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. Apple has unveiled the latest iPhone, and it seems that millions of people will choose to upgrade without even looking at competitor products. However, in 2009, one company believed it had created a truly better product and took on Apple head-on. It is the new Palm Pre quietly ended his retirement and returned to save a company that was already being shunned by the industry. That company was Palm. At the same event, Palm's designer, Matthias du Arte, demonstrated Palm Free. He opened the app, swiped it with his thumb,
and put another app in its place. Several apps were all running and stacked on top of each other like a deck of cards. The audience could not believe that this works on a mobile phone. And today, that gesture has become one of the most automated actions on mobile phones. Billions of people use this motion every day, but almost all of them 18 months before the iPhone could run two apps simultaneously, and 8 years before the iPhone 10 built its entire navigation around this feature. All of this ran on Palm's own software, webOS, which was far ahead of its time.
However, despite this leading start, the company disappeared, was sold, dissolved, and forgotten in just two and a half years. However, Web OS has not actually disappeared completely. It is highly likely that webOS is running on your living room smart TV right now, but came from. This is the story of a mobile phone company that threatened Apple with a better idea and. Now, I will tell you the story. You are currently watching ColdFusion TV. The iPhone was released in 2007, so it is already nearly 20 years old. It's really hard to believe. However, was the first smartphone to combine a capacitive touchscreen with true multi-touch, pinch, zoom, and scroll capabilities. It was a
truly innovative feature for that time. However, the iPhone actually did not support multitasking. I could only do one task at a time. It was a method where the app would be displayed across the entire screen when opened, and close when the home button was pressed. Apple Steve Jobs later explained the reason as follows. It is easy to implement this in a way that shortens battery life. Apple chose not to do it if it could not implement it properly. Other smartphones were also technically capable of multitasking. It was just like knowing that a car can drive through the windows. Then, in January 2009 at CES, Palm unveiled something completely different.
Today, Palm Pre and a new operating system, Palm webOS, were unveiled. Yes, the Palm Free feels great in the hand thanks to its soft, rounded edges. It is equipped with a capacitive touch panel for gesture recognition, and the gesture area extends to the bottom of the screen. You can perform various key gestures by swiping left or right. One of the most important features is multitasking. You can open and run multiple apps simultaneously. You can switch between apps just by flipping through them like cards. In the past, there was a small physical button that performed the same function, but the Palm Free's gesture function worked perfectly even without a button.
The iPhone didn't support this feature. The card-style app switching feature didn't appear until 2013, when iOS 7 was released- that is, four years later-and even then, you had to press the Home button twice The gesture of swiping up on the screen itself did not appear until the iPhone 10 in 2017. Palm is essentially nearly 10 years ahead. Two weeks after CES ended, Apple's Chief Operating Officer (COO) Tim Cook was asked how the iPhone would maintain its competitive edge. His answer was a warning. If another company steals our intellectual property rights, we will directly about Palm Pre, he did not mention the product name, but reiterated his position. Apple was so flustered that it threatened to publicly file a patent lawsuit against a company
in Silicon Valley that it had already given up on Going back 17 years, there was a man in Silicon Valley who put a block of wood in his shirt pocket and pretended to be a computer He was neither crazy nor out of his mind, but a man named Jeff Hawkins was conducting an interesting experiment Hawkins spent years developing pen computers at Grid and watched as the two most popular portable devices of the time, the Apple Newton and his own company's Zuma, failed because they tried to pack too many features So in January 1992,
as he founded Palm Computing, he established a single rule. The goal was to carved a wooden block to the size of the device he had in mind. I carved chopsticks into a stylus and carried it in my pocket for a few weeks, pretending to check the calendar. That wooden block became the blueprint. The Palm Pilot was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, worked in a few seconds, and performed 4 functions very well instead of clumsily performing 40 functions. It was not a phone, but a simple schedule management tool. The Palm Pilot, released in 1996, was a huge success
. Although it sold faster than the Sony Walkman, that success was not solely the work of Hawkins. Donna Dubinski, a former Apple executive, joined Palm as president and CEO in 1992. The following year, Ed Colligan took charge of marketing , and the three of them transformed the Palm Pilot. In 1995, Palm was sold to modem manufacturer US Robotics for $44 million to raise manufacturing funds. The product was launched the following year, and the year after that, US Robotics was acquired by 3Com, a giant in the network industry, for $6.6 billion. Although Palm became a subsidiary of a subsidiary, its growth did not falter. Surprisingly, in 2000, Palm came to hold 65% of the portable device market
. When 3M spun off Palm in March of that year, investors flocked in. The initial stock price of $38 soared to $165 and closed near $95. The market capitalization was approximately $53 billion, higher than General Motors, McDonald's, and 3Com, which still owned a 94% stake. However, that was the peak achieved after eight years of effort, and it did not last long. Eight days after Palm's IPO, the dot-com bubble collapsed, and Palm 's stock price plummeted along with all other stocks. The market capitalization, which was $53 billion, fell to $1 billion in 2002. In other words, 98% of Palm's value disappeared in two years. However, the real wound was not the stock market crash
. The real issue was how 3Com treated the three people who actually built the farm two years ago. In 1998, Palm's three pioneers, Hawkins, Dubinski, and Colligan, asked the 3Com CEO to spin off Palm into an independent company. The 3Com CEO refused. So they left the company and founded a company called Handspring. The new company acquired a license for Palm's operating system and that strategy was successful. Colligan later said, "We secured a 20% market share in an instant." So, Palm sold its top talent to the competitor it had created, and although it subsequently suffered billions of dollars in losses due to the economic crisis, the market continued to operate without them. BlackBerry put wireless email in every executive's pocket, and
Microsoft licensed Windows Mobile to anyone who wanted it Nokia sold mobile phones that included most of Palm's features, plus calling capabilities. Handspring, spun off by Palm's trio of founders, launched the Treo in 2002. It was a product that packed email, a keyboard, and proper organizer functions into a single mobile phone. By the end of the year, over 50,000 units were sold per quarter. Returning to Palm, the situation had become complicated. In 2003, it split into the hardware division Palm One and the software division Palm Source, and it took several years to merge them back. Then, it
lost and regained the rights to the company name, and its operating system was sold to a Japanese company called Access before regaining full control in 2006. However, amidst all this turmoil, Palm One completely acquired Handspring as well. I did. Hawkins, Colligan, and Dubinski returned to the farm, and brought the trio along as well. This product, renamed Palm Trio, kept the company afloat until the mid-2000s, but its underlying software, Palm OS, was not properly revamped for years. Multitasking was impossible, and usability was poor. Palm was aware of this fact, but did not have the resources to release alternative software
. Then, in November 2006, a reporter asked Colligan, who was the CEO of Palm at the time, what he thought about the rumors that Apple was developing a mobile phone. He dismissed this. PC manufacturers do not understand mobile phones , and it was said that there is no way they would suddenly jump into the mobile phone market There's no way they would just show up. He said. Seven weeks later, Steve Jobs appeared. On January 9, 2007, Jobs took the Macworld stage and unveiled the iPhone. Pam witnessed this, but he could not afford to watch how great the damage would become. We needed someone who understood Apple's way of thinking. On June 1, 2007, a private equity firm called Elevation Partners agreed to invest $325 million in Palm and
secure a 25% stake, but there was one condition. It was to recruit the new management, John Rubinstein. He left Apple a year ago and was building a house in Mexico when he received an offer from Elevation and accepted the position of chairman. However, before he could even officially start his work, the conflict escalated into a personal dispute. In August 2007, Steve Jobs called Colligan directly and proposed that they agree not to hire each other's employees And then he added the following remarks, which clearly showed how the upcoming fight would unfold well aware of the imbalance in financial resources between our two companies But Palm never gave up. Rubens Tyne moved quickly.
First, it got rid of the $600 laptop accessory Foleo, which was announced in May 2007. It was canceled in September of that year, even before it was released. Second, he developed communication devices called Danger Sidekick and Helio Du Arte joined in September 2007 and took charge of the design of a device that did not even exist yet. Rubens-Teen's official role began in October of that year. Du Arte 's team worked for 16 months without making any public statements leading up to their appearance on the CES stage. They completely discarded Palm's existing software kernel and installed underneath, and the entire interface was written in web code, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
theoretically enabling any web developer in the world to create apps. And they named this operating system Web OS. This was an unusual and dangerous gamble for that time. It was 2008, but that year was also the right year. On January 8, 2009, Ruben Stein took the stage to unveil the product that was born after 16 months of effort and silence. The Palm Pre was released on June 6, 2009. It was equipped with the very software that was unveiled at CES five months ago and caused a huge sensation. However, there were a few problems. It was released by only one carrier, Sprint, and did not provide an extensive network like AT&T or Verizon launch the service. Web OS itself was excellent.
Critics described Web OS as a sophisticated and ahead-of-its-time operating system. It was exactly the look Pam had promised in January. However, the problem was everything else. The hardware failed to properly implement the functions required by the software. The memory card was lagging and the app took a long time to load. Palm created an operating system suited for the mobile phone they wanted to make, but they had to develop the phone within the actual budget. And the app catalog was also a problem.
Palm did not release developer tools for several months, so the App Store could not operate properly. Palm started with just 18 apps. On the other hand, Apple's App Store launched with over 500 apps, and by the summer of 2009, it had tens of thousands of apps . Marketing actually made the situation worse. " My life, like all of ours, is made up of countless other lives. The lives of my family, the lives of my friends. My cell phone can read my mind." I got goosebumps at first. Because the phone acted exactly as I wanted before I even asked. My cell phone can read my mind. I used to say this to strangers standing in line Do you realize you're crazy?" "Of course, sir." Well, the attempt was good, but the advertisement only confused the viewers
. Far from properly demonstrating the functions of the mobile phone or By the time the hardware improved and caught up later, the opportunity had already been missed. In 2010, Palm was put up for sale again. HP (Hewlett-Packard) acquired Palm in April. $1.2 billion. HP 's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Phil McKinney, personally sealed this deal on the board. He was convinced that webOS was the best mobile technology he had ever seen One month after the deal was finalized, the HP CEO resigned due to a personal corruption scandal. His successor, Leo Apotheker,
came from the enterprise software giant SAP and had released the webOS tablet TouchPad on July 1, 2011, despite Apotheker himself having a skeptical view of the hardware business he had inherited. 270,000 units were shipped at a price of $499, but only 25,000 of the units supplied to stores were sold. It was a devastating failure. Eventually, Apotheker completely scrapped webOS just 49 days after its launch. He announced this fact during a briefing . And 35 days later, I was fired. McKinney, the CTO who originally made this deal happen, remained in his position That decision was made to him while he was recovering from surgery. He returned to his colleagues and said, "I can never take a vacation now." He
said. A few years later, someone asked Rubens Tyne if selling to HP was the right decision. He replied that the transaction itself was a waste. In 2013, LG quietly acquired the remainder of webOS. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but LG did not want another mobile phone. I wanted to improve the Smart TVs that were terrible at the time. Matthias du Arte's card interface was developed for mobile phones that no one was buying, but it became an excellent foundation for TV screens that could be viewed briefly while sitting on the sofa Personally, I bought an LG TV about 10 years ago. This TV equipped with webOS was stable, smooth, and reliable. It still works well even after being completely submerged in water. But that is an
old story. Unfortunately, the recently released webOS TV is quite slow and full of ads, and what is more serious is that it has been revealed that LG TVs collected user information. So, that is one aspect as well. However, on the positive side, LG process of that software being installed on the TV is an interesting story. Palm invented an idea that is installed in billions of smartphones. However, just because you invented technology. Apple dominated the world through its massive financial power, hardware, and the App Store So, the next time you multitask or close an app, keep webOS in mind. I
remember being completely captivated by the concept of being able to search for any information I wanted on the web when I first saw the iPhone and Palm Pre. Now we have virtually infinite information in our pockets. However, having a lot of information for students these days. So I think what Brilliant is doing is really interesting. Brilliant is an interactive learning tool for mathematics and coding designed to help students think for themselves and solve problems. It helps solve the problem itself. Instead of simply providing the correct answer, Brilliant's tutor Koji answers questions, analyzes problems, and guides students to solve them step by step. So instead of guessing, I asked Koji for help. This is exactly my favorite part
. Koji understands what I am doing and, rather than simply solving the problem for me, replace students' thinking skills, but to help them become better learners. You can start Brilliant for free by clicking the link below or scanning the QR code on the screen . Currently, ColdFusion viewers can receive a 20% discount on the annual subscription fee at brilliant.org/coldfusion Thank you for your support, Brilliant. This is this part of the episode. So, what do you all think? What was the real reason for Palm's failure Was it a contract with Sprint? Was it an ad that didn't properly showcase the features? Or was it a company that failed due to management's indifference and lack of time, despite having a good idea? Please
share your thoughts in the comments below. That's all for now. I will see you again in the next episode. have a good day
