9 ms·

Palm’s CEO emails Steve Jobs (2007)

258 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

throwoutway 2y ago
A well-written, thoughtful, and diplomatic response by Ed. I wonder if he was a good boss to work for
- xattt 2y ago
  In 2007, shortly after Palm announced the Folēo, Peter Rojas of Engadget fame posted a “Dear Palm” letter that called for the Folēo cancelled [1]. A few days later, Ed had forwarded the letter to the executive [2]. A few weeks after that, the Folēo was cancelled [3]. He was probably working with the best information that he had, but going on the friendly advice of tech journalists may not have been the best move. Palm completely missed the boat on the netbook market. Apple has milked Palm-firsts, like gesture-based UI (Prē) and mobile device mirroring to a computer (Folēo), since then to great success. Oh, what could have been… [1]https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-an-intervention.html https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-a... [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/08/thanks-engadget.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm.... [3]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancels-development-of-the-foleo/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancel...
  - pram 2y ago
    I agree with the criticism though, the Foleo looked like some kind of internet appliance anachronism straight out of 1998. I was fully on board the Palm train too (rip Pre)
    - sjm-lbm 2y ago
      I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.
      - filmgirlcw 2y ago
        I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence. PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight. The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser. The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it. Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software. Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.
        sillywalk 2y ago
        > heir next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) It was called Cobalt. https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html
  - filmgirlcw 2y ago
    But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release Foleo’s years later, this was vindicated by even the most strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600 before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also required a $400 or $500 phone to work. It wasn’t a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated operating system. Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm was right to cancel a product that wouldn’t have moved the needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me. Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure. Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely did not need to exist.
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      > Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me. It's not for everyone but for the ones that appreciate it it's a really powerful feature. I work whole days in DeX. I have docks at work, at home, at family where I stay a lot. Not needing to drag a laptop around is amazing. I have both a personal and work VDI for when I really need it but 95% of the time I just work in Android with DeX. It's definitely the #1 reason I buy Samsung
  - gnachman 2y ago
    I moved across the country to work for Palm on a secret project which was revealed to be the Foleo only after I started. I spent a year trying to make the web browser with a totally broken engine they had licensed from Access. Having blown their budget of 100k on the engine they were determined to stick with it. I was amused when it was announced and then canceled after I quit.
    - zelos 2y ago
      I was a developer at a third party developer writing Foleo software and I always wondered what was going on on the other side of the wall. The rumour I was told for the cause of all the delays was that some executive had decided the screen was too low resolution way too late in the project and everything had to be redesigned. Released a year or two earlier they might have been decent devices, IMHO.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    I was really looking forward to the foleo actually. Most likely would have purchased one.
- lizzas 2y ago
  These are not stream of conciouness emails. Almost certainly lawyers reviewed or drafted it, or edited it, or suggested edits or he knew how to write a good negotiation email. This ain't necessarily how he talks to his team.
  - mewse-hn 2y ago
    It's not that it was written off the cuff, it's that it holds up nearly 20 years later as a measured, ethical response to having his company threatened. And this email wouldn't even be public if it hadn't been evidence in court proceedings
    - lizzas 2y ago
      It is strategic. You can only look at it through that lens. For an ethical measure of a company or exec: see what a company does for the greater good despite it reducing their profit.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  It's a shame capitalism doesn't reward any of that, but instead rewards (in the industry he was CEO in) putting product in consumer's hands. He stood on principal and his ultimate reward for that call (in the absence of any regulatory enforcement against what Apple aimed to do here) was iPhone beat out PalmPilots. Oh well. On the plus side, looks like he's having some success with what he's doing now.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Well, one’s customers were his employees and the other was the world.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    The way he has an impact is over time by praising his response for the next generation. Steve was wrong, America is better when employees are free.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      It'd be cool if the mechanisms by which companies are rewarded and punished reflected that idea. Steve's company is now one of the three largest in the US. The other one was bought out. The lesson from history seems to be "you can have a little illegal non-compete. As a treat."
      - blackqueeriroh 2y ago
        There are about a billion other reasons why Apple is so successful today. It really has nothing to do with the illegal non-compete, considering most of its astronomical growth came post-Steve, something most people fail to understand.
  - wmf 2y ago
    You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products better.
ks2048 2y ago
Thoughts and prayers to the 3 people (referenced in the letter) who left Apple to work at Palm in 2007.
- epolanski 2y ago
  I don't think they need any of your prayers, they're likely better than all of us combined and better than any person who joined Apple later.
- neofrommatrix 2y ago
  They made the best decision based on the information they had at the time. No need to mock someone based on that.
  - lambdasquirrel 2y ago
    Given the rest of the exchange between Steve and Colligan, they might have needed to leave for other reasons too.
  - tengbretson 2y ago
    How much mockery would you trade to get some 2007 Apple RSOs?
    - neofrommatrix 2y ago
      Everyone wins when they have the benefit of hindsight.
  - ks2048 2y ago
    I wasn't trying to mock them - just a light-hearted joke.
    - jeltz 2y ago
      So you were mocking them.
- 2y ago
warkdarrior 2y ago
And being thoughtful and considerate got Palm nowhere, while Apple has now the largest market cap ever.
- deleted 2y ago
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- sixothree 2y ago
  They pretty much got Sherlocked.
- tkzed49 2y ago
  maybe it's less the diplomacy and more that they were sitting on a pile of crusty patents instead of building the iphone
  - nickpeterson 2y ago
    I think it’s easy to forget the palm pre and webos because it wasn’t a competitor for very long, but to be blunt, it was the only decent competitor to the iPhone but in the 2008/2009 timeframe. Android was awful on launch, blackberry was completely behind, Microsoft had a plan that was decent but was too late. Palm really was the only real threat in the early days. They just didn’t have the money to iterate like apple (and Google).
    - badgersnake 2y ago
      There was almost a tablet as well, I think it got pulled just before launch, and the inventory got sold off for next to nothing.
      - mgkimsal 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure a tablet was released, then scrapped sometime in the first month or so after release - TouchPad, IIRC? It got no support from HP or Palm. I seem to remember a quote from some exec saying something like "the market demands a $499 tablet" or something like that, and TouchPads weren't selling. But when they were discounted to $99 - $149, they sold out instantly. They even did a second production run and sold more at $249. This was a huge missed opportunity for Palm. WebOS was pretty good at that time. They needed more software for it - this is a perpetual problem for most platforms at launch. Seed the market with good hardware, invest in developers, and let it churn for more than 2 months before killing the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad
perihelions 2y ago
Here's the complete (?) exchange between Colligan and Jobs (no login wall or linkrot), https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-like-mob-boss-threatened-to-sue-palm-over-patents-if-it-poached-any-apple-employees/ https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-...
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  Is there a central repository where all these tech emails are coming from or are they discovery from disparate court cases?
  - azeemba 2y ago
    They are different court cases, usually popularized by techemails (https://www.techemails.com/ https://www.techemails.com/)
- pimlottc 2y ago
  Note that the quotes in the article are abridged, the full emails are in the embedded PDF
- isodev 2y ago
  Thanks, this should be the link for the post, instead of the xitter paywal.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Steve Jobs asking for a no poaching agreement is not just unethical but illegal. His threat about Apple’s greater financial resources is just so petty and low. It really changes my view of him.
  - jccalhoun 2y ago
    There was a lawsuit about apple, google, intel, and adobe agreeing not to poach from one another. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
mtlynch 2y ago
I'm impressed at how principled and unflappable Ed Colligan is in his response to Jobs: >On the other hand, this is a small space, and it’s inevitable that we will bump into each other. Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple is just out of line. A lawsuit would not serve either of our interests, and will not stop employees from migrating between our companies. This is a very exciting time for both of our companies, and the market is certainly big enough for both of us. We should focus on our respective businesses and not create unnecessary distractions. Compare this to Eric Schmidt's spineless response when Jobs complained to him about Google poaching: >Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote. >Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour." >He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs." Then again, Google thrived afterward and happily enjoyed the fruits of illegally suppressing wages, while Palm's market share plummeted soon after Jobs' threat.
- uniformlyrandom 2y ago
  >> illegally suppressing wages This is spot on - Googlers are notoriously poor.
  - neofrommatrix 2y ago
    This. This is why companies win.
  - wpm 2y ago
    High wages doesn’t mean they aren’t being suppressed
    - seizethecheese 2y ago
      In fact, the higher the wages the more incentive to suppress, right?
  - Teever 2y ago
    This is the wrong way to look at it. If the employees of these massive companies who illegally suppressed their wages hadn't done so then the companies wouldn't be so massive, and the employees would have more money and some of them would have had more resources to start competitors to the hypothetically less well moneyed giants. This would have lead to a scenario where there's more competition in the market which means more innovation, more jobs for other people in tech, and lower prices for consumers. Unfortunately this didn't happen and we're all worse off for it.
tptacek 2y ago
What would have happened had Jobs followed through with his threat and arranged to have Apple sue Palm? All this stuff would have entered the record, right?
- lern_too_spel 2y ago
  Palm would have countersued with its superior mobile patents. I'm sure Apple's attorneys pointed this out to Jobs when he went to them after this exchange, which is why he didn't follow through. These emails entered the record following discovery in the wage suppression lawsuits.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I'm just curious if the illegal attempt to coerce Palm would have been a factor in the case.
snowwrestler 2y ago
The thing that strikes me is the disparity in length. I think a lot of people don’t realize how hard it is to write succinctly. Jobs was (is?) probably under-appreciated as a writer. Colligan was correct such an agreement would be illegal and could have just stood on that.
- intuitionist 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure these emails are public for exactly that reason.
- bluefinity 2y ago
  Jobs tries to bully and threaten a smaller company into signing an illegal agreement and all you have to say is how great of a writer he is because of how few sentences he wrote?
  - wetpaws 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - gsibble 2y ago
    Seriously
  - deleted 2y ago
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- vidarh 2y ago
  Colligan was putting down what had occurred in writing so that the details of what Jobs had said would be a matter of record should it come to a lawsuit down the line. This is a common - and highly useful - strategy if you've just been in a meeting where things have been said that you were uncomfortable with. Being succinct would have defeated the purpose. This is a useful strategy to employ in all kinds of situations. A dated note written shortly after the event is going to carry more weight than recollection later. An e-mail sent to the other party that they have not contested the understanding of is going to carry more weight than just a note. And if, as Jobs did, your other side responds, you now have ammunition for any future lawsuits. EDIT: Creating a paper trail is a method to take note of in other contexts too. Your manager at work asked you to do something unethical? Summarise your understanding of the conversation in writing and ask if you understood it correctly (a lot of the time, the request will magically become a misunderstanding).
neilv 2y ago
> Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. Said in email, from one CEO to another, is this obviously intentional paper trail? > Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave is just out of line. Did that patent lawsuit happen? (And if it did, did this email, which suggested illegal activity, come up in discovery.)
- lelandfe 2y ago
  This is high level chess, I am certain that Jobs read that as the opening legal salvo it is. That’s a bigger threat left implied, and the smaller one was made plain (patents).
- adastra22 2y ago
  No, Apple ended up licensing the patents (Jobs bluster was BS): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-license-palm-other-patents/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-li...
  - allenu 2y ago
    That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some necessary patent licenses.
    - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
      peanuts now, but peanuts then?
      - function_seven 2y ago
        Yeah, even in 2007 Apple was a huge success already. Worth about $200 billion at the time, was earning about $3.5 billion a year in profit, and had $15 billion cash on hand. https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2007/10/22Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results/ https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2007/10/22Apple-Reports-Fo...
cyberax 2y ago
Palm... Or "how to blow your lead by wasting half a decade doing nothing". I _loved_ my Palm Treo 600, that was released 5 freaking years before the first iPhone. It had everything I needed, but the OS felt anachronistic even in 2003. So I was eagerly awaiting for Palm OS 6 to come, so I could upgrade. And waiting. And waiting. And then Palm died.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  Same. I did really like webos when it was finally released, I got one of those HP touchpad and happily used it. But it was too little, too late.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I was so frustrated. The number of times companies take the lead then sit on their lead until it dies has often bothered me deeply! The downside to being a passionate customer & engineer. — I felt similarly with Netscape. If Navigator had been consistently both web browser and editor, it would have been a better product, a real service in keeping the web a two way tool for most people. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision tied creation & browsing together, which is why the web happened at all. Staying true to that would have produced more value, and maintained enough (constructive) lock in for Netscape to keep innovating in a way that mattered. Instead they announced their imagined threat to Windows, before that threat was realistic, then drowned in Microsoft’s response. And the disparity in their emphasis on browsing vs. creation left a big hole in the side of their boat, leaving them extremely vulnerable to browser competitors. Microsoft was convicted in court for product tying & other over anti-competitive behavior. But Netscape was convicted in the market for not fulfilling the full circle value of the web they were pioneering. They commoditized themselves. And the web has never recovered from the unnecessary creation/browsing dichotomy. I was so mad at them! (Laughing tears emoji)
- ndiddy 2y ago
  Palm didn't have anything to do with Palm OS 6, they spun off Palm OS development to a company called PalmSource (later ACCESS). Palm OS 6 was finished around 2004, but never shipped on a device because the performance was horrible compared to Palm OS 5. This was due to poor software architecture. PalmSource threw out the kernel used by previous versions of Palm OS and replaced it with a microkernel that focused on message-passing between processes. Most of the Palm OS API got re-implemented using IPC. This meant that each API call would require at least two context switches, more if the API implementation needed to make another API call that was implemented with IPC. The ARM chips that were available at that point flushed their caches on each context switch. The result was that doing something like opening an address book with around a thousand entries went from taking a few hundred ms to taking seconds, as displaying each entry required an IPC call to the service responsible for handling contacts data. It's definitely a shame, as Palm OS 5 is a stopgap OS that got shipped on devices way after the point it became obsolete. Third-party developers couldn't even write native ARM software, they had to compile for 68k and add small chunks of ARM code for performance intensive areas where the 68k->ARM emulation became a bottleneck.
yummybear 2y ago
These are some of the richest people debating whether to stop people from seeking to work elsewhere. Absolutely despicable. Hat's off to Palm for seeking the reasonably route.
reillys 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- UberFly 2y ago
  He was a true accomplished trailblazer with a compelling corporate and personal story, and didn't mind hurting feelings along the way. History is built on these people like it or not.
  - reillys 2y ago
    He was sometimes successful. He had tons of failure and failed in the worst possible ways blaming everyone all around him and not taking any responsibility and then he got a chance to rebound and was finally successful. It's complete scoreboard journalism, if for whatever reason at the end apple didn't succeed we'd just put him in the POS column. But instead cause he made some of that sweet green (at the end) we say he's amazing. That is what I don't get.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  Because under him, Apple made beautiful products. And set the standard for everything that came next. That he was (probably) a bit of a dick isn’t enough to change that fact.
  - cookie_monsta 2y ago
    Nothing changes a fact. That's what makes them facts. If you are still undecided about whether Jobs was a POS in his personal life after everything we already know, your lack of objectivity makes your opinion weigh very little in the debate about if his professional accomplishments somehow mitigate that.
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      'change that fact' can be taken, in this context, to be an abbreviation for 'change the degree to which this fact is relevant to the given discussion'. ...but I'm sure you already knew that. > your lack of objectivity You don't sound particularly objective either. But perhaps you never claimed to be. I certainly didn't.
deleted 2y ago
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mullingitover 2y ago
This spells out in black and white that Jobs was a pretty shameless crook. We already knew this based on Apple and its peers getting caught colluding to wage fix, and the settlement that came from this, but this is a great reminder. I really feel like Jobs gets too much credit. He was smart, but he also rode on the shoulders of multiple giants in his career, and he got lucky several times. The cult of Jobs was convinced that Apple would go downhill in his absence, but the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over.
- yapyap 2y ago
  I agree on the premise of Jobs being overrated, Apple was the classic right spot right time company and that is not to say he was not a good leader in that situation but that _is_ to say that Apple could just as well have succeeded under a different leader with different antics.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - mrcwinn 2y ago
    It sure takes an awful lot of hard work to be in the right place at the right time. Foolish, both of you. Vision matters and Jobs had one. If it were all just meaningless fate, really there’s no reason to get out of bed or even comment on HN.
  - ericd 2y ago
    Who would it have succeeded as well with? Because they tried hiring a few CEOs, and far from succeeding, they were very nearly bankrupt. After bringing him back, they worked their way to being the most valuable public company. He's one of the clearest examples of the value of a good CEO.
    - mullingitover 2y ago
      We remember the comeback, but we forget that he was kicked out of the company because he nearly ran it into the ground when he was in charge the first time. You can't put all the blame on the CEOs who followed him for failing to clean up the mess he created in the first place any more than you can give him all the credit for the company's performance long after he departed. Furthermore, he was only brought back with a turnaround plan that was created up in no small part by his financial backers, and the C-suite he arrived with included Tim Cook. I'm convinced Cook's housecleaning on their supply chain and product lines was what actually saved the company. They might've delayed bankruptcy with a hit like the iMac, but only for a short while.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Still have fond memories of my Palm V. Was outstanding at the time.
localghost3000 2y ago
I think the best description I have ever heard of Jobs was given by Bill Burr: "Jesus, Ghandi, John Lennon, ME!". Much like Lennon, he cultivated a whole peace/love/enlightenment image while being a garbage person. Lennon for example, beat the shit out of his first wife, abandoned his first son Julian, and then made sure they got no money from him. Sound familiar? Yeah Jobs did very much the same to his first wife and daughter (well, I am not sure if he physically abused his wife but still..). I think you can make the argument that what Jobs brought to the table was impeccable taste. He was very good at pushing (some would say abusing) his people to make things that people genuinely loved. I think that design sense is notably absent in today's crop of tech CEO's. Again Burr nails it: "I want my entire album collection in this phone. GET ON IT!!"
knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
This crap happens all the time between companies. When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.) The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs. What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple. None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.
- knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
  A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement. I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.
  - knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
    As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser. You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting. I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari. By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Steve Jobs immediately got rid of "About boxes" and Easter eggs when he returned to Apple. Probably the right call if you want to promote a brand of professionalism for your company. But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way — recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The Finder. Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway to sign their creations. I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching. Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple engineer could pass out their resumé. When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design. Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory. I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.
- schlauerfox 2y ago
  It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn’t very successful
    - musicale 2y ago
      How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?
      - shotnothing 2y ago
        much more relative to the average worker in many other industries
      - 2y ago
cainxinth 2y ago
The company led by the petulant bully is worth trillions and the one led by the accurate, ethical, and reasonable person is defunct.
- silisili 2y ago
  I thought the same, kinda sad isn't it? Palm's email to Apple was like a teacher talking to an unruly teen, but not insultingly so. So what do we learn? Either Karma isn't real, or being a childish bully is the key to success. I'm not sure I like either answer.
  - voytec 2y ago
    > Either Karma isn't real If you look not at the companies, but individuals...
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    Karma is just not the only factor. It sure helps but Palm just had the wrong strategic vision and didn't have great marketing. WebOS was not a bad idea but they didn't manage to sell it well.
  - tessierashpool9 2y ago
    from my own experience and observations i'd say anti-karma is real. you do good, fate will punish you for it ;)
  - npteljes 2y ago
    Only the western mainstream version of karma is supposed to work within one's lifetime. The proper spiritual interpretations of it usually span multiple lifetimes. Not a huge believer myself, but I agree with your conclusion, this kind of short-acting karma surely doesn't exist. As demonstrated daily by the many horrible influential people.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      I’d say Christianity relies pretty heavily on fears of the guy in the sky and what happens after you die What happens when religion loses its place in western society though. Hummmm
throw4321 2y ago
[flagged]
- slater 2y ago
  Only if you can stomach "we're not a nazi bar, ok??" substack: https://www.techemails.com/ https://www.techemails.com/
- triceratops 2y ago
  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/561593-121737673-colligan-affidavit/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/561593-121737673-col...
mepian 2y ago
"Palm now owns the former Siemens mobile patent portfolio" Man, I miss Siemens phones, they were great at the time. I wonder what they would be like today if Siemens didn't quit the market.
camillomiller 2y ago
[flagged]
sneak 2y ago
Context: Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt at Google, and several other high ranking tech execs conspired to illegally fix wages lower by agreeing to not hire each others’ staff. Billions of dollars were thus stolen from staff by these companies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust... > In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement would not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement was unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represented only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded. The companies got off with barely a slap on the wrist.
msteffen 2y ago
Lot of comments observing that Apple is doing much better than Palm these days, but IMO they miss the point. Steve is dead, and I don’t think he got to take any of that victory money with him. Palm is dead too, but its investors and employees are doing something else now, and I don’t think they’re generally much worse for the wear. And the time that Palm’s engineers spent there is indelibly better because their boss respected them. On the other hand, I don’t know how many Apple employees got to retire early because of Steve’s management, but I’m not sure their lives, including their time working for Steve, are better overall. Life is a journey, not a destination.
iJohnDoe 2y ago
Great email by Palm CEO. Very adult and levelheaded. Something we all expect and deserve from anyone that makes it to the CEO level. Unfortunately, it has been rare and even more so lately. You will never be able to avoid the type of people that only care about the most money they can make. These people don’t care about the product, the mission, or the company. They will bounce from Apple to Palm and then somewhere else. Totally fine. I hope they are doing the level of work and have the level of skill that warrants their pay, if only for the sake of their colleagues that have to put up with them. I don’t have any sympathy for companies or people at the top of those companies that hire dipshits that can’t produce anything and still pay them unnecessary money. Obviously, we hope companies pay employees that have passion for the mission and treat them fairly. Then they have a reason to stay. Unfortunately, a lot of these employees fall through the cracks and it’s a shame. If they jump to another company then finding out why is a good thing to focus on.
watersb 2y ago
"Inside Macintosh" disciples would enjoy PalmOS app development. Clearly the "Classic" Mac API was an inspiration. In a good way. It was simple and fun. By 2007, though, the world had changed.
kevinsync 2y ago
Keep in mind this was 2007 -- my hunch is it sounds like it probably was really about iOS vs webOS, not Apple vs Palm (Pilot/Foleo/PalmOS). Android wasn't even out when the email was sent, and I know webOS didn't come out to the public until 2009, but I am rather curious how long it was in development prior-to... I was a webOS dude -- I still have a Palm Pre 1, 2 and 3 in a box. I tried to explain to my hipster doofus buddy at the time why I fucked with the Palm vision over the Apple vision (regrettably, in hindsight, part of it was due to Palm holding onto the physical keyboard, part of which was I was a huge fan of that due to entering the smartphone era after being a previous T-Mobile Sidekick 1 - 3 user) -- they both preached the same philosophy of web apps over native apps, except something intangible and aesthetic about the Pre resonated with me in late 00's more than iPhone did. Apple also hadn't yet started deploying most of its critical infrastructure (walled-garden interoperability, APNS, any of that stuff) that lead to eventual dominance and ended up justifying the current stock price / mobile supremacy -- it was just a phone vs phone comparison. These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term. They're doing stuff with hardware that today we think is stupid, but tomorrow might just be an accepted part of life. They've made it easy for anybody to lock their digital lives inside of the Apple vaults for a recurring monthly subscription lol. I can't say any of that speaks to the 90's dream of an open internet, but they sure do seem to have a clear-cut plan and are quite good at executing it!
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term. Satellite won't take over land-based mobile connectivity. The density and in-building coverage just isn't there. No matter how many sats you launch. There's only small windows of radio spectrum that work well for sats and the signal is spread out over too wide an area. You just can't get enough bandwidth to serve all iPhone users in populated areas. It's great for backup purposes and sparse areas but it's not going to replace mobile networks.
ab_testing 2y ago
Kinda tells you what an asshole Steve Jobs was.
devops99 2y ago
https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/1868368310024462791
wkat4242 2y ago
Totally fair and balanced response. I'd much rather works have liked to work for him than for Apple. Of course they didn't do very well in the end but I like this respectful attitude.
ucefkh 2y ago
You know Steve was right when Palm doesn't exist anymore now

258 points by mfiguiere 2y ago

throwoutway 2y ago

A well-written, thoughtful, and diplomatic response by Ed. I wonder if he was a good boss to work for

xattt 2y ago
In 2007, shortly after Palm announced the Folēo, Peter Rojas of Engadget fame posted a “Dear Palm” letter that called for the Folēo cancelled [1]. A few days later, Ed had forwarded the letter to the executive [2]. A few weeks after that, the Folēo was cancelled [3]. He was probably working with the best information that he had, but going on the friendly advice of tech journalists may not have been the best move. Palm completely missed the boat on the netbook market. Apple has milked Palm-firsts, like gesture-based UI (Prē) and mobile device mirroring to a computer (Folēo), since then to great success. Oh, what could have been… [1]https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-an-intervention.html https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-a... [2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/08/thanks-engadget.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm.... [3]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancels-development-of-the-foleo/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancel...
- pram 2y ago
  I agree with the criticism though, the Foleo looked like some kind of internet appliance anachronism straight out of 1998. I was fully on board the Palm train too (rip Pre)
  - sjm-lbm 2y ago
    I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.
    - filmgirlcw 2y ago
      I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence. PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight. The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser. The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it. Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software. Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.
      - sillywalk 2y ago
        > heir next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) It was called Cobalt. https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html https://www.palmsource.com/palmos/cobalt.html
- filmgirlcw 2y ago
  But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release Foleo’s years later, this was vindicated by even the most strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600 before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also required a $400 or $500 phone to work. It wasn’t a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated operating system. Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm was right to cancel a product that wouldn’t have moved the needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me. Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure. Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely did not need to exist.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me. It's not for everyone but for the ones that appreciate it it's a really powerful feature. I work whole days in DeX. I have docks at work, at home, at family where I stay a lot. Not needing to drag a laptop around is amazing. I have both a personal and work VDI for when I really need it but 95% of the time I just work in Android with DeX. It's definitely the #1 reason I buy Samsung
- gnachman 2y ago
  I moved across the country to work for Palm on a secret project which was revealed to be the Foleo only after I started. I spent a year trying to make the web browser with a totally broken engine they had licensed from Access. Having blown their budget of 100k on the engine they were determined to stick with it. I was amused when it was announced and then canceled after I quit.
  - zelos 2y ago
    I was a developer at a third party developer writing Foleo software and I always wondered what was going on on the other side of the wall. The rumour I was told for the cause of all the delays was that some executive had decided the screen was too low resolution way too late in the project and everything had to be redesigned. Released a year or two earlier they might have been decent devices, IMHO.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I was really looking forward to the foleo actually. Most likely would have purchased one.
lizzas 2y ago
These are not stream of conciouness emails. Almost certainly lawyers reviewed or drafted it, or edited it, or suggested edits or he knew how to write a good negotiation email. This ain't necessarily how he talks to his team.
- mewse-hn 2y ago
  It's not that it was written off the cuff, it's that it holds up nearly 20 years later as a measured, ethical response to having his company threatened. And this email wouldn't even be public if it hadn't been evidence in court proceedings
  - lizzas 2y ago
    It is strategic. You can only look at it through that lens. For an ethical measure of a company or exec: see what a company does for the greater good despite it reducing their profit.
shadowgovt 2y ago
It's a shame capitalism doesn't reward any of that, but instead rewards (in the industry he was CEO in) putting product in consumer's hands. He stood on principal and his ultimate reward for that call (in the absence of any regulatory enforcement against what Apple aimed to do here) was iPhone beat out PalmPilots. Oh well. On the plus side, looks like he's having some success with what he's doing now.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Well, one’s customers were his employees and the other was the world.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  The way he has an impact is over time by praising his response for the next generation. Steve was wrong, America is better when employees are free.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    It'd be cool if the mechanisms by which companies are rewarded and punished reflected that idea. Steve's company is now one of the three largest in the US. The other one was bought out. The lesson from history seems to be "you can have a little illegal non-compete. As a treat."
    - blackqueeriroh 2y ago
      There are about a billion other reasons why Apple is so successful today. It really has nothing to do with the illegal non-compete, considering most of its astronomical growth came post-Steve, something most people fail to understand.
- wmf 2y ago
  You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products better.

ks2048 2y ago

Thoughts and prayers to the 3 people (referenced in the letter) who left Apple to work at Palm in 2007.

epolanski 2y ago
I don't think they need any of your prayers, they're likely better than all of us combined and better than any person who joined Apple later.
neofrommatrix 2y ago
They made the best decision based on the information they had at the time. No need to mock someone based on that.
- lambdasquirrel 2y ago
  Given the rest of the exchange between Steve and Colligan, they might have needed to leave for other reasons too.
- tengbretson 2y ago
  How much mockery would you trade to get some 2007 Apple RSOs?
  - neofrommatrix 2y ago
    Everyone wins when they have the benefit of hindsight.
- ks2048 2y ago
  I wasn't trying to mock them - just a light-hearted joke.
  - jeltz 2y ago
    So you were mocking them.
2y ago

warkdarrior 2y ago

And being thoughtful and considerate got Palm nowhere, while Apple has now the largest market cap ever.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sixothree 2y ago
They pretty much got Sherlocked.
tkzed49 2y ago
maybe it's less the diplomacy and more that they were sitting on a pile of crusty patents instead of building the iphone
- nickpeterson 2y ago
  I think it’s easy to forget the palm pre and webos because it wasn’t a competitor for very long, but to be blunt, it was the only decent competitor to the iPhone but in the 2008/2009 timeframe. Android was awful on launch, blackberry was completely behind, Microsoft had a plan that was decent but was too late. Palm really was the only real threat in the early days. They just didn’t have the money to iterate like apple (and Google).
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    There was almost a tablet as well, I think it got pulled just before launch, and the inventory got sold off for next to nothing.
    - mgkimsal 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure a tablet was released, then scrapped sometime in the first month or so after release - TouchPad, IIRC? It got no support from HP or Palm. I seem to remember a quote from some exec saying something like "the market demands a $499 tablet" or something like that, and TouchPads weren't selling. But when they were discounted to $99 - $149, they sold out instantly. They even did a second production run and sold more at $249. This was a huge missed opportunity for Palm. WebOS was pretty good at that time. They needed more software for it - this is a perpetual problem for most platforms at launch. Seed the market with good hardware, invest in developers, and let it churn for more than 2 months before killing the whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchPad

perihelions 2y ago

Here's the complete (?) exchange between Colligan and Jobs (no login wall or linkrot), https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-like-mob-boss-threatened-to-sue-palm-over-patents-if-it-poached-any-apple-employees/ https://www.techdirt.com/2013/01/24/steve-jobs-used-patents-...

handfuloflight 2y ago
Is there a central repository where all these tech emails are coming from or are they discovery from disparate court cases?
- azeemba 2y ago
  They are different court cases, usually popularized by techemails (https://www.techemails.com/ https://www.techemails.com/)
pimlottc 2y ago
Note that the quotes in the article are abridged, the full emails are in the embedded PDF
isodev 2y ago
Thanks, this should be the link for the post, instead of the xitter paywal.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Steve Jobs asking for a no poaching agreement is not just unethical but illegal. His threat about Apple’s greater financial resources is just so petty and low. It really changes my view of him.
- jccalhoun 2y ago
  There was a lawsuit about apple, google, intel, and adobe agreeing not to poach from one another. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

mtlynch 2y ago

I'm impressed at how principled and unflappable Ed Colligan is in his response to Jobs: >On the other hand, this is a small space, and it’s inevitable that we will bump into each other. Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple is just out of line. A lawsuit would not serve either of our interests, and will not stop employees from migrating between our companies. This is a very exciting time for both of our companies, and the market is certainly big enough for both of us. We should focus on our respective businesses and not create unnecessary distractions. Compare this to Eric Schmidt's spineless response when Jobs complained to him about Google poaching: >Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote. >Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour." >He added: "Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs." Then again, Google thrived afterward and happily enjoyed the fruits of illegally suppressing wages, while Palm's market share plummeted soon after Jobs' threat.

uniformlyrandom 2y ago
>> illegally suppressing wages This is spot on - Googlers are notoriously poor.
- neofrommatrix 2y ago
  This. This is why companies win.
- wpm 2y ago
  High wages doesn’t mean they aren’t being suppressed
  - seizethecheese 2y ago
    In fact, the higher the wages the more incentive to suppress, right?
- Teever 2y ago
  This is the wrong way to look at it. If the employees of these massive companies who illegally suppressed their wages hadn't done so then the companies wouldn't be so massive, and the employees would have more money and some of them would have had more resources to start competitors to the hypothetically less well moneyed giants. This would have lead to a scenario where there's more competition in the market which means more innovation, more jobs for other people in tech, and lower prices for consumers. Unfortunately this didn't happen and we're all worse off for it.

tptacek 2y ago

What would have happened had Jobs followed through with his threat and arranged to have Apple sue Palm? All this stuff would have entered the record, right?

lern_too_spel 2y ago
Palm would have countersued with its superior mobile patents. I'm sure Apple's attorneys pointed this out to Jobs when he went to them after this exchange, which is why he didn't follow through. These emails entered the record following discovery in the wage suppression lawsuits.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I'm just curious if the illegal attempt to coerce Palm would have been a factor in the case.

snowwrestler 2y ago

The thing that strikes me is the disparity in length. I think a lot of people don’t realize how hard it is to write succinctly. Jobs was (is?) probably under-appreciated as a writer. Colligan was correct such an agreement would be illegal and could have just stood on that.

intuitionist 2y ago
I’m pretty sure these emails are public for exactly that reason.
bluefinity 2y ago
Jobs tries to bully and threaten a smaller company into signing an illegal agreement and all you have to say is how great of a writer he is because of how few sentences he wrote?
- wetpaws 2y ago
  [flagged]
- gsibble 2y ago
  Seriously
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
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vidarh 2y ago
Colligan was putting down what had occurred in writing so that the details of what Jobs had said would be a matter of record should it come to a lawsuit down the line. This is a common - and highly useful - strategy if you've just been in a meeting where things have been said that you were uncomfortable with. Being succinct would have defeated the purpose. This is a useful strategy to employ in all kinds of situations. A dated note written shortly after the event is going to carry more weight than recollection later. An e-mail sent to the other party that they have not contested the understanding of is going to carry more weight than just a note. And if, as Jobs did, your other side responds, you now have ammunition for any future lawsuits. EDIT: Creating a paper trail is a method to take note of in other contexts too. Your manager at work asked you to do something unethical? Summarise your understanding of the conversation in writing and ask if you understood it correctly (a lot of the time, the request will magically become a misunderstanding).

neilv 2y ago

> Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal. Said in email, from one CEO to another, is this obviously intentional paper trail? > Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave is just out of line. Did that patent lawsuit happen? (And if it did, did this email, which suggested illegal activity, come up in discovery.)

lelandfe 2y ago
This is high level chess, I am certain that Jobs read that as the opening legal salvo it is. That’s a bigger threat left implied, and the smaller one was made plain (patents).
adastra22 2y ago
No, Apple ended up licensing the patents (Jobs bluster was BS): https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-license-palm-other-patents/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-pays-10m-to-li...
- allenu 2y ago
  That is quite amusing, but $10M is peanuts to Apple for some necessary patent licenses.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    peanuts now, but peanuts then?
    - function_seven 2y ago
      Yeah, even in 2007 Apple was a huge success already. Worth about $200 billion at the time, was earning about $3.5 billion a year in profit, and had $15 billion cash on hand. https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2007/10/22Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results/ https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2007/10/22Apple-Reports-Fo...

cyberax 2y ago

Palm... Or "how to blow your lead by wasting half a decade doing nothing". I _loved_ my Palm Treo 600, that was released 5 freaking years before the first iPhone. It had everything I needed, but the OS felt anachronistic even in 2003. So I was eagerly awaiting for Palm OS 6 to come, so I could upgrade. And waiting. And waiting. And then Palm died.

nicolas_t 2y ago
Same. I did really like webos when it was finally released, I got one of those HP touchpad and happily used it. But it was too little, too late.
Nevermark 2y ago
I was so frustrated. The number of times companies take the lead then sit on their lead until it dies has often bothered me deeply! The downside to being a passionate customer & engineer. — I felt similarly with Netscape. If Navigator had been consistently both web browser and editor, it would have been a better product, a real service in keeping the web a two way tool for most people. Tim Berners-Lee’s vision tied creation & browsing together, which is why the web happened at all. Staying true to that would have produced more value, and maintained enough (constructive) lock in for Netscape to keep innovating in a way that mattered. Instead they announced their imagined threat to Windows, before that threat was realistic, then drowned in Microsoft’s response. And the disparity in their emphasis on browsing vs. creation left a big hole in the side of their boat, leaving them extremely vulnerable to browser competitors. Microsoft was convicted in court for product tying & other over anti-competitive behavior. But Netscape was convicted in the market for not fulfilling the full circle value of the web they were pioneering. They commoditized themselves. And the web has never recovered from the unnecessary creation/browsing dichotomy. I was so mad at them! (Laughing tears emoji)
ndiddy 2y ago
Palm didn't have anything to do with Palm OS 6, they spun off Palm OS development to a company called PalmSource (later ACCESS). Palm OS 6 was finished around 2004, but never shipped on a device because the performance was horrible compared to Palm OS 5. This was due to poor software architecture. PalmSource threw out the kernel used by previous versions of Palm OS and replaced it with a microkernel that focused on message-passing between processes. Most of the Palm OS API got re-implemented using IPC. This meant that each API call would require at least two context switches, more if the API implementation needed to make another API call that was implemented with IPC. The ARM chips that were available at that point flushed their caches on each context switch. The result was that doing something like opening an address book with around a thousand entries went from taking a few hundred ms to taking seconds, as displaying each entry required an IPC call to the service responsible for handling contacts data. It's definitely a shame, as Palm OS 5 is a stopgap OS that got shipped on devices way after the point it became obsolete. Third-party developers couldn't even write native ARM software, they had to compile for 68k and add small chunks of ARM code for performance intensive areas where the 68k->ARM emulation became a bottleneck.

yummybear 2y ago

These are some of the richest people debating whether to stop people from seeking to work elsewhere. Absolutely despicable. Hat's off to Palm for seeking the reasonably route.

reillys 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
UberFly 2y ago
He was a true accomplished trailblazer with a compelling corporate and personal story, and didn't mind hurting feelings along the way. History is built on these people like it or not.
- reillys 2y ago
  He was sometimes successful. He had tons of failure and failed in the worst possible ways blaming everyone all around him and not taking any responsibility and then he got a chance to rebound and was finally successful. It's complete scoreboard journalism, if for whatever reason at the end apple didn't succeed we'd just put him in the POS column. But instead cause he made some of that sweet green (at the end) we say he's amazing. That is what I don't get.
xanderlewis 2y ago
Because under him, Apple made beautiful products. And set the standard for everything that came next. That he was (probably) a bit of a dick isn’t enough to change that fact.
- cookie_monsta 2y ago
  Nothing changes a fact. That's what makes them facts. If you are still undecided about whether Jobs was a POS in his personal life after everything we already know, your lack of objectivity makes your opinion weigh very little in the debate about if his professional accomplishments somehow mitigate that.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    'change that fact' can be taken, in this context, to be an abbreviation for 'change the degree to which this fact is relevant to the given discussion'. ...but I'm sure you already knew that. > your lack of objectivity You don't sound particularly objective either. But perhaps you never claimed to be. I certainly didn't.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mullingitover 2y ago

This spells out in black and white that Jobs was a pretty shameless crook. We already knew this based on Apple and its peers getting caught colluding to wage fix, and the settlement that came from this, but this is a great reminder. I really feel like Jobs gets too much credit. He was smart, but he also rode on the shoulders of multiple giants in his career, and he got lucky several times. The cult of Jobs was convinced that Apple would go downhill in his absence, but the company has quantifiably done wildly better since Cook took over.

yapyap 2y ago
I agree on the premise of Jobs being overrated, Apple was the classic right spot right time company and that is not to say he was not a good leader in that situation but that _is_ to say that Apple could just as well have succeeded under a different leader with different antics.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mrcwinn 2y ago
  It sure takes an awful lot of hard work to be in the right place at the right time. Foolish, both of you. Vision matters and Jobs had one. If it were all just meaningless fate, really there’s no reason to get out of bed or even comment on HN.
- ericd 2y ago
  Who would it have succeeded as well with? Because they tried hiring a few CEOs, and far from succeeding, they were very nearly bankrupt. After bringing him back, they worked their way to being the most valuable public company. He's one of the clearest examples of the value of a good CEO.
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    We remember the comeback, but we forget that he was kicked out of the company because he nearly ran it into the ground when he was in charge the first time. You can't put all the blame on the CEOs who followed him for failing to clean up the mess he created in the first place any more than you can give him all the credit for the company's performance long after he departed. Furthermore, he was only brought back with a turnaround plan that was created up in no small part by his financial backers, and the C-suite he arrived with included Tim Cook. I'm convinced Cook's housecleaning on their supply chain and product lines was what actually saved the company. They might've delayed bankruptcy with a hit like the iMac, but only for a short while.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Still have fond memories of my Palm V. Was outstanding at the time.

localghost3000 2y ago

I think the best description I have ever heard of Jobs was given by Bill Burr: "Jesus, Ghandi, John Lennon, ME!". Much like Lennon, he cultivated a whole peace/love/enlightenment image while being a garbage person. Lennon for example, beat the shit out of his first wife, abandoned his first son Julian, and then made sure they got no money from him. Sound familiar? Yeah Jobs did very much the same to his first wife and daughter (well, I am not sure if he physically abused his wife but still..). I think you can make the argument that what Jobs brought to the table was impeccable taste. He was very good at pushing (some would say abusing) his people to make things that people genuinely loved. I think that design sense is notably absent in today's crop of tech CEO's. Again Burr nails it: "I want my entire album collection in this phone. GET ON IT!!"

knuckleheadsmif 2y ago

This crap happens all the time between companies. When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.) The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs. What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple. None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.

knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement. I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.
- knuckleheadsmif 2y ago
  As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser. You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting. I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari. By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

Steve Jobs immediately got rid of "About boxes" and Easter eggs when he returned to Apple. Probably the right call if you want to promote a brand of professionalism for your company. But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way — recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The Finder. Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway to sign their creations. I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching. Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple engineer could pass out their resumé. When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design. Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory. I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.

schlauerfox 2y ago
It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn’t very successful
  - musicale 2y ago
    How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?
    - shotnothing 2y ago
      much more relative to the average worker in many other industries
    - 2y ago

cainxinth 2y ago

The company led by the petulant bully is worth trillions and the one led by the accurate, ethical, and reasonable person is defunct.

silisili 2y ago
I thought the same, kinda sad isn't it? Palm's email to Apple was like a teacher talking to an unruly teen, but not insultingly so. So what do we learn? Either Karma isn't real, or being a childish bully is the key to success. I'm not sure I like either answer.
- voytec 2y ago
  > Either Karma isn't real If you look not at the companies, but individuals...
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Karma is just not the only factor. It sure helps but Palm just had the wrong strategic vision and didn't have great marketing. WebOS was not a bad idea but they didn't manage to sell it well.
- tessierashpool9 2y ago
  from my own experience and observations i'd say anti-karma is real. you do good, fate will punish you for it ;)
- npteljes 2y ago
  Only the western mainstream version of karma is supposed to work within one's lifetime. The proper spiritual interpretations of it usually span multiple lifetimes. Not a huge believer myself, but I agree with your conclusion, this kind of short-acting karma surely doesn't exist. As demonstrated daily by the many horrible influential people.
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    I’d say Christianity relies pretty heavily on fears of the guy in the sky and what happens after you die What happens when religion loses its place in western society though. Hummmm

throw4321 2y ago

[flagged]

slater 2y ago
Only if you can stomach "we're not a nazi bar, ok??" substack: https://www.techemails.com/ https://www.techemails.com/
triceratops 2y ago
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/561593-121737673-colligan-affidavit/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/561593-121737673-col...

mepian 2y ago

"Palm now owns the former Siemens mobile patent portfolio" Man, I miss Siemens phones, they were great at the time. I wonder what they would be like today if Siemens didn't quit the market.

camillomiller 2y ago

[flagged]

sneak 2y ago

Context: Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt at Google, and several other high ranking tech execs conspired to illegally fix wages lower by agreeing to not hire each others’ staff. Billions of dollars were thus stolen from staff by these companies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust... > In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement would not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement was unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represented only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded. The companies got off with barely a slap on the wrist.

msteffen 2y ago

Lot of comments observing that Apple is doing much better than Palm these days, but IMO they miss the point. Steve is dead, and I don’t think he got to take any of that victory money with him. Palm is dead too, but its investors and employees are doing something else now, and I don’t think they’re generally much worse for the wear. And the time that Palm’s engineers spent there is indelibly better because their boss respected them. On the other hand, I don’t know how many Apple employees got to retire early because of Steve’s management, but I’m not sure their lives, including their time working for Steve, are better overall. Life is a journey, not a destination.

iJohnDoe 2y ago

Great email by Palm CEO. Very adult and levelheaded. Something we all expect and deserve from anyone that makes it to the CEO level. Unfortunately, it has been rare and even more so lately. You will never be able to avoid the type of people that only care about the most money they can make. These people don’t care about the product, the mission, or the company. They will bounce from Apple to Palm and then somewhere else. Totally fine. I hope they are doing the level of work and have the level of skill that warrants their pay, if only for the sake of their colleagues that have to put up with them. I don’t have any sympathy for companies or people at the top of those companies that hire dipshits that can’t produce anything and still pay them unnecessary money. Obviously, we hope companies pay employees that have passion for the mission and treat them fairly. Then they have a reason to stay. Unfortunately, a lot of these employees fall through the cracks and it’s a shame. If they jump to another company then finding out why is a good thing to focus on.

watersb 2y ago

"Inside Macintosh" disciples would enjoy PalmOS app development. Clearly the "Classic" Mac API was an inspiration. In a good way. It was simple and fun. By 2007, though, the world had changed.

kevinsync 2y ago

Keep in mind this was 2007 -- my hunch is it sounds like it probably was really about iOS vs webOS, not Apple vs Palm (Pilot/Foleo/PalmOS). Android wasn't even out when the email was sent, and I know webOS didn't come out to the public until 2009, but I am rather curious how long it was in development prior-to... I was a webOS dude -- I still have a Palm Pre 1, 2 and 3 in a box. I tried to explain to my hipster doofus buddy at the time why I fucked with the Palm vision over the Apple vision (regrettably, in hindsight, part of it was due to Palm holding onto the physical keyboard, part of which was I was a huge fan of that due to entering the smartphone era after being a previous T-Mobile Sidekick 1 - 3 user) -- they both preached the same philosophy of web apps over native apps, except something intangible and aesthetic about the Pre resonated with me in late 00's more than iPhone did. Apple also hadn't yet started deploying most of its critical infrastructure (walled-garden interoperability, APNS, any of that stuff) that lead to eventual dominance and ended up justifying the current stock price / mobile supremacy -- it was just a phone vs phone comparison. These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term. They're doing stuff with hardware that today we think is stupid, but tomorrow might just be an accepted part of life. They've made it easy for anybody to lock their digital lives inside of the Apple vaults for a recurring monthly subscription lol. I can't say any of that speaks to the 90's dream of an open internet, but they sure do seem to have a clear-cut plan and are quite good at executing it!

wkat4242 2y ago
> These days, IMO, Apple is on top of the pile. They're launching satellites that likely will completely sidestep mobile carriers in the short term. Satellite won't take over land-based mobile connectivity. The density and in-building coverage just isn't there. No matter how many sats you launch. There's only small windows of radio spectrum that work well for sats and the signal is spread out over too wide an area. You just can't get enough bandwidth to serve all iPhone users in populated areas. It's great for backup purposes and sparse areas but it's not going to replace mobile networks.

ab_testing 2y ago

Kinda tells you what an asshole Steve Jobs was.

devops99 2y ago

https://xcancel.com/TechEmails/status/1868368310024462791

wkat4242 2y ago

Totally fair and balanced response. I'd much rather works have liked to work for him than for Apple. Of course they didn't do very well in the end but I like this respectful attitude.

ucefkh 2y ago

You know Steve was right when Palm doesn't exist anymore now