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.
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.