A well-written, thoughtful, and diplomatic response by Ed. I wonder if he was a good boss to work for
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In 2007, shortly after Palm announced the Folēo, Peter Rojas of Engadget fame posted a “Dear Palm” letter that called for the Folēo cancelled [1]. A few days later, Ed had forwarded the letter to the executive [2]. A few weeks after that, the Folēo was cancelled [3].
He was probably working with the best information that he had, but going on the friendly advice of tech journalists may not have been the best move. Palm completely missed the boat on the netbook market.
Apple has milked Palm-firsts, like gesture-based UI (Prē) and mobile device mirroring to a computer (Folēo), since then to great success. Oh, what could have been…
[1]https://www.engadget.com/2007-08-21-dear-palm-its-time-for-a...
[2]https://web.archive.org/web/20071012033705/http://blog.palm....
[3]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/09/palm-abruptly-cancel...
I agree with the criticism though, the Foleo looked like some kind of internet appliance anachronism straight out of 1998. I was fully on board the Palm train too (rip Pre)
I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.
I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence.
PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight.
The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser.
The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it.
Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software.
Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.
> heir next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me)
It was called Cobalt.
I moved across the country to work for Palm on a secret project which was revealed to be the Foleo only after I started. I spent a year trying to make the web browser with a totally broken engine they had licensed from Access. Having blown their budget of 100k on the engine they were determined to stick with it. I was amused when it was announced and then canceled after I quit.
I was a developer at a third party developer writing Foleo software and I always wondered what was going on on the other side of the wall. The rumour I was told for the cause of all the delays was that some executive had decided the screen was too low resolution way too late in the project and everything had to be redesigned.
Released a year or two earlier they might have been decent devices, IMHO.
But the Foleo was by all accounts a bad device (when Palm enthusiasts were able to use obtain nearly final release Foleo’s years later, this was vindicated by even the most strident of Palm fanboys). The price was ridiculous ($600 before a $100 introductory rebate) for a thing that also required a $400 or $500 phone to work.
It wasn’t a netbook at all, it was a thin client for an extremely underpowered mobile phone with a very outdated operating system.
Ignoring for a moment that the netbook craze was extremely short-lived and largely a placeholder for what people really wanted (sub $500 laptops), no attempt at any of these sorts of companion devices has ever achieved critical mass and Palm was right to cancel a product that wouldn’t have moved the needle. Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me.
Another smart phone pioneer that struggled and was never able to adequately respond to the iPhone did release their own take on the Foleo. It was called the BlackBerry Playbook and it was an absolutely terrible tablet and a colossal failure.
Canceling Foleo in 2007 was prudent. It is a shame the post-Colligan Palm was never able to find success; webOS had many great ideas. But the Palm Foleo was a product that absolutely did not need to exist.
> Why Samsung even bothers maintaining DeX mode is beyond me.
It's not for everyone but for the ones that appreciate it it's a really powerful feature. I work whole days in DeX. I have docks at work, at home, at family where I stay a lot.
Not needing to drag a laptop around is amazing. I have both a personal and work VDI for when I really need it but 95% of the time I just work in Android with DeX.
It's definitely the #1 reason I buy Samsung
I was really looking forward to the foleo actually. Most likely would have purchased one.
These are not stream of conciouness emails. Almost certainly lawyers reviewed or drafted it, or edited it, or suggested edits or he knew how to write a good negotiation email. This ain't necessarily how he talks to his team.
It's not that it was written off the cuff, it's that it holds up nearly 20 years later as a measured, ethical response to having his company threatened. And this email wouldn't even be public if it hadn't been evidence in court proceedings
It is strategic. You can only look at it through that lens. For an ethical measure of a company or exec: see what a company does for the greater good despite it reducing their profit.
It's a shame capitalism doesn't reward any of that, but instead rewards (in the industry he was CEO in) putting product in consumer's hands. He stood on principal and his ultimate reward for that call (in the absence of any regulatory enforcement against what Apple aimed to do here) was iPhone beat out PalmPilots.
Oh well.
On the plus side, looks like he's having some success with what he's doing now.
You make it sound like doing the right thing caused the downfall of Palm but I don't think there's any evidence of that. Being evil doesn't automatically make your products better.
I think the point is that being evil (especially in illegal ways) should be discouraged by society _regardless_ of whether it's successful. The issue isn't that this specific good guy lost, it's that the bad guy faced no repercussions. If this good guy still wouldn't have won, there still could have been a different good guy to come along.
Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel paid a $415M settlement for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
That is just cost of business. I like the EU approach but the US will never adopt it. Scale the fines up to percentages of global revenue. That would definitely stifle some of these abuses.
In other words, Apple only got a slap on the wrist.
I mean, they did face repercussions.
The DoJ reached settlements with 8 different companies and there was a civil penalty too. Whether the repercussions were enough is a valid question, but Jobs was dead by the time the civil action was ruled on and on medical leave when the DoJ settlement in 2011 took place, so it’s hard to play a “what if” game here — especially since these lawsuits and DoJ investigations (correctly) caused tech companies to have to change their policies.
But Apple’s egregious no-poach agreements and collusion with other companies to do the same didn’t cause Palm’s collapse. And being able to more easily hire Apple employees wouldn’t have saved Palm.
The repercussions Apple faced were essentially insignificant to them as a company. The money they had to pay was a drop in the bucket, and having to stop doing something illegal is not a punishment for the illegal thing; it's literally what everyone who didn't do anything illegal has already been doing the whole time!
As I said before, the issue to me isn't whether Palm would have been successful without the illegal activity, it's whether Apple would have been as successful as they were.
The way he has an impact is over time by praising his response for the next generation.
Steve was wrong, America is better when employees are free.
It'd be cool if the mechanisms by which companies are rewarded and punished reflected that idea.
Steve's company is now one of the three largest in the US. The other one was bought out. The lesson from history seems to be "you can have a little illegal non-compete. As a treat."
There are about a billion other reasons why Apple is so successful today. It really has nothing to do with the illegal non-compete, considering most of its astronomical growth came post-Steve, something most people fail to understand.
Well, one’s customers were his employees and the other was the world.
I suspect his ultimate reward for the call was sticking to his integrity, and knowing that his integrity cannot be compromised by a bully. Some people prefer that to money or fame. Agreed it would be nice if capitalism saw that as a positive and not a hindrance.