Former Palm CEO: Selling Palm to HP was a Waste

From DailyTech: Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said that selling Palm to Hewlett-Packard (HP) was a "waste," considering Palm's technologies are now seen in today's most popular devices.

Rubinstein told FierceWireless in an interview that Palm's innovative technologies were lost in the sale to HP, and he would reconsider the Palm/HP sale if he could go back in time.

"I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure," said Rubinstein. "Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?"

Rubinstein added that Palm's technologies, like multitasking and Synergy, are now seen in mobile operating systems like iOS, Android and Windows Phone. He said it's even said in desktop operating systems like Mac OS X. Palm may have been ahead of its time.

"It's not just mobile platforms," said Rubinstein. "If you look at the notifications on Mac OS X, it looks just like webOS, too. We did a lot of things that were very, very innovative. Obviously, multitasking, notifications, Synergy, how we handled the multiple cards… Our over-the-air updates and mechanism has been updated by everybody. Our whole Synergy concept is now becoming much more common. I don't think anyone has implemented it as well as we did yet, but clearly they're all heading down that direction."

For those who need a refresher, Palm was an American smartphone manufacturer founded in 1992. During its time, the California-based company developed smartphones like the Pre, Pixi, Treo and Centro. It later released its one and only tablet, the TouchPad. Older devices ran the Palm OS Garnet operating system, but webOS was introduced as a replacement in 2009.

View: Article @ Source Site