Re: For Ed.
>WebOS? The one who killed Palm?
That's not what killed Palm. The only problem with WebOS was that it was too late to arrive.
The 2007 Engadget Open Letter to Palm - written before the Palm Pre and webOS were announced - outlines why people were turning away from them:
We know you're working on a Linux-based mobile OS to succeed Palm OS Garnet -- which was already REALLY showing its age two years ago -- but we're sorta worried that you're going to just port the old UI to a new kernel. It's too late for that.
Like when Apple introduced OS X: it made a serious gamble that the stability and features they were offering in their new OS outweighed the compatibility with older apps and user interface comfort which already existed. They took an old, once great, but very dated OS (sound like anyone we know?) and trashed it. And it worked for them.
If you've demonstrated any true wrongdoing in the way you've sustained your operating system, it's been your inflexibility in cutting ties and moving forward. Believe us when we tell you that's not an attitude embraced by a culture of techno-fetishists -- your core customer. So don't be scared to kill backwards compatibility, or threaten a little bit of what users are used to in order to gain important advances for your OS and devices. Sometimes you have to tear down to rebuild, and honestly, you have a lot to tear down.
So if Palm, which has been around for around 15 years, doesn't have the user interface design and OS engineering expertise to pull this off, then you should just get out of the game right now. Seriously, if this new OS you're going to introduce is just the old Palm OS with some slightly fancier graphics, your customers will just come to resent you all the more. Respect their intelligence.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
