New York Times Article On WebOS Fails Almost As Badly As WebOS

I really don’t want to become That Guy — the kind of guy who rails on and on about the superiority of his niche or failed tech (see: Betamax, DiVX disks, Newton PDAs, etc). But it’s hard to keep from doing that after reading the article titled “In Flop of H.P. TouchPad, an Object Lesson for the Tech Sector” in the New York Times. Simply put, the article is wrong on multiple accounts.

Pictured: NY Times estimate of webOS market value.

The New York Times piece lays the lion’s share of blame on the operating system, webOS, as to why the Pre and TouchPad failed. Except anyone who bothers to do a simple Google Search for old articles on the Pre sees that the operating system is the one thing that people liked in this whole mess! Heck, the Wall Street Journal has its resurrection as number eight in their top 10 tech wishes for 2012. What doomed Palm, as a separate entity and as a division of HP, was not one simple thing, but a multitude of issues that had almost nothing to do with the code.

While the Pre had a lot of buzz after being unveiled, Palm let that buzz fizzle away. This is a pattern Palm would fall into time and time again, with no solid release dates and constant push backs. The buzz that did generate was generated within the tech community. Palm’s marketing of the Pre was absolutely craptastic.

Marketing: selling to those who don't already know about your product.

There’s just no other word for it. At the time, webOS had features no one else did:  graceful multiple account management, simple multitasking, and elegant notifications. Palm chose to promote the Pre with nonsense like this.

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It’s pretty and certainly well-choreographed, but it tells you next to nothing about the actual product. Most of Palm’s ads continued in this vein, meaning that someone had no idea why he or she should get the Pre when stepping into a Sprint store. This didn’t stop the Pre from having, as the N.Y. Times article notes, one of the best roll-outs of any device in Sprint’s history. However, the Pre also allegedly had some of the highest return rates. While even webOS fanatics admit that webOS 1.0 was not fully baked, the reason cited most often for returning the device was build quality. Way too many Pres had a loose slider, causing what is less-than-affectionately known as the Oreo Effect. Essentially, you could sort of twist your phone. This caused people to send the phone back and resulted in retailers at Sprint not wanting to bother with the phone, to the point that Sprint wanted nothing to do with webOS at all. By the time the phone made it to other carriers in the form of the Pre Plus (with a more solid slider), Android had already eaten the potential marketshare. Verizon’s “Driod does” marketing was clever and absolutely got the message “this is a phone you want” across.

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e52TSXwj774′]

You know just how successful that ad was? At the time you could go into a Verizon store and request a Pre Plus and they would actively try to convince you to “get a Driod”. This actually became a bit of a thing to do on some forums.

Oh and Verizon’s ad campain for the Pre?

[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX6lBwvq4zQ’]

That’s right, webOS was “for moms”. Here’s a hint to marketing agencies out there: if you want to alienate smart and successful women, create ads like that. Ironically, the best print ads for the PrePlus would show up in “lady” magazines. I mean like Rachel Ray, not Playboy. Mind out of the gutter.

The N.Y. Times article puts a ton of blame on WebKit, one of the many technologies behind webOS. I find this baffling and amusing as WebKit is in fact the engine behind Apple and Google’s successful browser technology. That, and that WebKit was only a portion of the underlying technology behind webOS, which was built on a Linux kernel and has a lot of Java underpinnings. It would make a lot more sense to blame Palm’s constant messing with their software developer kit policies. For example, in the update to webOS 1.4, Palm pulled access to the microphone. This meant any sort of app that wanted to use sound (think a Google Voice client or the popular Shazam app) was locked out. Obviously, this had the affect of souring some developers. Palm made a bunch of similar changes (do an internet search for Mojo, Ares, Enyo, or PDK for some more detailed information) and did nothing to assuage developers that they wouldn’t make such changes again. In fact, early launch partner developers like DataViz and Slingbox never bothered to bring anything to market.

Let’s not forget the boardroom drama involved as well. Palm ran out of cash in the middle of rolling out the Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus (both disappointing for not being major hardware revisions, especially as the Pixi Plus was just an uncrippled Pixi). When HP bought them they could have chosen to halt development of items already in the pipeline and get webOS on more powerful hardware. Instead, we had the Pre 2 finally released on the very day that the Pre 3 and the TouchPad were announced. Except once again, we had to wait and wait and wait. By the time the TouchPad came out, the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 were already on the market, which made the TouchPad look like a complete piker. Had the TouchPad come out a week after it was announced, while the only competition was the original iPad, it maybe might have stood a fighting chance.

HP’s larger shakeups at the time meant Mark Hurd, the CEO who bought Palm and had a vision for it (and apparently a weakness for the ladies), was out and  Leo Apotheker was in. Apotheker wanted to ditch hardware altogether. It was unlikely we were going to see this new CEO add webOS to desktops, like Hurd had planned. (Remnants of that idea can be found in HP now adding their touch interface, Magic Canvas, to all desktops, just in time for Windows 8 to come out and make it irrelevant).

Calling webOS a software flop when what killed it was politics, poor planning, and hardware not up to snuff is like blaming a cut on your finger for cancer. Yes, it may hurt, but it’s not the real problem.