Palm was way ahead of time with webOS. It featured so many things that simply weren't there in iOS and android: - Multitasking - Wireless Battery Charging (T

Palm was way ahead of time with webOS. It featured so many things that simply weren't there in iOS and android: - Multitasking - Wireless Battery Charging (Touchstone) - Over the air Updates - HTML5 based GUI - JS Api - Touch gestures - Cloud Sync (Apps, Settings, Data) - Facebook, LinkedIn, GMail integration with Contact List - many things I surely forgot... The first Palm Pre had slight quality problems and the battery life wasn't good enough. Unfortunately Palm didn't have enough time to fix these issues and was bought by HP. Everybody went: "Whoa! They really have a chance now against Apple and Google due to HP's money and scale." Then the epic fail began when Mark Hurd (then CEO of HP) bought spent some company money for the secretary he was secretly having an affair with. He was replaced with the Leo Apotheker who was just fired from SAP (by the time I worked for SAP and trust me he seemed to be very "special"). Apotheker didn't understand the vision HP had for WebOS and Phones and wanted to get entirely rid of HPs Hardware Business (Imagine Mercedes Benz stop selling cars and putting it's focus on engines instead... o_O). The by then HPalm Product Line was actually very solid: HP Pre3, HP Veer, HP Touchpad. Unfortunately only a few weeks after market introduction everything was killed of by Leo. So Apotheker rather sooner than later proofed himself as completely insane in the eyes of board and investors and needed to "leave the company to pursue new opportunites outside of HP"(c). This made room for Meg Whitman who was feared to revert Apothekers decisions concerning webOS. Yes, it would have been a risk but when executed correctly there was a chance to win market shares. No risk no fun I guess... So great products failed because of bad leadership decisions.