WebOS perishes, leaving no ripples in its wake

Let me warn you right now: This is not a kind eulogy. HP pulled the plug yesterday on its WebOS-based TouchPad tablet and Pre and Pixi smartphones, a little more than a year after it bought Palm to get WebOS and six months after HP announced grandiose plans to implement WebOS across smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

Crusty pundits like me and my colleague Bill Snyder doubted from the beginning whether HP could pull it off, for the simple reason that WebOS’s inventors at Palm were never able to accomplish the same, and HP bet on them to make it work. Plus, HP’s own prowess in the PC market has been questionable for some time, so it was never clear what HP brought to the table other than a marquee name.

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The strategy itself was plausible — for a company with the drive, vision, and ability to pull it off. That wasn’t HP, and it was not Palm.

You might recall that Palm spent nearly a decade changing hands or management teams (or both) after its early halcyon days of the Palm Pilot and later the lesser glory of the Treo. A few years back, Palm brought in Jon Rubinstein as CEO, hoping his role as one of the creators of the original iPod would bring Apple-like savvy and execution to Palm. The result was WebOS and the original Palm Pre.

When the Palm Pre debuted in 2009, the then two-year-old iPhone was not the juggernaut it is today. It had a following, but its lack of multitasking and copy and paste, plus very limited business security capabilities, caused many people to dismiss it as an Apple “fanboy toy.” There was already a sense that the old-school mobile device represented by the Research in Motion BlackBerry was on its way out, but it was an open question as to what might take its place.

The original Palm Pre and its WebOS had some very nice capabilities, such as multitasking, its elegant card-based UI, and strong integration of communications capabilities across apps. But overall, it felt like an iPhone wannabe, an ersatz clone that had a few advantages but more disadvantages than the real thing. People bought the real thing instead.

Rubinstein may have come from Apple, but he couldn’t out-Apple Apple, at least not in that first version. Of course, Palm had the underdog thing going for it at that point, and a band of loyalists willing to give Palm time — very much like the scenario Apple went through (successfully) in the early 2000s.

A year after the first Pre and WebOS, most carriers had given up on the platform. Although Verizon Wireless originally had WebOS plans, it never acted on them, leaving early champion Sprint the sole provider — and Sprint stopped actively marketing it very quickly once the first Pre proved not to be an iPhone killer. Palm did come out with several OS updates in the year that followed its debut, but they were minor, obvious fixes that didn’t propel WebOS meaningfully forward.

Then in spring 2010, HP announced its plans to buy Palm, viewing WebOS as a platform it could use to tie multiple devices — smartphones, tablets, printers, and PCs — into a unified ecosystem that might give Apple a run for its money and keep Microsoft and its fractured OS portfolio to the side.

A few months later, HP’s Palm Business Unit debuted WebOS 2.0, another minor upgrade that didn’t warrant the full-version number change and certainly didn’t give the iPhone or the newly surging Android any meaningful competition. In fact, it just reminded me that the gap had widened. In the customer world, no one batted an eye, and anyone who did notice didn’t care.

But HP still believed — or at least the head of the PC division, Todd Bradley, did. Because in March 2011, he and Rubinstein announced HP’s grand WebOS plans at a media extravaganza: the TouchPad tablet, the Pre 3 series of smartphones and the consumery Veer series, and the intent to run WebOS on its PCs (on top of Windows, HP later said). I was shocked that the WebOS as pitched by Rubinstein was basically the same as the first version, and the advantages he was touting such as multitasking were long dead issues in the market. All such events are hyperbolic, but the zeal with which he and Bradley promoted WebOS was extreme even in that context. It was definitely a “get a room” moment, yet it felt unconvincing. CEO Léo Apotheker also made similar exuberant commitments about WebOS that spring.

When the TouchPad finally shipped in July, it was a disappointment, unable to compete with the original iPad, much less than iPad 2 that had taken the world by storm. Even normally kind reviewers were notably neutral. After all, it offered no big advancement over the original WebOS, and in the intervening two years, Apple had moved iOS by leaps and bounds, while Google had finally brought a credible alternative to market. The hardware was also pokey, and had little style. Statements from HP executives after the release that said it was gunning to be No. 2 in the market were a sad commentary on the gap between the promise of WebOS and its reality.

The Pre 3 never shipped. I had a prototype to test while waiting for the real thing to arrive (no longer a possibility), and I can say now that it was a “meh” product, not that different from the original Pre.

There are reports that HP execs have blamed its mediocre TouchPad and Pre hardware for the end of that business, telling Palm Business Unit employees that it may license WebOS to other device makers, once it detaches the OS from its Qualcomm hardware ties. That may be what HP is saying internally, but it makes no sense. If the hardware were the real problem, HP would have kept its WebOS devices officially alive as it sought a new design and manufacturer — or licensees to take over — for the next round. Instead, HP ingloriously dumped its WebOS devices — putting a bullet in its head so publicly just a few weeks after the product relaunch and just months after exuberant praise from Apotheker on down. After all that bravado and then quick abandonment, no Samsung, HTC, or LG would be foolish enough to step in and trust anything HP had to say about the technology, much less license it. It’s equally hard to believe that HP intends to use WebOS in any significant way other than maybe keep it for its associated patents.

Let’s get real: WebOS was never bad, and it had some delightful aspects. But it was never great.

Now that HP has formally pulled the plug on WebOS as a mobile and PC platform, the sad truth is that it doesn’t matter. WebOS had no meaningful impact on the market, and its absence will harm no one (other than the employees at HP’s Palm unit).

Even sadder, its death will actually help some people. Several people I know at HP say they and countlesss colleagues have been using barely functional cellphones for a year because HP refuses to buy iPhones, BlackBerrys, or other competing devices for its employees — yet the Pre hasn’t been available for months and months from the carriers, so HP couldn’t give employees Pres, either. At least now these suffering employees can get smartphones that work.

I wish WebOS had made an impact, but it didn’t. That’s its sad legacy: It didn’t leave one.

This article, “WebOS perishes, leaving no ripples in its wake,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.