I joined just before the Pre launch straight out of university so at the time I was still very very green and didn’t have special insights. I think there were three main challenges. The first is we bet wrong on 2 strategic directions: physical keyboards (blinded because of history / Blackberry making us think it was an important market segment that would resist Apple) and screen size (trying to zig and capture value while the market zagged to chase volume). There were knock on effects for sliding keyboards (more complex manufacturing, more RMAs because of defects in the keyboard, higher cost, etc etc). The screen size probably hurt a lot because while most people would love a smaller form factor, the larger screen is more addictive in terms of media consumption, games, large text for older people. Apple made this mistake too btw and lagged a bit the Android competitors that pushed screens yet larger, but they adjusted quick and they had a huge war chest by that time.
It was recoverable and if I recall correctly we had no keyboard prototypes with larger displays floating around but we failed to prioritize that properly / probably limited volume to shift from the Pre design after one year because of the upfront investment we’d have had to have made for the lines. Palm Pixi sacrificed the sliding aspect of the keyboard (typically candy bar) but went with a smaller screen with fight the actual market direction.
The second big factor in the downfall I think was our ads. Verizon totally fucked up our advertising further (positioning the Palm phones as “for moms” in extremely sexist advertisements). I wish I could say this was Verizon’s fault since they actually had control of the co-branded advertisements if I recall correctly. Anyone remembering the travesty of those original Pre ads though will know it was a disaster. Worse - the Jon at an all hands was all gung ho about it. Wasn’t sure if there was just no steering the ship because of budget or something and he was just trying to salvage it, but regardless those ads went out. High concept is fine for an art class. Not for smartphones without any hype and the general public inundated with smartphone = iPhone, android was “that knockoff iPhone”, and Blackberry was “the phone they make me use at work”. No one knew palm and our ads did a poor job articulating that to the general public, especially since we didn’t have the hype machine that iOS did (not that they needed it - they had really top notch pr/marketing/advertising people in the wake of the desktop OS wars and then the iPod rocket ship). Btw, Android failed at countering Apple’s marketing until Sony cracked it many years later: copy Apple almost to the letter in design, create clear descriptive messaging that explains what’s better about your phone (or at least equal), and take away Apple’s “coolness” by commoditizing as much of the phone as possible. This was many years later though.
Side note: a girl I went on a first date with mentioned she loved the Pixi because of the smaller design. Maybe this was just trying to connect with me about my work, but I maybe it was also a missed opportunity on a niche beachhead market segment: second phone for women to put in a clutch for the night out which you could also use as a “phone for your kids”. The second one is particularly valuable but if you want to learn more read about how the companies carefully track how chat and social media apps do with kids and will sacrifice adoption with older generations to protect that - today’s kids are tomorrows yuppies with disposable income.
Finally something went horribly wrong with the Verizon deal. I don’t know what actually happened but it turned out that Palm somehow ended up on the hook for all unsold phone inventory on our books while Verizon forced us to premanufacture a ton (our leadership got overly excited and made too much without thinking through the consequences? Not sure). This was also around the time that Apple had ended their AT&T exclusivity and started shipping on Verizon. Did Apple strongarm Verizon into screwing Palm over in retaliation to this non compete stuff? We certainly were poaching very hard from Apple. Still, even if they did put the nail in the coffin (which I doubt because it just wouldn’t be worth it for the minnow that we were), we were clearly making a lot of missteps on the business front.
WebOS itself was also a technical mistake in a way:
1. Web tech was too early. In particular, we were finding and fixing JIT bugs not only in v8 (dedicated team that if I recall correctly was second to Google at the time in size and far more familiar with V8 ARM), but also the CPU (because QCOM had shitty chips at the time and wasn’t bothering to test cache invalidation of dynamically generated code).
2. Performance of web tech was too immature / CPUs were too slow. We were perceived as being slower than Android which was saying something.
3. While no one bats an eye at react native and electron today, the software ecosystem wasn’t as mature which meant apps in our store weren’t very compelling because they just couldn’t do all that much (and then the native SDK basically capitulated to that for games).
However. I don’t see the technical pieces as fatal mistakes in and of themselves. Given time we would have fixed these, brought down memory usage, etc etc. the technical team was phenomenally strong and we recognized technology gaps early and fixed them by iterating (eg Luna bus 2 got replaced DBus with a proprietary implementation that was waaaay better). Still. When you’re competing with Android and iOS at the time, it wasn’t a great spot to be in. On the other hand we were showing off core OS UIs that only now have started catching up a decade later. And even then, it would be close. So all in all probably more of a correct long term bet at the sacrifice of certain near term performance, but one the company wouldn’t live to see validated.
I don’t think it requires Apple doing much if anything out of the ordinary course of normal competition. I’m sure they were more worried about the impact of Chrome and Android. But who knows. Jobs was known for his anger and I doubt anyone will care because ultimately we ended up being a small player dead by the side of the road along with all the others.