Palm's Rubinstein Says He Helped Save Dying Apple, Will Help Save Palm

From DailyTech: Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was once the hottest executive at Apple, co-inventing the iPod, Apple's bestselling product of the last decade. Now he leads a troubled competitor to Apple in the mobile devices sphere and much of the glamor that surrounded the top executive has vanished.

Palm is struggling. Its smartphones are selling poorly and it just slipped to fourth place behind a charging Google, an ever-present Apple, and heavily entrenched market leader Research In Motion. Palm has a warehouse full of unsold phones and it will likely take up to a year to move the back inventory. By then the phones will have to be sold at a fraction of their production cost as the technology will be dated.

Still, Rubenstein is optimistic. In an interview with Fortune's BrainStorm Tech, he states, "Clearly we've hit a speed bump. No question about it. It’s really disappointing, and it's frustrating. But, the company has tremendous assets. We've got a great team we've built over the last couple of years. Remember this whole thing was a transformation story. It wasn't like we took something that was working and didn't run it well. We started off with a company that had no future, and we have been transforming it. We have arguably the best mobile operating system out there. It’s clearly the easiest to use and has the most intuitive user interface. We've got good products that get critical acclaim. It's in its early stages still, but we've got great quality of apps, and new apps coming all the time. By the time you get this published, we'll have commerce going in Europe, which is a big milestone for us. We've got good relationships with carriers."

He adds, "We do have $590 million in the bank, and we have a plan that carries this company forward. Now, we need to be frugal and we need to invest in those areas that have the best return for us, but when I read that we're going out of business or our stock is worth zero or those kinds of things, it defies logic to me."

He takes the blame for the company's shortcomings -- hardware problems with the initial Sprint deployment of the Palm Pre and lack of training for Verizon salespeople for the winter's Palm Pre Plus rollout. But he says he and his staff have learned from those mistakes.

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