Tag Archives: Steve Jobs

Life and death of the TouchPad

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English: Jon Rubenstein introduces new HP Touc...

Jon Rubinstein announces the HP TouchPad in February 2007

HP paid $1.2 billion to purchase Palm to get its WebOS operating system designed for handheld devices. HP then launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS. But after less than seven weeks on the market, HP killed the TouchPad, and open-sourced WebOS.

The New York Times offers some explanations for this expensive failure.

WebOS turned out to be something of a toxic asset. Several former Palm and H.P. employees involved in WebOS say that there was little hope for the software from the beginning, because the way it was built was so deeply flawed.

“Palm was ahead of its time in trying to build a phone software platform using Web technology, and we just weren’t able to execute such an ambitious and breakthrough design,” said Paul Mercer, former senior director of software at Palm, who oversaw the interface design of WebOS and recruited crucial members of the team. “Perhaps it never could have been executed because the technology wasn’t there yet.”

Who knows whether the report is accurate or actually includes all the major factors involved. But it is certainly a cautionary tale for others attempting to launch a high end attack on Apple’s iPad or even Android.

The fact is that Apple created its mobile operating system, iOS, with a very sound foundation, somewhat based on OS X, and it has been refining and polishing iOS for five years now, since its original announcement by Steve Jobs in January 2007.  At the time, Steve Jobs said “iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone.” He was right.

Take a look at this part of the 2007 iPhone launch event and think about the mobile phones we all used back then and what we are using today. This announcement is probably Steve Jobs’ best-ever product launch. Here is the opening segment.

Adobe stops development of mobile Flash

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Here.

Once again, a Steve Jobs was correct.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

More from MG Siegler.

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The real genius of Steve Jobs

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Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the current issue of The New Yorker, believes that the real power of Steve Jobs came from his ability to look at the existing technology and “tweak” it to make it more attractive and more useful. One example:

Jobs’s friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, had a private jet, and he designed its interior with a great deal of care. One day, Jobs decided that he wanted a private jet, too. He studied what Ellison had done. Then he set about to reproduce his friend’s design in its entirety—the same jet, the same reconfiguration, the same doors between the cabins. Actually, not in its entirety. Ellison’s jet “had a door between cabins with an open button and a close button,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs insisted that his have a single button that toggled. He didn’t like the polished stainless steel of the buttons, so he had them replaced with brushed metal ones.” Having hired Ellison’s designer, “pretty soon he was driving her crazy.” Of course he was. The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies—his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness—in the service of perfection. “I look at his airplane and mine,” Ellison says, “and everything he changed was better.”

I think there is a lot of support for this position. Steve Jobs repeatedly looked to current or near future technology and chose the best way to leverage those technologies for customer satisfaction. He never added a technology to his devices just to be able to claim that the device had a certain functionality. He added technology when it was ready and only if it increased the value of the device to the average user. This is why almost all Apple product marketing eschews long lists of technical specifications and relies on the emotional impact to the user.

Mona Simpson and her brother

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Mona Simpson has published a deeply moving eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs.

Excerpt:

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Tech quote of the day

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Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.

– Bill Gates, in response to a claim by Steve Jobs that Windows software was a rip-off of the Mac, as reported in the new book Steve Jobs.