Smartphone Palm and webOS ups and downs: Emperor's new clothes

On June 10th, Beijing time, the US technology blog website The Verge recently published a long article about the causes and consequences of the gradual demise of the US smartphone Palm and the corresponding webOS platform.

The following is the full text of the article:

This is also the number of months that the US smartphone maker Palm has gone from being the darling of the 2009 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to the obscure small division of HP. The obscure small department has no hardware projects at this time, and its owner HP has also lost confidence in the development prospects of this small department. The 31-month period is usually a little longer than the time specified in the service contract between the US consumer and the mobile operator.

To fully understand why Palm is gradually declining in such a short time, will become one of the permanent research topics in Silicon Valley in the future. In the story of the Palm strategy mistakes or the loss of employees, some of the details are now unknown. But in any case, what we can understand is that despite the fact that there are many factions and decision-making mistakes in Palm, the excellent people and core team at Palm were desperately fighting to make the Palm brand continue to survive.

The following content relates to the introduction of the Palm Pre mobile phone, the subsequent decline in Palm market performance and the eventual decline of Palm. The content also involved interviews with a large number of existing and former Palm employees.

"People in the PC industry will not think about how to enter the smartphone market. They will not even consider entering the market."

History has shown that if you want companies to abandon similar platforms that have brought you huge profits and start afresh, this kind of decision is not as easy as patting your head. If you do n’t believe it, you may wish to ask Apple and Microsoft: During the 1990s, the two companies ’next-generation desktop operating system development codes were" Copland "and" Cairo ", respectively. I struggled aimlessly for several years before being replaced by other R & D projects. The same is true for mobile platforms. Market transformation will quickly evolve into a war, not to mention the danger of alienating users and third-party developers. It is the attitude of users and external developers that will ultimately determine the "life or death" of the relevant platform.

Around 2004, the Palm company named "palmOne" was actually facing such a situation. In the previous decade, the company's life was unhappy: acquisitions, spin-offs, and separation of hardware and software businesses. Despite this, Palm OS has also achieved continuous success and has introduced impressive hardware devices such as Pilot, Palm III, Palm V and Treo series to the market. Unlike other PDA manufacturers, Palm has tried to achieve a smooth transition to the nascent smartphone industry (To achieve this, Palm needs to acquire Palm Spring license holder Handspring). Nonetheless, by 2005, the situation was already very clear: No matter from the perspective of hardware configuration or product performance expected by users, Palm OS has become an aging and outdated platform. Palm eventually narrowed the gap by obtaining a Microsoft Windows Mobile platform license. Windows Mobile first appeared on the Treo 700w product.

Ed Colligan held various executive positions at Palm, and served as the CEO of Palm in early 2005. He comes from Handspring. In fact, since Palm was founded in 1992, Corrigan has been more or less associated with the company. Although Palm desperately needed a new platform, it was easy to understand why Corrigan believed that Palm had its own advantages. At that time, the mainstream view was that the PDA and smartphone markets would not be easily broken by latecomers. Corrigan's widely quoted sentence during 2006 was: "Persons in the PC industry will not think about how to enter the smartphone market. They will not even consider entering the market." Corrigan's view at the time was that in the field of smartphone industry Palm has more experience and unique understanding than Apple, which is rumored to be developing mobile phones.

After Palm split its software business unit into PalmSource in 2003, Palm decided not to produce any hardware equipment running the original planned replacement for the Palm OS version (ie version 6, later named "Cobalt"), and the two companies It took years to write this subsequent version. In fact, neither Corrigan nor his successor has ever introduced any Cobalt device to the market. On the contrary, Palm continues to introduce mobile phones and PDA devices based on Palm OS 5 to the market, and Palm OS 5 is only a revision of the original version, and there is no major adjustment in performance. In addition, Palm also introduced some Treo smartphones based on the Windows Mobile platform.

By 2007, the Palm OS 5 function was revised again, which was equivalent to the "squeeze the last drop of blood" behavior: although the platform was revised to accommodate the newer ARM processor, its user interface is the same as that of the Palm 10 The devices are very similar, and the functional limitations are the same as the original Palm devices. At this point Apple has released an iPhone, but has not yet announced the launch of the App Store. However, traditional smartphone manufacturers such as Palm are still not aware of the transformative impact of the iPhone on the smartphone market. The Centro, the first entry-level smartphone launched by Palm later in 2007, has achieved success in retro-reflective style, making Palm's sense of innovation more dull.

However, within Palm, the company has realized that, in the long run, its own operating system still needs to be replaced, thereby reducing its dependence on the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform. At this moment, Palm is no longer the owner of Palm OS 5 or Cobalt: these two platforms have been placed under the name of PalmSource during the spin-off of the Palm business, and these two platforms were later acquired by Access Japan. It is worth pointing out that the Cobalt platform still survives under the name of ALP (Access Linux Platform) platform, but no major mobile phone manufacturer has yet launched products based on this platform.

Nova Prima system

We might as well type "Paul Mercer" in the search engine. In the early 1990s, Mercer worked as a Macintosh software engineer at Apple, and soon later became the founder of Tacit Software, which later changed its name to "Pixo". The Pixo development environment is intended to provide a running platform for the original iPod. Apple was developing the lightest operating system at the time, mainly for the iPod's mobile music player, and some of the functions of the Mercer platform just fit this requirement.

"We paid a lot of money to Inventor."

If Apple wants to obtain a permanent license for some functions of the Pixo software, it must pay the latter a large fee. Sun later took Pixo as its own. Mercer himself left Pixo in 2000 and created another startup, Inventor. Iventor has inherited Pixo's corporate mission. The company ’s background material reads: “Our goal is to bring the PC industry best practice activities to the embedded software development industry. Inventor has developed a high-level runtime environment to develop advanced, dynamic users Interface. "Iventor became the headline of the media in 2006. The content was that the company was contacting Samsung to develop an" iPod killer "product, the Yepp YP-Z music player.

Mitch Allen (Mitch Allen) is also from Handspring, he once served as Palm software director, and later served as chief technology officer (CTO). Since mid-2006, Allen has made a lot of preparations for the next-generation operating system that Palm plans to develop. The development code for this operating system is "Nova". But Allen lacked a user interface layer, so during February 2007, Corrigan hired several employees of Inventor (including Mersel) to assist in this matter. But the final result of this matter was that Corrigan made a decision during the third quarter of 2007: to take Iventor as his own. This is also the key stage of Palm's development: the investment company ElevaTIon Partners, jointly created by Roger McNamee and the famous Irish singer Bono, has signed an investment agreement with Palm, namely the ElevaTIon plan Injected $ 325 million in cash to Palm. In the process, Palm robbed Jon Rubinstein, former senior vice president of Apple, and entrusted him with the role of executive chairman.

Rubinstein "has a wide network". Although he has resigned from Apple for more than a year, he still keeps in touch with some members of the Apple iPhone and iPod development team. Rubinstein would contact these people without hesitation if he felt it was necessary, even before he was officially appointed as the executive chairman of Palm.

"Jobs knew very well ... Once you do something, the technicians will leave one after another."

In fact, a group of Apple iPhone development team members then came to Palm. Since the Apple iPhone has been shipped, developers naturally like to meet new challenges. Rubinstein used his previous contacts to gather a large number of former colleagues, the purpose is to develop the next generation of consumer products that will have huge market influence. Andy Grignon (Andy Grignon), Rob Chuk (Rob Tsuk), and Rich Dellinge (Rich Dellinge) are among these new developers. Matias Duarte (MaTIas Duarte) used to be the head of development at Danger and Helio. After rejecting a Google (Weibo) request to join (inviting the inviter to work for Danger) Former boss Andy Rubin (Andy Rubin), was appointed by Palm as the head of user interface design. In addition, Rubinstein also dug Mike Abbott from Microsoft as the software team leader. Palm also acquired a startup called "Lampdesk", which was founded by Manu Chatterjee and Greg Simon, a former employee of Pixo. The transaction was completed in early October of this year.

A person familiar with the matter said of the situation at the time: "For Rubinstein's corner-digging behavior, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs) is clear. He knows that once you do something, the technician Leaving one after another. "Jobs then used his personal charm to retain some of the technical developers who originally planned to switch to Palm. A 2009 Bloomberg report said that in August 2007, Jobs and Corrigan held talks-this is the month when Apple technology developers began to switch to Palm. Jobs hopes to reach a non-digging agreement with Corrigan to prevent more iPhone technology developers from flowing to Palm. However, Corrigan's attitude is very cold: "You are asking us not to rob talents from other companies. This kind of advice will undoubtedly limit the relevant employees' desire to choose a job. This is not only wrong, but also suspected of being illegal."

From the situation at that time, Palm is expected to recruit the best technology developers in Silicon Valley. Everyone who had some technical achievements in Silicon Valley at the time was communicating with each other and gathered to Corrigan and Rubinstein. The two were also very popular in Silicon Valley at that time, so they were considered capable of achieving this goal. On the other hand, Palm executives hinted that the company's Windows Mobile phone business is making good progress, so it can reserve more time and space for technical developers on Nova development matters.

"You need to write 5 lines of code for the central text."

This talent flow phenomenon continued from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2008. Mercer and his small team of Inventor are working hard to develop Nova, whose development code is "Prima". But Prima is a lightweight operating system developed for devices with limited resources. But this is not what Nova needs. One person familiar with the matter said frankly: “Mercer and their people ca n’t do it.” Another person familiar with the matter also said: “What he can get is good presentation materials, but they ca n’t be used normally. The software development team is ready to Shake it off, because we can't build what we want to build. "Tasks such as placing text in the center of the screen require 5 lines of code. If an application crashes, all other applications also "strike." Palm technical engineers encountered difficulties in trying to write applications and services for Prima, because a test program requires that the entire user interface layer must be stopped and restarted each time, which takes about one and a half minutes. Despite the use of Java technology, Prima code writing requires the use of "customized keywords that no one understands."

DeVaanti was also dissatisfied with this situation. Despite all the efforts of technical developers, DeVaanti did not get what he wanted. While Palm showed the API (application programming interface) to external developers, the developer's answer was: "No, not at all. This is too complicated. Too weird, you won't have any users. You have to use industry standards It will do. "

To make matters worse, Palm initially proposed to the US mobile operator Verizon Wireless, which can sell Nova equipment (the device eventually evolved into Pre), but Verizon Wireless later withdrew for some reason. So Palm had to find another US mobile operator Sprint. Compared with Verizon Wireless, Sprint's scale is much smaller, and the user's ability to generate revenue is not as good as Verizon Wireless. At the same time, Palm executives originally thought that the Windows Mobile phone market could win more time for Nova development, but they did not expect that the influence of this type of mobile phone market will also decline rapidly.

Although the situation is chaotic, Corrigan and Rubinstein have previously promised to show the Pre phone to the outside world for the first time at the CES show next year. Time, money and employee patience have all been exhausted.

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