4 ms·
A strange article. The only winning strategy was not to read it. Regarding the Pre being slow, I for one never felt it was slow. I returned mine for two reaso
by jerrya 15y ago
A strange article. The only winning strategy was not to read it.
Regarding the Pre being slow, I for one never felt it was slow. I returned mine for two reasons, each of which had kept me on Treo and prevented me from moving to iPhone, each of which were horribly botched by Palm, and thus destroyed any barriers to switching I had. First,the keyboard on the Pre was terrible, just incredibly awful, and that was one of its big differentiators, and a huge reason I liked my Treo. Second, I had at that time many critical Palm apps that I'd spent a good deal of money on, as did most of Palm's existing customers, and absolutely NONE of them ran on WebOS, nor was there any upgrade plan in place.
The phone didn't feel slow, and on the contrary, the UI was way above its competitors.
This may be true:
"a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P."
At the time, IIRC, JWZ was very enthusiastic about the platform, but he could make almost no headway into writing apps for the damn device, but the failure seems to be one of Palm's leaders who didn't see the need to evangelize and recruit developers.
- thought_alarm 15y agoJWZ also complained about the calendar app taking 20 seconds to launch, and being unable to buzz people into his building due to the extremely sluggish phone app. And of course, their dev kit was a mess, and their "App Store" a joke. WebOS was a Hail Mary attempt by Palm to save the company after the failure of Palm OS 6, which was under development for 5 years before being canned. In a panic, they took a Linux kernel and WebKit and spat out an OS in a matter of months. It's no surprise it was a failure, but it does show how clueless HP is, and how blind the faithful can be. Here you have the actual WebOS engineers taking about what a turkey the platform is, yet there are people who still refuse to believe it.
- jerrya 15y ago"WebOS was a Hail Mary attempt by Palm to save the company after the failure of Palm OS 6, which was under development for 5 years before being canned. In a panic, they took a Linux kernel and WebKit and spat out an OS in a matter of months." Yeah, this is certainly true. All us Palm users got endless emails that there was a new OS coming, and then we saw Palm sell the entire OS off, and buy it back, and yeah, total trainwreck. JWZ also was one of the first people I read talking about how WebOS was better than iOS or Android for the reason j_col spells out: a better development system since it meant writing in JS and Web like technologies. (FWIW, in the 30 days I had one, I never found it slow, or had it crash, or even found the phone app slow. I went from there to my first Android, the Hero, which was widely acclaimed at the time and in fact so slow it could not answer the phone reliably before seeing the call roll over into missed-call-landia. I returned the Hero and went back to my Treo until Nexus One came along.)
- ScottBurson 15y agoYes, the apps did take a bit of time to come up, but against that was the convenient multitasking. It was easy to just leave three or four apps running all the time. Then at least for those apps, the startup time was irrelevant; and switching between them was very easy.
- drumdance 15y agoYour Hail Mary comment got me thinking: is there an example of Hail Mary working in the tech biz? I've seen it happen in football enough to know it's at least worth a shot. But launching a product with all kinds of problems into a competitive market?
- politician 15y agoThat pretty much describes the MMO industry. I remember beta testing EVE Online and being amazed when they launched it. Yet, it's still going strong how many years later.
- flomo 15y agoThe original iMac. Same crap in a prettier package, and it saved Apple. I was surprised that Google Apps caught on, but I'd underestimated Microsoft's lethargy - they had reportedly developed a web version of Office 2003 but decided to sit on it. Perhaps also the Nintendo Wii.
- nailer 15y agoInteresting re: Office 2003, seeing as how even the current generation Office Web Apps still aren't web apps in the common definition. I suspect the 2003 version may have been similar - running in an IE window, but requiring Windows desktop software to actually run properly.
- freehunter 15y agoI would actually reckon that the NES was Nintendo's original successful Hail Mary. The games market was dead, introducing a new game console at that point was suicide. They coasted through the SNES due to a lack of real competition (Genesis being the only threat) and name recognition. They flopped the N64 and Gamecube for being more of the same. They've always had innovative ideas in the marketplace; The gameboy, the Virtual Boy, the Famicom Disc System, the Satellaview, the SuperFX chip, rumble paks, minidiscs, etc. The Wii was just returning to form in fabulous style. They weren't hinging the success of their entire company on a low-chance market like they were with the NES, or Apple did with the iMac. Nintendo has (and had) plenty in reserves and a handheld that printed money if the Wii failed.