Headlines like "H.P.’s TouchPad Tablet Was Bound to Be a Flop, Some Say" are a blight on journalism, and it's another dent in the reputation of NYT to feature something that reads like that.
Everyone can see that the touchpad is a major flop, so it's easy to just write some hindsight fluff piece about it. It's ridiculous to write about the inevitability of the device's failure after the fact; the only way to write in this tone is to write the article before the fact, unless you intend to revel in someone's failure.
Even so, they use weasel words like "... some say", which they no doubt will use to hide their snipe piece behind. In other words, as certain as it seems that the touchpad was a complete and utter dud, and how ever epimethean and arrogantly the piece reads in its hindsight and rationalization, they still waffle on arguing their point rigourously and confidently.
I can only hope Brian Chen himself didn't write the headline, because that would at least serve to redeem the intention of the article.
As long as the article has named sources saying essentially that it was doomed, identifying the "some" who "say", and those people are in a position to know, then I don't have a problem with it.
If the "bound to flop" comes from unnamed sources flinging poo, and possibly just lying, then it's a problem.
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.
JWZ 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.
Yes, 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.
Your 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?
The 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.
I 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.
Final Fantasy on the NES. That's supposedly what the "final" was for; it was to be their last game before the studio shut down. It was a hit, and it and its successors kept them in business until they morphed into Square Enix and became Japan's EA.
That 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.
"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.)
As a long-term webOS user, I could not disagree with the conclusion of this article more. WebOS did not fail because of a decision to use WebKit, it "failed" (in marketing and commercial terms, not in technological terms) because of a lack of decent hardware, which is still the case today.
My own personal feeling is that the decision to put a web interpreter at the heart of webOS was inspired, I mean as an app developer what would you rather code in?
1. iOS - objective C.
2. Android & RIM - Java.
3. webOS - HTML5/CSS/JS.
webOS the platform is fantastic, but has never been seen on decent hardware (with the exception of the Pre3 which is an amazing phone, but was never officially released outside of a limited European release). If the open sourcing of webOS leads to decent hardware manufacturers like Samsung or HTC releasing devices, it still stands a chance.
It is and it isn't at the same time IMHO. It is for simple stuff and for typical applications it was great. It also has an amazing online designer. But it suffers when you had to do something more... I run into that for example when I needed to handle RSA. Have a look at how many encryption libraries are out there for ObjC and Java. Now try to find one for JS - you'll need to find 3 different parts usually - the rsa itself, key reader/writer, base64 library. Then you have to deal with their different inputs/outputs and missing features... Really not a great experience.
So yeah - the platform is great, just misses the whole ecosystem which you take for granted in Java. That said, I don't know why people complain about hardware. I'm not letting go of my Touchpad - it can do all the 3d I would expect from it and more. With preware patches it's also more smooth than other pads I've played with so far.
Because the 'native' UI is ... HTML/CSS/JS. There is no non-HTML 'native' UI on webOS.
Don't want to implement RSA in javascript? Create a 'hybrid' webOS app using a C lib, but 'native' HTML UI.
The 'native' Mojo or Enyo frameworks may not be as rich as UIKit, but the web UI ecosystem you can leverage to extend them is massive, and the source for both is all there for you to read and extend.
When the Pre came out, both my brother and sister bought one. They both liked iPhones, but couldn't get them because they were on Sprint. I had an iPhone 3G.
They didn't like the keyboard, and the fact that I could grab the top and bottom half of the phone and twist them at least 10 degrees relative to each other was rather worrying. The Touchstone was fantastic, and I assume the only reason no one else has done it was because it's patented. However since the Touchstone cost $70 the only person I know who had one got it for free when their phone (when they were given away at some sales conference long after it was clear the phone was dead).
I though WebOS was very nice, and my siblings liked it. I did just a teeny bit of development for it, and thought it was a decent environment. I liked the documentation, and it was pretty easy to do. The simulator, which ran on VirtualBox (IIRC), was slow as hell. The phone liked to use gestures to trigger things, which was a bit unintuitive and was very difficult to trigger in the simulator.
However, I thought the card metaphor was fantastic. At the the time the iPhone didn't allow any multitasking at all. I still think the card metaphor is elegant. My mother has had an iPhone for two years and still doesn't know about the multitasking or how to close apps if she wanted to. They Apple or Google could buy just the card metaphor patent for a few million, I would say "do it".
But I always thought the main failing was apps. By the time the Pre came out the iPhone app store was already huge and the reason to get an iPhone. After a few months, Palm finally announced an app store and... nothing happened. It took months and months before they actually opened the store and let people download things. After it was open, only one or two apps would come out each month. The ones that did gave the impression the internal developers were making them as demo apps. If Palm had paid a few big app developers to port their apps, it would have gone a LONG way.
From the end user's point of view, the app market situation was a fiasco. The time between the announcement of the store and starting to get any recognizable apps was eons.
It doesn't surprise me that HP didn't fix things. The Touchpad was nice, but overpriced. The fact the first thing HP said was "We're putting it on our printers" wasn't reassuring in any way.
Agreed. I had an iPhone 4 for about a year when the Touchpad went to fire sale, and stayed up fairly late to order one online. I had heard great things about webOS, and the Touchpad looked like a bargain.
And it's great for reading Hacker News (overlooking that it is incapable of parsing the single quote char correctly on HN) and the odd Kindle book(on the beta Amazon webOS app that is unlikely to ever see another update). But all it really has done for me so far is validated that I will utilize a tablet device and made me want to buy a supported device. I want to do things like play higher end games, use Evernote, and watch Hulu/Netflix.
But oh well, maybe one day the open source effort will yield fruit. After I get a tablet that hasn't died yet, I will try putting Ubuntu on my Touchpad. I still really like webOS, and it does some things very well, better than my iPhone. But right now I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel.
I wouldn't trade my touchpad for an ipad. The only advantage of the ipad is that it has more apps (that you probably don't use anyway). I think the multitasking / cards approach from WebOs is awesome.
> But Mr. Mercer insisted that WebKit would still leave WebOS underpowered relative to Apple’s software. “If the bar is to build Cupertino-class software in terms of responsiveness and beauty,” he said, “WebKit remains not ready for prime time, because the Web cannot deliver yet.”
This sums up how I feel--I should make it my motto.
NeWS was Postscript and a contemporary of NeXTSTEP which was also Postscript, but much more sane to program (and this comes from a Postscript lover).
I hope we come up with something better than HTML / CSS / JS, because they are a step back from the current app platforms. Hopefully there will be an evolution / revolution.
It was more than that, you wrote your entire UI in NeWS's Postscript-with-knobs on, and communicated asynchronously with the server side of your app. Think of writing a desktop app as a tiny web-server with the UI in a browser, only all the UI is in PS rather than HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
I am a big fan of webOS, so my views may be off. I am not a developer, just a consumer, so my comments may even be irrelevant to the OP.
webOS definitely had its rough edges. The phone app will be sluggish (what jwz was referring to, try answering a phone call by tapping "pick up" several times without any response as the phone keeps ringing), in USB mode the phone shuts down and directs all voice calls to voicemail, the entire OS does not have a position indicator to tell you how long and where you are in the page, etc.
However, all initial releases of software are buggy. As someone already mentioned in this thread "I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out". I think everyone at Palm expected to be able to release updates and get the OS up to speed.
However, Google started cranking up on Android and left everyone (including iOS) in the dust. I am not talking about UI here. I am talking about sheer speed in the software turnaround cycle. In seemingly no time, Android had Cloud syncing, Maps with Navigation, features in the photo app like red eye removal etc. etc. They just blasted away with these updates. To me it is astounding that a complex mobile OS used all over the world can be developed in such speed. After this effort, webOS just had no chance.
You need apps for the tablet but without a successful phone ecosystem, the touchpad was definitely a tough sell. HP thought their "channels", "marketing" would amount to something. It just wasn't. A CEO wanting to get out of the consumer space finally stopped the bleeding. Maybe if HP had been going for another 6 months and risked another $1 billion (I feel stupid just typing that clause :) ), webOS could have gotten lucky.
I'm an outsider to whom webOS appealed a lot to. I was an iPhone 2G user, and to me webOS was a totally new approach to mobile UI. The Cards-based multitasking model was (for a mobile OS) at that time revolutionary.
But I can understand how and why it flopped, Palm was haemorraging money like anything. Its investors were doubtful at the best. And the lack of backwards-compatibility (or a planned roadmap to implement it) forced the Palm faithful to take their business elsewhere.
I would argue that webOS and Palm in the greater sense failed because of mismanagement, and maybe not so much due to technical issues/inabilities. The fact that the Phone app (the most important part of a smartphone OS) wasn't stable when the product was out the door casts some serious doubts on QA. Palm has handled the one product that might've saved them from extinction with a "Ship it, then fix it" mentality.
Palm has had their focus all over the place. They wanted to out-do Apple, which given their finances was the one approach they shouldn't have taken. They could've focussed their resources on the core product, the OS and the phone itself. Rather than on accessories and creepy marketing campaigns.
Questioning the technical ability of the team seems unfortunate, but an inevitable outcome of the product being flawed. If the developers, architects, evangelists of webOS knew what they wanted they would've settled on a set of objectives before beginning to work on an entire Operating system. And clearly if they were opinionated they would've nudged the h/w team in the right direction.
Articles like these make me wonder if webOS might've had a totally different fate had it ended up with a company like Facebook which has had a huge success in developing and nurturing one of the largest platforms on the web.
I owned an original Pre and was never much bothered by it being slow. But having to reboot it every night to make it less likely to crash while I was using it was a drag.
Oh, it did take forever to boot. Bad combination, that, frequent crashing and slow booting.
I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out. I guess they were too busy adding features.
That was the combo that made me ditch my BlackBerry (8900 Curve, great phone at the time otherwise) and move to the iPhone 4. At the mall, take out the phone to snap a picture, and whatdya know, the camera program crashes taking down the whole system with it. Reboot? I'll be lucky if it's back up and running by the time I get to the car.
EDIT: Yeah, obviously I'm lying out of my ass and should be downvoted. Because, you know, BlackBerry's still doing super-hot, and is clearly impeccable. There's no way anyone had problems with their BB and switched to Apple.
Interesting - I had an original Pre, and could go weeks without having to reboot it. Contrast with my new Nexus S, which I find I need to give a kick every few days.
I did have few apps installed on my Pre compared to my Nexus, which is likely a factor.
I agree that WebOS has a good ambition. But maybe that they should have updated their software stack more often. If you look at the software versions, such as Webkit, V8, node, you find that their collection of tools are heavily outdated. That's completely against the nowaday web standard of fast updating.
It seems that neither journalists nor HP understand software platforms. Former is not surprising but latter is painful.
You groom platform for a several years and only then you harvest fruit, but once you do, you have a huge preference over those who didn't invest in one.
It demands patience. Apple understand platforms. MS does. Google sort of. HP do not have the required guts. Mindset costs 0$, is a main asset and they haven't got it.
That's the reason software companies always win and hardware companies always help them to win while being barely profitable themself.
They expected to make a huge push of a new platform to market and make a top sale right away. I can imagine people at e.g. MS laughing.
Seriously, the title here is not even close to what the actual article covered. It sounds more like someone offered this as justification for why they felt the Touchpad was doomed to fail.
Everyone can see that the touchpad is a major flop, so it's easy to just write some hindsight fluff piece about it. It's ridiculous to write about the inevitability of the device's failure after the fact; the only way to write in this tone is to write the article before the fact, unless you intend to revel in someone's failure.
Even so, they use weasel words like "... some say", which they no doubt will use to hide their snipe piece behind. In other words, as certain as it seems that the touchpad was a complete and utter dud, and how ever epimethean and arrogantly the piece reads in its hindsight and rationalization, they still waffle on arguing their point rigourously and confidently.
I can only hope Brian Chen himself didn't write the headline, because that would at least serve to redeem the intention of the article.