Posted By: Ryan Kairer Tuesday, June 05, 2012 11:59:16 AM
The Verge has published an excellent insiders look into the “death of Palm and webOS.” The well researched article looks back at Palm’s efforts to revive the platform and companies fortunes in the last five years of its existence.
The piece, which includes quotes and commentary from a number of former Palm employees and engineers, primarily focuses on the efforts of building and launching webOS and the ensuing struggle to market.
History has proven that tossing out a familiar platform that prints money for your business and starting anew isn’t easy: just ask Apple and Microsoft, whose next-generation desktop operating systems in the 1990s (codenamed “Copland” and “Cairo,” respectively) floundered aimlessly for years before being replaced with other initiatives. The politics of a mobile platform are no different. The entire process can quickly devolve into a holy war, it turns out, never mind the risk of alienating your users and third-party developers — the very people by whom any platform is ultimately made or broken.
