Palm Case Study
31 months is what it took for Palm to go from glory to demise.
Several Palm products delivered it success, like the Pilot, Palm III, Palm V and the Treo series.
Ed Colligen, CEO of Palm. He initially believed Palm had what it takes to beat the rumored Apple phone.
When the Iphone was launched, Palm didn't realize yet the potential of the product. At the time, Appstore hasn't yet been launched. The success of the Centro, dulled Palm's sense of urgency.
Paul Mercer
He had been an engineer at Apple, and later founded his own company, Tacit Software, later becoming Pixo. Pixo would later be acquired by Sun. Mercer had left earlier in 2000 to form another company Iventor, that advertised many of the same service that Pixo does.
Mitch Allen, Palm's CTO. Palm didn't have a UI layer, so Colligan decided to recruit a few of Iventor's employees, including Mercer, in 2007. In the 3rd quarter of the same year, Palm bought Iventor.
Meanwhile, another company, Elevation Partners, decided to infuse Palm with $325 million cash. Palm also recruited Apple SVP Jon Rubinstein, to serve as executive chairman. He retired from Apple a year before.
After the iPhone was making successes, Rubinstein started to contact his peers in Apple, to see if they wanted to meet new challenges in producing the next blockbuster products. Several followed, such as Andy Grignon, Rob Tsuk and Rich Dellinger.
Matias Duarte, who was from Helio, and before that from Danger, was tasked to lead with Palm's UI design. Mike Abbot was recruited from Microsoft, to run the software team.
Jobs met with Colligan to ask him to stop recruiting people from Apple, Colligan rejected him.
Duarte,
Verizon was initialy tapped by Palm to be the carrier for the Nova, but it opt out of the deal. Palm then chose Sprint. Amidst the turmoil, Rubinstein and Colligan were committed to launch the Palm Pre by January the following year, 2009.
One of the problems was, Mercer's OS had few believers.
Platform Director, Greg Simon and VP Andy Grignon, thinks they have the answer. They figured they should create a UI layer, using Webkit alone. According to them, using HTML and JavaScript would have a few advantages. The project to bring up WebKit was given the approval, and it was called Luna.
CTO Mitch Allen was replaced by Mike Abbot, and they worked on getting away from Prima.
After a month, Luna was real, it worked. Prima was still challenging Luna, thus Palm often had a bake-off, where both of them will challenge each other in trying to implement key pieces of functionality within a set amount of time.
Before the unveiling during the CES event in January, Colligan, Rubinstein and Duarte practiced all day. Between CES and launch, Palm prevented anyone from touching the phone.
The Pre was launched in June, and had a lot of modifications made up until the end of the year.
Blowfish (WebOS 2.0) was what the engineers wanted from day one, a true-blue Luna, without Java. The previous models still had Prima.
The company then was again trying to secure the Verizon deal. They got it, a large order of Pre Pluses and Pixi Pluses was placed. However, the launch of Motorola Droid caught them completely off guard. Verizon then decided to refuse the shipment on the majority of devices Palm had already manufactured.
Todd Bradley, the CEO of HP, was looking to diversify into the phone industry, he had a soft spot for Palm, since he left it before, so he decided to go on acquiring it for $1.2 billion in April, 2010.
After that, Palm was making the Pre 3, however, suppliers was saying that Apple had already bought parts from them, and if they were to supply parts to Palm, Palm would have to build a new factory for them.
Abbot, who was instrumental in launching the Prima, left for Twitter. Then Duarte left to join Android. He developed the framework for Blowfish, that HP would need to create a webOS tablet, but there was still much to be done.
Hurd, CEO of HP, resigned amidst allegations of misconduct, Palm lost an ally. He was replaced by Lesjak briefly, befor Apotheker took the helm. Leo wanted to transform HP into the next IBM. The Touchpad was due to be introduced in February 2011, but work on it was without the necessary assistance in funding and staff from IBM. Leo wanted it to be cash-flow neutral.
The TouchPad was released in July, and it did not meet its anticipated success. The reasons were not quite clear, some said:
1) Palm decided to go with the 3.0, instead of waiting for the less buggy 3.0.1 or 3.0.2.
2) HP refused to subsidize it.
Six weeks after the launch of TouchPad, Leo announced that the product will be discontinued.
Meg Whitman, the new CEO decided to open source the webOS.
Several Palm products delivered it success, like the Pilot, Palm III, Palm V and the Treo series.
Ed Colligen, CEO of Palm. He initially believed Palm had what it takes to beat the rumored Apple phone.
When the Iphone was launched, Palm didn't realize yet the potential of the product. At the time, Appstore hasn't yet been launched. The success of the Centro, dulled Palm's sense of urgency.
Paul Mercer
He had been an engineer at Apple, and later founded his own company, Tacit Software, later becoming Pixo. Pixo would later be acquired by Sun. Mercer had left earlier in 2000 to form another company Iventor, that advertised many of the same service that Pixo does.
Mitch Allen, Palm's CTO. Palm didn't have a UI layer, so Colligan decided to recruit a few of Iventor's employees, including Mercer, in 2007. In the 3rd quarter of the same year, Palm bought Iventor.
Meanwhile, another company, Elevation Partners, decided to infuse Palm with $325 million cash. Palm also recruited Apple SVP Jon Rubinstein, to serve as executive chairman. He retired from Apple a year before.
After the iPhone was making successes, Rubinstein started to contact his peers in Apple, to see if they wanted to meet new challenges in producing the next blockbuster products. Several followed, such as Andy Grignon, Rob Tsuk and Rich Dellinger.
Matias Duarte, who was from Helio, and before that from Danger, was tasked to lead with Palm's UI design. Mike Abbot was recruited from Microsoft, to run the software team.
Jobs met with Colligan to ask him to stop recruiting people from Apple, Colligan rejected him.
Duarte,
Verizon was initialy tapped by Palm to be the carrier for the Nova, but it opt out of the deal. Palm then chose Sprint. Amidst the turmoil, Rubinstein and Colligan were committed to launch the Palm Pre by January the following year, 2009.
One of the problems was, Mercer's OS had few believers.
Platform Director, Greg Simon and VP Andy Grignon, thinks they have the answer. They figured they should create a UI layer, using Webkit alone. According to them, using HTML and JavaScript would have a few advantages. The project to bring up WebKit was given the approval, and it was called Luna.
CTO Mitch Allen was replaced by Mike Abbot, and they worked on getting away from Prima.
After a month, Luna was real, it worked. Prima was still challenging Luna, thus Palm often had a bake-off, where both of them will challenge each other in trying to implement key pieces of functionality within a set amount of time.
Before the unveiling during the CES event in January, Colligan, Rubinstein and Duarte practiced all day. Between CES and launch, Palm prevented anyone from touching the phone.
The Pre was launched in June, and had a lot of modifications made up until the end of the year.
Blowfish (WebOS 2.0) was what the engineers wanted from day one, a true-blue Luna, without Java. The previous models still had Prima.
The company then was again trying to secure the Verizon deal. They got it, a large order of Pre Pluses and Pixi Pluses was placed. However, the launch of Motorola Droid caught them completely off guard. Verizon then decided to refuse the shipment on the majority of devices Palm had already manufactured.
Todd Bradley, the CEO of HP, was looking to diversify into the phone industry, he had a soft spot for Palm, since he left it before, so he decided to go on acquiring it for $1.2 billion in April, 2010.
After that, Palm was making the Pre 3, however, suppliers was saying that Apple had already bought parts from them, and if they were to supply parts to Palm, Palm would have to build a new factory for them.
Abbot, who was instrumental in launching the Prima, left for Twitter. Then Duarte left to join Android. He developed the framework for Blowfish, that HP would need to create a webOS tablet, but there was still much to be done.
Hurd, CEO of HP, resigned amidst allegations of misconduct, Palm lost an ally. He was replaced by Lesjak briefly, befor Apotheker took the helm. Leo wanted to transform HP into the next IBM. The Touchpad was due to be introduced in February 2011, but work on it was without the necessary assistance in funding and staff from IBM. Leo wanted it to be cash-flow neutral.
The TouchPad was released in July, and it did not meet its anticipated success. The reasons were not quite clear, some said:
1) Palm decided to go with the 3.0, instead of waiting for the less buggy 3.0.1 or 3.0.2.
2) HP refused to subsidize it.
Six weeks after the launch of TouchPad, Leo announced that the product will be discontinued.
Meg Whitman, the new CEO decided to open source the webOS.
Comments
Post a Comment