

HP's touchpad was bound to be a flop - cpleppert
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/technology/hewlett-packards-touchpad-was-built-on-flawed-software-some-say.html

======
kmfrk
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.

~~~
jonhendry
They appear to have changed it, at least online. Now I'm seeing "In Flop of
H.P. TouchPad, an Object Lesson for the Tech Sector"

------
jerrya
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.

~~~
thought_alarm
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.

~~~
drumdance
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?

~~~
flomo
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.

Perhaps also the Nintendo Wii.

~~~
freehunter
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.

------
MBCook
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.

~~~
alexbell
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.

------
j_col
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.

~~~
ams6110
But you can do 3 on iOS, as Safari is a WebKit browser. But for when that's
not enough, you can do 1.

~~~
rsanchez1
It's always enough on webOS, and in the rare case when it's not, you have
C/C++ instead of Objective-C.

~~~
alexbell
You do have C++/SDL (roll your own UI!), but if I recall correctly you DO NOT
have native UI APIs anywhere near what Cocoa is.

~~~
ryanwatkins
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.

------
jvandenbroeck
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.

~~~
joenathan
Same here except my Touchpad is running Android :)
<http://i.minus.com/iVYidLWciBgsJ.png>

------
adamjernst
> 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.

~~~
watmough
The same thing happened with SUN NeWS, a PDF-based rendering system, some 10
years or so ahead of OS X. It was beautiful, but slow.

Give it time, even as an iOS programmer, in my opinion I'd think that
HTML/CSS/JS is _long-term_ , the better way to go, simply because it's open.

Let's hope openness wins in the end.

~~~
rbanffy
NeWS was also _very_ hard to program. Just try to write a spreadsheet in
PostScript...

~~~
ams6110
The NeXT OS used Display PostScript, and I believe that is still the core of
OS X Quartz, is it not?

Are you saying that there was not a good API for drawing on the display? You
had to spit out raw PS?

~~~
aardvark179
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.

------
guard-of-terra
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.

------
p1itopre
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.

------
ameen
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.

------
ScottBurson
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.

~~~
ComputerGuru
> _frequent crashing and slow booting_

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.

------
clvv
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.

------
ams6110
_Ms. Whitman said 600 employees were still working on WebOS_

Clearly that number includes more than the engineers... but wow.

~~~
cpeterso
The webOS org had about 1200 employees before 600 hardware product people were
cut.

------
Qz
...some say.

Title fix?

~~~
rsanchez1
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.

