Where Palm went wrong

A colleague recently asked me if we should plan to build a WebOS version of our new application, which we’re currently building for iPhone and Android. My answer, sadly, is no. I say sadly, because I own a Palm Pre and I was even part of the early access developer program. I remember being incredibly excited that after 2 years someone had finally gone beyond “look, we can make an iPhone, too!” and shown some real imagination. Say what you will about WebOS, but at least it is different, and I think in some ways superior to the iPhone.

Of course, for all that great engineering, things haven’t quite gone according to plan for our friends at PALM. Lots of people have piled on in the past couple of days, some looking at where Palm goes from here, some looking at how they got to this point (for example, did Palm get here because they don’t have Steve Jobs?).

Well, as much of a fan of Apple (and Jobs) as I am, I’m not sure I subscribe to the idea that a mobile electronics company simply cannot succeed without Steve Jobs at the helm. For me, I keep coming back to two big mistakes that helped to throttle what should have been the best competitor Apple has:

1. The launch date

Palm launched the Pre in Sprint stores on June 6, 2009 (a day that will go down in infamy?). This was on a Saturday, two days before the keynote at WWDC, where Apple introduced the third generation iPhone. Two days. Zero business days. So on Monday the news was all about Apple’s impending announcement, the keynote, and then reaction to the keynote, then reactions to the reactions, and so on. The entire news cycle that you would expect if you’ve ever heard of Apple. Or if you, for example, had worked there.

So, of course, the innovative and very interesting new Palm Pre wasn’t even the first headline in mobile phones, let alone gadgets, for the whole week. And Palm got not nearly the coverage they would have had two weeks later after everyone had come to terms with the fact that the iPhone 3GS didn’t cure cancer. So why release a phone two days before the hottest company in your segment? I presume it was a statement that this phone was so great that it could actually drive the 3GS off the front page. If that’s so, someone should have run that thought by someone outside of Palm. The reality is the public release ended up being entirely forgettable (and forgotten).

(Actually, there is a 1b here, which is Palm’s obsession with Apple. That’s understandable given the history of the people working there. But still probably not smart, given that even as WebOS is arguably better than iPhone OS, it totally blows away other mobile OSes. Perhaps their energy would have been better directed at those other competitors.)

2. The development environment

This is where I think Palm had a great idea that was probably better on paper than in practice. The idea was that if the development environment was Javascript and CSS, then there would be millions of potential WebOS developers, immediately leapfrogging the small number of experienced Objective C developers. In theory, that makes sense. In practice, though, I think what people realized is that most CSS and Javascript work in the world is simple little tricks in webpages. A lot of that work is copy/pasted and evolved from scripts and stylesheets borrowed from around the web. And, so, as a result most web developers have never done anything as complicated as building a full app and don’t even know Javascript to that kind of depth that you need to work with something like Mojo.

So what happened in practice is that Mojo development actually ended up being more daunting for web developers (the target market) than Android development, for example, is to Java developers (their target market). Or that Cocoa development is to someone who knows C. And that’s hard to overcome when you’re competing with the AppStore gold rush. I wonder how this story would have played out if Palm had offered a native kit from the beginning that allowed the easy port of some popular OpenGL games. Or a new framework that looked and felt a lot like Flash, with the target being Flash developers rather than general web developers.

Again, the good news is that the Palm team built a very nice OS, at least from the user’s perspective. And the UI is so much better than the iPhone knockoffs. Licensing WebOS to other handset manufacturers may be a challenge against the essentially cheaper than free Android. But becoming part of Nokia could really save Palm (and probably Nokia as well in the smartphone market).

What do you think? What’s your theory on how such a great smartphone sold so poorly when everyone is talking about and buying smartphones?