A Brief Appraisal of the Mobile OS Market: webOS Edition at 12:00 AM

Gone through iOS and Android, and while webOS is certainly not #3 in marketshare, it's still #1 in my heart.

First, a brief history.  Well it's not really that brief.  Palm basically pioneered the first mobile devices in the PDA (non-cell phone) space.  When it came to the transition to phones, they did well for awhile.  Microsoft also had strong contenders, more power and a familiar operating system experience.

And then Apple came along with their fancy capacitive touch screens and finger friendly OS.

A year or two after Apple started doing its thing, Palm, having gone through several corporate transitions (divesting itself of its hardware divisions, getting back into the hardware game, etc.) decided they were going to come out with a new OS from the ground up.  They decided it was going to be built on web standards.  Application development was going to be easy.  You could multitask.  It was going to be finger friendly.

As it turns out, they delivered.  In almost every way, webOS is a superior experience to iOS and Android.  It's intuitive and powerful.  It's also extremely open to customization by third parties.

Here's where Palm failed though: marketing.  If you saw any of their earlier ads with the creepy Palm lady, you would know exactly where I'm coming from, and the marketing only got worse from there.

First of all, they had an exclusivity agreement with Sprint for the first six months.  They had a lot of success on Sprint, but it was a mistake signing on exclusively with a third place carrier which was suffering from its own issues (poor customer service and an ill-advised Nextel acquisition).

Verizon comes along to start selling the Pre (Palm's first webOS phone) and pretty much fumbles the launch.  Simple enough reason too: the Motorola Droid came out at almost the exact same time.  Verizon had a better agreement with Motorola and store reps were too busy focusing on Android.  Plus, Google and Motorola actually know how to run an advertising campaign with good branding.

The launch on AT&T was only marginally better a few months later.  The marketing was also only marginally better.  And it was at this point, that with Google coming out with gorgeous new hardware and superphones, and Palm still running the same, dated, old equipment that Apple came out with their next revision.

Palm was too slow to react, and all of their differentiators were pretty much gone and/or ignored.  So they had to sell themselves, and did so to HP.  There were eight different suitors for Palm, but HP had the highest offer and won the sweepstakes.

What does an acquisition do?  Slows the product cycle down even further.  It took them over a year and a half to finally release a new revision of their hardware.  Problem was it was just barely current from a specification standpoint.  Palm's marketshare continued to drop and they became less relevant.  Less marketshare means less mindshare, which means less application support.

How many applications are out there for iOS and Android?  Hundreds of thousands each.  Palm?  Five thousand.  Now it doesn't matter that probably 60% of those applications are complete and utter crap (seriously, how many fart applications does a guy need?).  But there are also a lot of good, well written applications out there for the other platforms.  Why would you go after a platform with roughly three percent of the installed base of a competing platform?

Exactly.

So that's an appraisal of where they are.  Where are they going?

HP has a lot of cash.  Based on the spending spree they've been going on, it's quite the war chest.  What they want to be more like is Apple.  Proprietary systems, their own in-house operating system running on all of HP's hardware.  Everything from HP printers to phones to tablets to PCs.  Lest we forget, HP has the largest marketshare in PC sales and printer sales.

Can they out-Apple Apple?  Hell no, at least not while Steve Jobs is still around.  But they're sure going to have a good try at it.

In eleven days they're coming out with their first new phone in a different form factor in six months.  Problem is it's only on AT&T and it's still barely adequate from a specifications standpoint.  Cheap though at $99.  The next new phone is the Pre3, the third revision of Palm's flagship.  It's going to be one hell of a powerful phone too.  Not a dual core monster, but it's clocked faster than anything else out there, with an OS optimized for that speed.  But where HP is really going to need to make moves is in the tablet market which happens to still have some competition left in it.

What's really cool about what they're going to try to do is complete integration across all of their product lines.  The printers, phones and tablets will all work together.  Want to make a video call?  Use your tablet to make a call via your cell phone.  Want to transfer a bunch of open web pages or applications from your phone to your tablet?  Touch one with the other and it gets transferred automagically.

Not to mention that the tablet is extremely powerful in its own right with a dual core processor and quite impressive graphics.

But what about the big weakness of webOS: application support?  HPs war chest will come in handy there as well.  They've created a new application SDK that allows users to create applications across all of their products seamlessly (also adjusting for different resolutions with minimal fuss), and once again with open web technologies.  Furthermore, they're planning on sending developer ninja teams (for lack of a better term) out to various sites as needed to get application development kick-started.  They get out there and help developers get started and then turn everything over to them and let them manage it for free.

What's really unique about HP is how they embrace the homebrew community, to the point where they've donated server equipment to the community to allow them to host patches and applications.  At this point, HP's going to do whatever they can to build some support behind webOS.

They definitely have a superior operating system.  Multitasking, usability, independent support, good hardware that's coming out, product integration.  What they're lacking is developer support.

So they're going to try to pull an Apple.  I don't see much success in the approach, mainly because Apple's already done it, and they don't have Apple's marketing.  But they're sure going to try, and I'll likely end up with an HP tablet and phone in the future.