP decided to enter the smartphone/tablet fray. It thus competes with Android and iOS. The consumerization of IT renders the “enterprise-only” pivot null and void. In this new world, Google and Apple wage an ecosystem war: devices + apps + distribution. Add marketing, if you want, but Word Of Mouth is still more potent than ad dollars. Or merely reinforces it. [...]
[...] [...]
[...] is the link for review., Seriously why would anyone buy a tablet other than [...]
[...] HP’s Tortured WebOS Positioning [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]
[...] many panned a TouchPad. HP betrothed discerning fixes (and even delivered some), execs attempted to re-position a product and cut a [...]
[...] WebOS, most panned the TouchPad. HP promised quick fixes (and even delivered some), execs tried to re-position the product and cut the [...]