Kindle Fire: The Most Divisive Product of 2011

A month after its launch, Amazon’s Kindle Fire continues to be an extraordinarily polarizing product. Lots of people like it and it appears to be flying off the shelves (though it would be nice if Amazon supplied some actual numbers to back up its glowing sales reports.) But a significant element of the tech world has nothing but contempt for the 7″ ereader/tablet.

Kindle Fire photo
Amazon's Kindle Fire

The split in opinion reflects an analytical division that has colored the debate since Amazon announced the Fire in September. Some folks see it as poor (if smaller and much cheaper) version of Apple’s iPad, while others view it as a more limited device dedicated to the consumption of Amazon content, particularly books.

The latest round of discussion was  triggered by a New York Times Business Day article by David Streitfield. The piece leaned heavily on criticisms by usability guru Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, who declared: “I feel the Fire is going to be a failure.” But Nielsen is no great fan of the iPad  either. Though he has praised the hardware design, he has been sharply critical of both iPad apps and web sites optimized for the tablet. And his criticism of the Fire’s display of web pages in a bit odd, that pages designed for a 10″ display don’t work well on a 7″ screen. People who buy a Fire looking for a general-purposed web browser are going to be disappointed.

Streitfield’s article immediately inspired Fire defenders. In a post aptly titled “The Kindle Fire is a Kindle Killer, Not an iPad Killer–That’s Why It Works,” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan wrote:

The Kindle Fire originally disappointed me. While it had the form factor I wanted, it was heavier than I wanted to hold. I’d also grown to love the e-paper format of the regular Kindles. But for the past two weeks, the Kindle Fire has grown to push aside my use of the other Kindles.

Why? For one, the screen is nice and being backlit, I don’t have to purchase a light to read at night. Consider that for the cheapest basic Kindle for $80, you’re going to spend another $60 for a case that integrates a light, if you want to read it at night. That’s $140 right there — getting pretty close to the Kindle Fire’s $200 price and gaining so much more.

The Kindle Fire doesn’t replace my iPad, but it sure has replaced my Kindle Keyboard. That’s the killer factor here. I think the Kindle Fire will pull more and more Kindle users into the tablet world, where for just a little more money, they get books and more — and for a lot less than buying an iPad.

At TechCrunch, John Biggs wrote:

The Kindle Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. It’s made for the mass of men and women who have been looking into this whole tablet business and like what they see. But it is, first and foremost, a reading device and to fault it for not playing Angry Birds well or offering a sub-par Netflix experience is to ignore its primary goal: to inject the concept of Amazon content downloads into a consumer base that is increasingly inundated with video, audio, and ebook sources.

And Technologizer’s Harry McCracken, writing at Cnet, said:

For now, mentioning the first Kindle Fire in the same breath as the Edsel is even more of an overreaction than assuming that it was going to be an instant blockbuster. With tech products, following through on a product’s promise is at least as important as getting things right in the first place–and Amazon, unlike some of its tablet-making rivals, has a strong record when it comes to doing just that.

I’ve been using a Fire for about a month and I mostly am very happy with it. My biggest complain, shared with most users who have written about the Fire, is the relative insensitivity of the touchscreen. To the extent that is a software problem, I hope it will be addressed in an update Amazon told Streitfield to expect in a couple of weeks. Another prime candidate for an update is the rather fidgety nature of the home page that can make it hard to select one item from the ever-growing panel of favorites at the top.

Another urgent item for correction is a point made by many writers and commenters on the Amazon site. As currently configured, the fire has * no parental controls. The built-in one-click ordering lets anyone who picks it up, say your children or a total stranger, order books, videos, or music without any authentication.

The hardware is what it is and there won’t be any change until a second-generation Fire comes along, most likely in the first half of next year. But even then, don’t expect miracles. Amazon’s top priority is keeping the price low, not producing iPad-like near perfection. That means there will continue to be hardware compromises. But it also means that Amazon can continue to address a price-sensitive market  interested primarily in a media consumption tablet.

The Fire will never make folks who know and love the iPad happy. The good news is that it doesn’t have to.

*–The original version said the Fire does not offer a password lock. This was incorrect and I thank Michael Gartenberg for pointing out the error.

 

 

Palm: The End of a Long and Troubled Road

Palm P{ilot photo
The original Palm

I was delighted back in the spring of 2010 when Hewlett-Packard announced it was buying Palm. I’ve been a fan of Palm for 15 years, but throughout its history, the company has always been hamstrung by a lack of adequate financial resources. With mighty HP behind it,  Palm could finally reach its destiny.

I couldn’t imagine that 20 months later, after wasting more than $3 billion, HP would put Palm’s sole remaining asset, the webOS operating system, out at the curb with a “Free to a Good Home” sign around its neck. (I’m sorry, I simply cannot credit HP CEO Meg Whitman’s claim in an interview with The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky that we’d eventually see new HP tablets and smartphones powered by webOS.  If HP meant that, it  wouldn’t have let the webOS team scatter to the winds.)

But if it’s a sad end to the Palm line, it is somehow a fitting one. Palm always  was a company that couldn’t buy a break.

Palm’s  troubles started at the very beginning. Having failed to raise venture capital funding to get the original Palm Pilot manufactured and marketed, founders Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, and Ed Colligan had to sell the company to modem maker U.S. Robotics in 1996. Almost immediately, U.S. Robotics turned around and sold itself to 3Com. It’s not clear that 3Com was more than dimly aware that Palm was part of the deal. It certainly clear that 3Com never had any idea of what to do with it.

Palm was forced to stop using the Palm Pilot brand in a trademark dispute with the Pilot Pen Co.

After founders Dubinsky, Hawkins, and Colligan left in a dispute over strategy, 3Com spun Palm into two companies, PalmOne, which made PDA hardware, and PalmSource, which owned the operating system. The goal was to license Palm software to third parties, but the only really significant licensee it signed was Handspring, the company started by Dubinsky, et. al. PalmOne (which later renamed itself Palm) struggled with constant management turmoil, while PalmSource struggled, mostly without luck, to modernize Palm’s increasingly creaky operating system.

Meanwhile, the crew at Handspring managed to turn the Palm into the first real smartphone, the Treo.  Eventually, in a bity of financial judo, Handspring merged with Palm and the company regains the right to develop its own OS, which by then had been sold to Access, a japanese software company.

Alas, it was really too late. Money was as short as ever and drastic action was needed to save the Palm OS from hopeless obsolence (by this point, Palm was becoming largely an OEM of Windows Mobile phones.)  In 2008, Palm got a $100 million infusion from Roger McNamee’s Silver Lake Partners and former  Apple hardware guru Jon Rubenstein came aboard, eventually as CEO. The new team produced webOS and got it into the Palm Pre, but the hardware never won the accolades the software earned. It was a modest success at best and the money drain continued.

The HP acquisition was supposed to change Palm’s fortunes for good, but of course we know how that turned out. But given the soap opera history, the ending should hardly be a surprise.

Open Source webOS: A Nice Gesture, but a Sad End

In the end, Hewlett-Packard could neither use webOS to gain a foothold in the smartphone and tablet market, nor could it sell the operating system it acquired as part of the $1.2 billion purchase of Palm last year. So it is giving it away, releasing the code and the application framework under an open source license. The sad truth is that we are unlikely to ever again see webOS in a commercially viable smartphone or tablet.

Sad face TouchPadFor webOS to have a real life after HP, some hardware maker would have had to snap it up. But the likeliest suspects, Samsung and HTC, already have their hands full with Android and Windows Phone, and perhaps Windows 8 too. Amazon was a rumored buyer, but it has little interest in taking on a major OS development project; it’s doing just fine with an old version of Android.

The problem is that successful mobile software has to be co-developed with the hardware it runs on. Of the current mobile players, the one pure software company, Google, is getting into hardware with the purchase of Motorola Mobility. And it continues to work intimately with its leading hardware partners on design. Microsoft gives its Windows Phone hardware partners very limited freedom in their design choices. Apple, of course, is the maestro of integrated mobile hardware and software, and it was in an attempt to emulate Apple’s success that HP bought Palm in the first place.

There’s a good reason for this. The mobile user experience depends to a huge degree on how smoothly the hardware and software work together. A huge part of Apple’s success is based on the fact that it and third-party iOS developers know every detail of the very limited variety of devices they write for. In that environment, the hardware and software become one, and this makes for happy users.

Attempts to develop mobile operating systems in isolation have a sorry history. Intel and various partners tried with Moblin, MeeGo, and Tizen and left us with nothing but a pile of odd names.  The LiMo Foundation had no greater success with its attempt to create a mobile Linux.

I’m sure open source webOS will attract a bunch of enthusiastic developers, who will succeed in getting it to run on commodity hardware. But if there were a real chance of getting a product out of this, someone would have shown interest in buying webOS for what I am sure was a bargain-basement price. Instead, they saw a pit full of Pres and TouchPads and 3 billion of HP shareholders’ dollars.

The sad end of webOS is a terrible shame. It was an extremely promising operating system that never really got a chance, hobbled as it was first by the financial weakness of Palm and then by the incompetence and lack of staying power of HP. It deserved much better.

Why Apple Had To Release Siri Half-Baked

Siri has been having a bad week. Gizmodo’s Mat Honan called Apple’s voice-response service “a lie.” Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, who rarely has bad things to say about Apple efforts, said it “isn’t up to Apple’s usual level of fit and finish, not by a long shot.”  And my colleague Patrick Moorhead tweeted that inconsistency was leading him to reduce his use ofSiri screen shot the service.

Hang in there, Pat, Siri needs you. I share the frustrations and annoyances of Siri users, but the only way she’s going to get better.

Here’s what I think is going on, with the usual caveat that Apple only shares its thinking with people it can legally keep from talking about it, leaving the rest of us free to speculate. Apple doesn’t much like public beta testing. Before a major release, Microsoft will typically make a new version of Windows or Office to tens of thousand of users for months,  allowing developers to find and fix most of the bugs. Apple limits beta testing mostly to internal users and selected developers. It can get away with this because the real-world combinations of Mac or iOS hardware and software are orders of magnitude simpler than in the Windows world.

Siri is very different. The artificial intelligence engine behind the service lacks any inherent understanding of language. It has to be trained to make connections, to extract meaning from a semantic jumble. To even get to the databases and search tools Siri uses to answer question, it first must contract a query from the free-form natural language that humans begin mastering long before they can talk, but which machines find daunting. (See Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land post for an excellent analysis of Siri’s struggles with queries about abortion clinics.)

The secret to machine learning is feedback. I expect that Siri carefully logs every failed query, along with what the user does next. And algorithmic analysis of those logs, combined perhaps with some human intervention, means that every mistake contributes to the process of correction. In other words, Siri learns from its errors and the more people use it, the faster it will get better. Benoit Maison has a good explanation of how this works on his blog.

The server-based learning creates a very different situation from the troubled handwriting recognition that helped doom Apple’s Newton 15 years ago (and to which some critics have compared Siri’s troubles.) Newtons were products of a preconnected age, so there was no way for the community of MessagePads to learn from each other’s mistakes. And the extremely limited processing power memory on the Newton itself made the claim that it would learn from its errors an empty promise. The Newton could never get past “egg freckles.”

Now, all of this said, Apple’s approach to Siri is a distinct departure from its usual practice of under-promising and over-delivering. It properly labeled Siri as a “beta” product. But, at the same time, it is using the half-backed feature as a major selling point for the iPhone 4S, hitting it hard in commercials. This is a disservice to customers, who have learned to expect a high polish on Apple products, and has saddled Siri with unreasonably high expectations that now are inspiring a backlash. Apple had to release Siri prematurely to let the learning process go forward. Let’s hope that Apple did not do the service permanent damage with its hype.

 

 

Big Data, Price Discrimination, and Markets

At GigaOm, Derrick Harris has an interesting take on how data analytics are allowing New York landlords to extract maximum rents. It’s a good piece, but I think it just scratches the surface of what is going to become an increasingly important debate about the ethics of big data (where concern until now had focused primarily upon privacy issues.)

Driscrimination in admission prices
A form of price discrimination

Price discrimination is a technical (and value-neutral) term in economics. It refers to sellers charging different prices for a food or service based on factors other than the cost of providing it. In the past, price discrimination was difficult, both because it was difficult, as a practical matter to charge different prices to different customers and because sellers lacked the information they needed to determine a profit-maximizing individual price. Airlines have used discriminatory pricing since deregulation and have gotten increasingly good at it.

But there are a lot of problems inherent in price discrimination. For one thing, it is inherently a distortion of free markets. Efficient markets theory, to the extent that anyone still believes it,  assumes that all participants in a market, buyers and sellers, have equal access to the information that goes into price-setting. Price discrimination, at least as practiced in the real world, depends on the seller having information no available to the buyer. Car dealers could engage in price discrimination because only they knew what the wholesale price of the car really was and what prices were on comparable sales to other customers (a power eroded by the web.) Airlines and hotels have lots of information about available seats or rooms, marginal costs, and expected demand that lets them vary prices profitably.

The growing ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of data, plus the trend to online sales that allow customized price quotes not possible in brick-and-mortar stores, is bound to produce a lot more price discrimination. Is this necessarily bad for consumers? That’s not clear, although there definitely will be winners and losers. It is also sure to produce growing calls for regulating the practice.

 

Windows and ARM: A Fork in the Road

ZDnet reports  that Microsoft has tentatively decided that Windows 8 running on ARM processors will only support new Metro-style applications, not programs written for older versions of Windows and Intel processors.

In one sense, this is not surprising. Existing applications would have to be recompiled to run at all on ARM systems and would probably need substantial tweaking to run well. The ARM systems would probably be mostly tablets, and the existing  Windows desktop interface does not work at all well on touch systems. On the whole, users of ARM-based Windows systems will be better off without these old applications.

The problem is that the result of this decision, if Microsoft goes ahead with it, is two operating systems, both called Windows 8, with radically different capabilities.  This is a situation that cannot help but create confusion for users, especially if there are both ARM and x86 tablets with very different software abilities.

I have long though that Microsoft would have been much better off following Apple’s iPad approach and use an enhanced version of a phone operating system for tablets rather than a cut-down version of a desktop OS.  What looks like it may be a fundamental fork in Windows  suggests that Microsoft made the wrong choice.

Zittrain vs. Apple: What About the User Experience?

Harvard Law School Prof. Jonathan Zittrain does not like the iPhone. Or the iPad.  Or  much of anything about the modern app economy.

Jonathan Zittrain phoyo
Jonathan Zittrain

In an article for MIT’s Technology Review, Zittrain takes up a theme he has been sounding for the past several years, bemoaning a loss of a golden age of software openness, when “anyone could write and run software for an operating system, and up popped an endless assortment of spreadsheets, word processors, instant messengers, Web browsers, e-mail, and games.” In the dystopian future Zittrain sees, “an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other” means the Apples, Googles,  and Microsofts of the world will control what you can do with your PCs, phones, and tablets and we’ll all be the worse for it.

Zittrain is a very smart and witty guy, but I think he is missing something very important. Nowhere in his article does the phrase, nor the concept of, “user experience” appear. Back in what Zittrain sees as the glory days of computing freedom, the user experience was horrible. The overwhelming majority of computer users–a far smaller segment of the population than they are today–weren’t writing their own software. They were struggling to figure out how to use the awful stuff they already had. The situation was so bad that in 1998, I worked with Clare-Marie Karat of IBM Research on a computer user’s bill of rights that focused on the most basic of usability issues.

The fact is that the many millions of people who have bought iPhones and iPads have made a choice. They have ceded to Apple the right to to choose what software their devices can run in exchange for a superior user experience. They don’t seem at all unhappy with the choice. Speaking for myself as an iPhone and iPad owner–and as someone who once upon a time wrote his own software–I’m perfectly happy to have someone keep the junk off my devices. I’m not always entirely happy with Apple’s choices, but I think it’s a good deal on the whole. I have spent way too much of my life cleaning up after really bad software.

I think there’s another important misconception that Zittrain perpetuates. He repeatedly refers to the 30% of the price that Apple claims as its share of App Store sales as the “Apple tax” (and ditto for the Google tax in the Android Market.) The fact is that 30% of the retail price is a lot less than developers had to give up in that mythical golden age when software came in boxes. Back then, they were lucky to get 10% after a publisher, a distributor, and a retailer all took their share–and that was only if they were lucky enough to get distribution in the first place.

An arrangement that takes care of marketing (to some extent) and distribution and still delivers 70% of the retail price to developers is better than anything they have ever had before. It has led to a massive outpouring of independent developer creativity unparalleled since the days of VisiCalc. The only complaints have come from vendors such as Amazon, which are basically resellers and don’t have 30 points of gross margin to share, and they have found their own workarounds. And from a few academics who value some abstract notion of software freedom above user experience.

 

 

Microsoft’s Future in Tablets: Forget Consumers, Go for the Enterprise

Only huge a company with massive cash flow can make a mistake of the magnitude of Microsoft’s error in missing the movement from PCs to smartphones and tablets and survive as a major player. Legacy cash flows allowed IBM to recover from its errors of the late 1980s and the money flowing in from Windows and Office can do the same for Microsoft. But time is growing short. With the latest version of Windows Phone and its partnership with Nokia, Microsoft is at least making a play in smartphones. But it’s a long way from even playing in the increasingly important tablet market.

Apple iPads and Amazon Kindle Fires are flying off shelves now and even the justly criticized Android tablets could become attractive in coming months with a new version of the the operating system, Microsoft is at least a year away from tablets running Windows 8 on either Intel or ARM processors. But Microsoft has to make some critical decisions right now about what these tablets are going to be.

The first thing the company should recognize is that by the fall of 2012, the consumer market is likely to be lost. Over the next year, Apple is likely to sell at least 50 million iPads, Android tablets should gain traction, and Kindles and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablets will be gobbling up the low end of the market. In consumer markets, Microsoft is shooting at a moving taget that’s not moving in a favorable direction.

The enterprise market, on the other hand, is wide open. iPads have definitely been turning up in the enterprise in large numbers. And Apple has worked hard, including some quiet cooperation with Microsoft, to make the iPad play reasonably well in an enterprise environment dominated by Microsoft back-end services such as Exchange. But enterprises need more than Exchange mail, contacts, and calendar. They require support for all of Microsoft Office, including the SharePoint collaboration and document management service on which many enterprises depend, far better document handling than today’s tablets provide, and better ways to load and maintain custom applications.

Office is the key, and it is where Microsoft faces the hardest choices. The cool kids, startups, ands tech pundits may be happy with Google Apps or perhaps OpenOffice and emacs, but the fact is that business (and government) runs on Office. Documents are written in Word, numbers are crunched in Excel, presentations are shown in in PowerPoint, mail is read, meetings are scheduled, and calendars and contact lists are kept in Outlook. And it is all tied together with Exchange and SharePoint.

There have been large-scale corporate deployments of iPads, but as ancillary tools, not really as replacement for computers. For example, airlines have given thousands of iPads to pilots as replacements for the paper documents that used to fill their weighty flight bags. Tablets will remain in enterprise niches until they can offer reasonable support for corporate Office installations. This is unlikely to happen on iPad, even if rumors about some sort of Office version for the Apple tablet are true, and even less likely on Android, where the lack of standardization and built-in security are a huge barrier to enterprise adoption.

Related post: Who Really Needs a PC anyway?
Related post: A Scenario Where Smartphones Take Down the PC

The problem is just what does Office on a tablet mean? While Microsoft has been very transparent about the development of Windows 8, an accompanying new version of Office remains nothing but a bunch of fragmented rumors. It’s clear that a dramatically new version of Office is needed for tablets; five minutes spent with Office 2010 on a Windows 7 tablet will convince you of that. Making office work on a mouseless, keyboardless touch tablet is not a matter of tweaking the user interface–the UI most be radically rethought. Menus are the essence of Office, but menus are death in tablet apps. How many of Office’s existing features–thousands of them–could be supported in a  drastically simplified interface? How many can you lose before Office ceases to be useful for enterprises? (Few consumers care or know about Word’s Track Changes feature; enterprises cannot live without it.)

More needs to be done than just fixing the UI. The current Office is a multi-gigabyte resource-sucking monster. It’s probably an order of magnitude too big to be a reasonable fit on a tablet. Microsoft promises tablets running on both Inter and ARM processors. The current Office, particularly Outlook, is a slug on Intel Atom processors and a converted version would likely be even worse on ARM. Office has to become dramatically smaller and lighter without losing its essential character, a daunting task.

Maybe Microsoft is well along in solving all these problems, but they have been uncommonly quiet about the process. For a new Office to ship together with Windows 8, I’d expect to have seen a technical release by now and a large scale beta early next year. There have been rumors of a beta being made available at the consumer Electronic show in January. I hope so, but I am dubious.

 

 

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion May Be RIM’s Future

The flood of iPhones, iPads, and Androids into corporate offices is destroying BlackBerry’s once dominant position in the enterprise. In a bold if-you-can-lick-them-join-them move, Research In Motion is striking back with BlackBerry Mobile fusion, a software and a back-office package that promises to bring BlackBerry-like security and manageability to competing hardware.

BlackBerry iPhoneThis may be an obvious move for RIM, but it is not an easy one. The company’s DNA–and the heart and soul of co-CEO Mike Lazaridis–is in hardware. Previous efforts to bring BackBerry functionality to  third-party hardware, such as BlackBerry Connect for Nokia and Windows Mobile, were half-hearted at best and went nowhere. But RIM today is threatened with irrelevance and needs a desperate move to get back into the game. And the may be a secret agenda behind Fusion: It could be the solution to bringing full BlackBerry services to the troubled Playbook tablet and the new generation of handsets based on RIM’s QNX operating system.

Fusion may offer an attractive solution to IT managers, especially in Microsoft Exchange shops,  bedeviled by  users demands that they be allowed to use the smartphone of their choice for business. Of the alternatives to BlackBerry, currently only iPhone comes close to providing full support for Exchange, including a wide range of security policies. There are third-party solutions for Android, such as Good Technologies BlackBerry-like server-based system or NitroDesk’s TouchDown app, which provides support for a variety of Exchange-based mobile device management systems.

The big advantage of Fusion, if it delivers on its promises when it is released next March, is that it runs on top of the existing BlackBerry Enterprise Server and gives IT managers a single platform they can use to manage a variety of devices: BlackBerrys, iPhones, iPad, and Android phones and tablets. All of the existing third-party offerings require some sort of multi-server infrastructure to support all devices.

There’s also a curious little note in the fusion announcement that may hint at a broader role for the software:

RIM has clearly been having a very difficult time making the QNX-driven PlayBook work properly with BlackBerry Enterprise Server, a fact that helps explain the crippling lack of native mail, contact, and calendar apps on the device. The Fusion language still doesn’t promise full BES support for the PlayBook, but is definitely moving in that direction. A similar solution might help RIM bring BlackBerry services to its forthcoming QNX handsets.

All of this, of course, is a double-edged sword for RIM, because the better Fusion is, the more damage it may do to the company’s  fading handset business. But long term, RIM’s only path to survival may be as a provider of managed services for enterprise mobility. That would be a sad comedown for a company that once dreamed of dominating the consumer smartphone business, but it may be all that’s left.

 

 

Two Phones in One: An Enterprise BYOD Solution

I’m not usually terribly sympathetic to the problems of corporate IT departments. It seems that corporate employees, including senior executives, are no longer willing to accept whatever miserable handset the company designates as its official phone. At the same time, IT managers and their colleagues in legal, corporate security, and finance need secure, managed mobile platforms that can deploy custom apps and satisfy a big pile of compliance needs. Letting execs bring their own devices is popular, but can be very difficult to implement.

“If you look at what is happening with bring your own device, the IT department wants to provision, manage, and deprovision the phone over the air,” says Janet Schijns, vice president for the Verizon Wireless Business Solutions Group.  “But there’s a second lens through which to view this. People want to maintain privacy and control of their mobile environment. They don’t particularly want their employer looking at pictures of their kids, or email from their husband.”

For a long while, the BlackBerry was the solution. Providing what IT wants is part of BlackBerry’s DNA and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and Research In Motion’s back-end network gave IT tools that were comprehensive and cost-effective. But trouble came as BlackBerry handsets began to fall further and further behind Apple and Android offerings.

Now a solution of sorts is emerging, at least for Android. Virtualiztion software can give a single handset two separate personalities. VMware Horizon creates a virtual machine that gives you a secure, managed environment for business use and a wide-open one for personal use. Enterproid Divide created a secure work environment within a sandbox on the phone. In either case, users can switch quickly and easily between the corporate and personal modes.

For now, these options exist only on Android phones, and it’s likely that’s where the VMware solution will stay for now. Creation of a full virtual machine requires low-level access to the operating system that is possible with Android but strictly prohibited by Apple for iOS or Microsoft for Windows Phone 7.

The VMware approach turns a handset into what appears to the outside world to be two separate phones, each with its own phone number. Each has its own apps, and apps on the personal side cannot access corporate data and vice versa. If necessary, the corporate phone number along with all apps and data can be wiped remotely. Verizon plans to roll out VMware Horizon as a pre-installed package on LG Android handsets before yearend and will eventually expand it to its entire Android portfolio. Verizon will, if asked,  also provide dual billing so that the employee gets billed for use of the personal side of the phone, while the corporation pays its bill directly.  Telefónica is working with LG and VMware on a similar offering in Europe.

Enterproid Divide will be offered by AT&T as a service called Toggle. Enterproid says it is working on versions of Divide for Windows Phone 7 and even iPhone, though whether it can comply with Apple’s complex and often obscure rules remains to be seen.

iPhone’s (and iPad’s) place in the enterprise would surely benefit from solutions like these, but it can probably hold its own without help. Apple has quietly worked with Microsoft for the past several years to give the iPhone the best Exchange support of any phone other than a BlackBerry Enterprise Server-backed BlackBerry. The manageability of an iPhone is not as comprehensive as what BES provides, but it is acceptable to many IT departments. The biggest problem is the deployment of corporate custom apps. (Good Technology provides BlackBerry-like server based support for iPhones, iPads, and select Android handsets.)

Windows Phone provides an interesting challenge. Its predecessor, Windows Mobile 6.5, offered extensive manageability through Microsoft Exchange Server. But the company decided to focus heavily on consumer markets when it developed Windows Phone 7 and it and its recent Mango update have very limited Exchange support. But with Microsoft looking for a bigger market, and especially with the new alliance with Nokia, a Windows Phone push into the enterprise looks inevitable. Built-in virtualization could be a nice differentiator.

 

 

Apple Should Stay Away from the Wireless Carrier Business

Jean-Louis Gassée’s Monday Notes are some of the sharpest and most insightful commentary on the web. But I have to take issue with his suggestion that Apple should get into the wireless business by becoming a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).

Apple’s mountain of cash naturally gets people thinking about what Apple could do with that mountain of  money, and getting into the wireless business naturally springs to mind. Buying an actual operating carrier is probably out of the question. You can’t just up and start a wireless carrier. You need spectrum, and there isn’t any of that available. Clearwire’s big block could come on the market  if the company cannot overcome its financial woes, but at 2.5 GHz, it’s not the best cellphone spectrum around, and Apple would have to spend tens of billions to build out the network.

Apple could buy a carrier. Sprint could be had and T-Mobile would be available if, as seems likely, the AT&T deal falls through. But I find it impossible to imagine Apple thriving in the highly regulated, intensely political  carrier world. Apple is extraordinarily good at many things, but living in a highly regulated regime, where AT&T and Verizon have decades of experience, is not one of them.

Becoming an MVNO, which means running a retail service over wholesale capacity supplied by other carriers, makes marginally more sense. MVNOs don’t need their own spectrum and are much more lightly regulated than facilities-based carriers. But in the U.S., being an MVNO is a terrible business. The biggest U.S. MVNO’s, Boost and Virgin Mobile, are both owned by Sprint. They, and MVNOs in general, cater to younger and less affluent, often prepaid, customers–not exactly the prime iPhone audience. Apple, being Apple, could make a success of a business where many others have failed, but if I were a shareholder I would not be thrilled with such a move.

But the biggest problem with Apple getting into the wireless business in any form is that it would put it into competition with its most important partners. Steve Jobs’s made no secret of his distaste for carriers–in pre-iPhone days, he called them “orefices”–but, starting with A&T, Apple has done remarkably well and bending the carriers to its will. It failed in an early effort to move away from carrier-subsidized iPhone sales, but gat carriers to offer pay-as-you-go 3G plans for the iPad. Unlike any other handset maker, Apple totally controls iPhone branding and has maintained total control over the software loaded on the phone.

Becoming and MVNO would  put a tremendous strain on these relationships. And for what? Apple Wireless’ service would only be as good as the wholesale carrier Apple is using. Its flexibility on pricing would be limited because it would be at the mercy of its wholesaler. It wouldn’t be able to eliminate many of the mysterious fees and charges that clutter wireless phone bills because most of these are government mandated. And it’s a crummy, low-margin business.

I agree with Gassée that the stodgy and unimaginative carriers are ripe for disruption. The problem is that the scarcity of available spectrum, which effectively bars new entrants, and the difficulty of dealing with one of the most complex regulatory regimes on earth, alas, leaves the incumbent carriers in an extremely strong position to defend their turf. Apple has enough money to get into this business, but I really doubt they would like what they found.

Why Kindle Fire Reviews Are All Over the Place

The Amazon Kindle Fire is having an extremely polarizing effect on reviewers. Most mainstream reviews, like this one from The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg, have been favorable with some important reservations. But some, like The New York Times‘s David Pogue were far more hostile.

Kindle fire and iPadThe prize for the most over-the-top reaction to the Fire goes to Instapaper creator Marco Arment, who, in a scathing post on his own blog, said: “Granted, I’ve only spent two days with it, so I can’t share any long-term impressions. But I’m honestly unlikely to have any, because this isn’t a device that makes me want to use it more. And that’s fatal.”

There are two radically different ways of looking at the Fire, and the point of view a reviewer chooses goes a long way toward explaining the reaction. Arment gives the game away high in is review when he writes: “I expected the Kindle Fire to be a compelling iPad alternative.” Pogue adds: “Most problematic, though, the Fire does not have anything like the polish or speed of an iPad.”

Anyone who picked up a Fire expecting it to be an almost-iPad was bound to be severely disappointed. Apple explicitly designed the iPad as an alternative to a traditional personal computer for many purposes. Steve Jobs famously compared the PC to trucks and the iPad to cars and said that while some people needed trucks, a car was more than adequate from most. With that goal in mind Apple set out to build the best tablet it could, then figured out how to price it.

Amazon had entirely different goals. It was looking for a way to build on the success of the Kindle, to offer a more capable device whose capabilities would mostly focus on enabling the purchase of stuff, especially digital content, from Amazon. It wanted a device it could sell for $200 without losing its shirt, and it designed the Kindle with the compromises necessary to make that price point. Complaining that the Fire is less thrilling or compelling than an iPad is a bit like grumbling that a Honda Civic is less fun and exciting than an Audi A6. Both do what they are intended to do very well (though their intended functions are a lot more alike than the Fire and the iPad.)

That leaves the question of how successful the Fire is at its intended uses. I think Slate’s Farhad Manjoo hit about the right balance when he wrote: “Still, when you take into account its reduced capabilities and inferior interface, I’d rate the Fire as something like 70 percent of an iPad. When you consider that the Fire costs only 40 percent as much as Apple’s tablet, though, that’s not a bad deal. If spending $500 to get the real thing is within your budget, by all means, go to an Apple store. But if all you’re looking for is 70 percent of an iPad, then why spend any more?”

But I would argue that even Manjoo gets it partly wrong when he insists on viewing the fire as a kind of junior iPad. I own both–admittedly most people won’t–and I am finding completely difference uses for both. The iPad does replace my Mac or Windows PC a fair amount of the time. The Fire replaces my old Kindle as a reader, with the added benefit of being able to watch videos, play some casual games, do light web browsing–and buy stuff from Amazon. Also, going out with the iPad means taking a bag of some sort, while the Fire fits easily in a jacket pocket.

Related content: Where Kindle Fire Fits in My Life

One final word about Arment’s review: While many reviewers, myself included, have found that the Fire’s touch screen response is fidgety when compared to  many other devices–not just the iPad–the problems he experienced were so severe that I suspect he may have been using a defective unit. In particular, his complain about light leaks around the edge of display is something that neither I nor other users I checked with have experienced, and points to a unit that maybe should have failed quality control. And bad manufacturing defects can lead to an unsatisfactory user experience that make a device seem much worse than it objectively is.

Updated: Marco Arment responds.

Why iPhone Scarfs Up All the Profits

Andrew Kim’s Minimally Minimal blog has a stunning visualization that goes a long way to explaining how Apple’s share of handset profits is vastly disproportional to its market share. If you scroll down a ways in the linked page, you’ll see a graphical comparison of Apple’s iPhone line to Samsung’s current U.S. product market.

Kim says Samsung makes this many phones to earn a fraction of what Apple does, but I think he has it backwards. A major reason why Apple is so much more profitable is because they make so few products, not just iPhones but across all product lines. Minimizing the number of product variations lets Apple enjoy massive economies of scale in its supply chain. Buying larger quantities of fewer components lets it drive harder bargains with vendors, minimizes inventory costs at every stage from raw components to retail, and simplifies manufacturing.

It’s a major secret of Apple’s (and supply chain maestro Tim Cook’s) success.

(via Daring Fireball)

 

Where Kindle Fire Fits in My Life

Like most people in this business, I have more gadgets than I know what to do with. Those sent to me for evaluation go back to their makers in due time, but even products I’ve bought often end up collecting dust after an initial flurry of use.  The Amazon Kindle Fire is not going to be one of those losers.

Kindle Fire photo
Amazon's Kindle Fire

 

After just a day with the Fire (actually, it is a unit Amazon lent me while I’m waiting for the unit I preordered to arrive), it has already found a place in  my life. For the moment, that place is on the night table next to my bed. I do most of my book reading late at night, and a Kindle of one sort or another has lived  there since the original e-reader shipped in 2007.

But already, I find the Fire an improvement. The e-ink display of the original Kindles was always a bit hard to read in the dim bedroom light, though recently models have been a significant improvement. At least for an hour or so of pre-sleep reading, the Fire’s LCD is an improvement. (There was always the alternative of using an iPad as a Kindle reader, but it’s just too big and heavy.)

The Fire’s place as a bedside companion was boosted when I successfully installed the Sonos Android controller app. This is not currently available in the Kindle app store, so I had to side load it, not too difficult provided you have an Android device with an SD card handy (PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan has the how-to details here.) So the Fire can now also control the Sonos S5 that also lives on my night table. Its bedside utility would be complete if I could also use it to control my TV but alas, the Android version of the FiOS remote only works on phones (it requires a device phone number as part of the setup; if anyone knows a way around this, I’d be happy to hear about it.)

The still-open question is whether the Fire will find a permanent place as part of my traveling kit. I used to always travel with a Kindle, but these days it has mostly been replaced by the iPad, which is vastly more versatile and also a better reader, despite its bulk, in poorly lit airplane cabins and often stygian hotel rooms. Some times I go with just the iPad . But if I expect to do any writing, I’ll add my 13″ MacBook Air. If find even writing a simple post like this on the iPad painful, mainly because of software limitations.

I doubt there will be many trips that I can make with just the Fire. It has the bare essentials to check email, Twitter, Facebook,  and the web, but just barely. If I’m only going to take one device (in addition to a phone, which can double as a Wi-Fi hot spot), it’s going to be the Pad.

But the Fire plus the MacBook is an appealing combination, and I’m going to give it a try. If it works, the Fire might earn a permanent place in my backpack.

 

 

 

 

How DMCA Became the Tech Industry’s Friend

Who would have thought that the tech industry would every come to regard the digital Millennium copyright Act as its friend?

Just a few years ago, DMCA was widely reviled in the tech world. The main objection was to provisions that prohibited “circumvention” of copy protection measures, particularly digital rights management technology. But over time DRM faded as an issue–and we discovered that DMCA had a good side.

The turning point was Google’s 2010 legal victory over Viacom, which had accused YouTube of massive copyright infringement. Google’s defense was that YouTube had complied fully with the “safe harbor” provisions of DMCA by making good faith efforts to keep infringing material off the system and responding to rights holders’ requests that infringing content be taken down. The judge agreed, and Google was off the hook. Suddenly, DMCA didn’t look so bad.

Now the industry is up in arms in fears that those safe harbors might be taken away. The object of the angst is a piece of legislation known variously as the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), PROTECT IP, or E-PARASITE. The bill’s bipartisan backers, who run the ideological gamut, say it is intended only to give the government to power to shut down rogue piracy sites, many of which operate offshore.

Opponents, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that it is very dangerous. The opponents say the standards for designating a site as “dedicated to the theft of U.S. property” are way too too low and the government would have far too much power to take actions such as banning banks from processing payments to designated sites without due process. A major objection is that an accuser could force the shutdown of a site in –dare I use the word–circumvention of the DMCA safe harbor protections.

Although I think the rhetoric of opponents is badly overheated–Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said it “would mean the end of the internet as we know it”–SOPA is a very bad piece of legislation. Although the problem it addresses is real, it doesn’t begin to justify the creation of such a blunt and dangerous weapon.

I doubt the worst fears of opponents would come to pass, with shutdowns of sites over  bits of user-posted infringing content or attacks on politically unpopular sites. But the internet and the legal system are too robust for that, and somehow things would likely go on much as before. But the potential exists, and the best the supporters of the proposed law can say is “trust us.” The Department of Homeland Security already has asserted the power to seize the domains, without court orders or advance notice,  of sites that engage in criminal copyright infringement. So far, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used this power to shut down sites that offered pirated music or counterfeit goods. The government is moving in advance of any criminal charges–which generally are never brought because the alleged offenders are beyond the reach of U.S. courts–by invoking its power of forfeiture.

Unlike DMCA, SOPA does not appear to have a potentially good side. And at the risk of sounding like a Tea Partier, the government’s claim to “trust me” isn’t very strong these days.

In Praise of Tweakers: Why Gladwell Is Wrong About Jobs

If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 1676

Portrait of Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton

In a New Yorker essay on  the career of Steve Jobs,  Malcolm Gladwell dismisses the idea the Jobs was a visionary. Instead, Gladwell writes, drawing heavily on Walter Isaacson’s biography, “he was much more of a tweaker.”

In defining Jobs’s career, Gladwell is mostly right, though I don’t think “tweaker” is an adequate word. Jobs’s genius was to to take ideas he found floating around and make them much, much better.

Where Gladwell is wrong is in his analysis of the inventive process. Those he calls visionaries, the person who “starts with a clean sheet of paper, and reimagines the world,” hardly ever come along. And those who do often end up forgotten, as in the case of of Gladwell’s prime example, Samuel Crompton, inventor of the spinning mule.

Consider Isaac Newton, a true scientific revolutionary but one who would have to be classed as a “tweaker” in Gladwell’s taxonomy. Newton did not suffer from false modesty; he carried on a decades-long feud with Leibniz over primacy in the development of the calculus. But he knew that he was building on progress in mathematics from Archimedes to his contemporary John Wallis and on the astronomical breakthroughs of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler. Similarly, Einstein’s relatively revolution is impossible to imagine without the physics of James Clerk Maxwell and Hendrik Lorentz or the mathematics of Henri Poincaré and Hermann Minkowski.

Or the computer itself. The computer,  which truly has no inventor, was born when several streams of invention coalesced in the cauldron of World War II: A long history of tinkering with mechanical calculating devices from Pascal to Babbage; the theoretical mathematics of Alan Turing and John von Neumann; the development of electronics to replace mechanical devices; the engineering genius of John Antanasoff, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, and others; and a flood of government funding.

The fundamental problem with  Gladwell’s approach is that there are no clean sheets of paper, and perhaps no visionaries as Gladwell defines them. Everyone inherits the world as it is. The geniuses are the ones who can take that and turn it into something much better.

Mobile Flash: Adios and Good Riddance

Flash icon

UPDATE: Adobe has confirmed the end of mobile Flash development.

Jason Perlow at ZDNet is reporting that as part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe is ending development of its Flash plug-in for mobile browsers. If true, and the story seems well-sourced, this marks the end of one of the silliest tech controversies in recent memory.

The dispute was triggered, of course, by Apple’s refusal to support Flash on iOS devices and  by Steve Jobs and other Apple executives steadfastly supporting native HTML 5 over the Adobe technology. Some commentators viewed the lack of Flash would doom the iPad. Google and makers of Android phones and tablets claimed the ability to run Flash as a huge competitive advantage. An Adobe executive claimed the only reason Apple was keeping Flash off its products was to prevent Flash-based services like Hulu from competing with iTunes.

There was only one problem with the argument. Flash never actually worked on mobile devices. It was buggy, stuttery, and a huge resource hog. Beyond Flash video, the mouse-centric interface of flash applications never worked right on touch displays.

Somehow, the problems of Flash were always going to be fixed in the next version of the software, or with 16-core processors, or something. But while mobile Flash got better, it never got good, and Adobe now seems to be facing up to inevitable: Steve Jobs was, as was so often the case, right. Flash was the wrong technology for mobile.

The impending death of Flash deprives Android of a marketing claim. But anyone who bought an Android phone or tablet to enjoy the pleasures of flash was mostly the victim of exaggerated, if not outright false advertising. We’re all better off without it.

Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire: Specs or Ecosystem

Photo of Nook TabletDo you care how fast the processor in your e-book reader is? Barnes & Noble seems to hope so. It’s announcement today was heavy on comparing its specs to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. There’s no doubt the Nook beats the Kindle hands down in speeds and feeds: more memory, much more storage, better display. But there’s little doubt that Amazon offers a superior ecosystem that may turn into a better user experience.

The Nook Tablet is basically an upgraded Nook Color: thinner, lighter, faster, better looking, but functionally similar. The Tablet will sell for $249; the Color remains in the lineup at a reduce price of $199, matching the Fire.

A bigger difference than the specs is how the two devices present content. The Nook, of course, connects (via Wi-Fi) to the Barnes & Noble store for books and periodicals. Music can be streamed over a number of services, including the built-in Pandora app, but there is no integrated music store. Video can be streamed over Netflix and Hulu Plus, or downloaded from Flixter.

Fire, by contrast, is an all-Amazon production: Kindle books, magazine,and newspapers; Amazon Music (including streaming of your own music uploaded to Amazon’s cloud), Amazon video to buy or stream. No separate apps, no separate subscriptions.  But anyone who signs up for the $80 a year Amazon Prime after the free 30-day trial gets free book loans, free video streaming, and–Prime’s original purchase–free two-day shipping on Amazon purchases. My guess–and it can only be a guess until we have a chance to put these devices through their paces–is that a superior shopping experience will trump a superior display.

Fire also has a wild card in its Silk browser. The Nook Tablet has a browser, of course, but not much was said about it at the launch. Fire has a novel split browser that offloads much of the work of rendering pages to Amazon’s cloud servers and promises much speedier browsing. Again, we can’t really come to any conclusions about how big an advantage this is until we see it in the wild.

Barnes & Noble also promoted the competitive advantage of its retail stores by promising a sort of Genius Bar to help consumers with Nook problems. One can only hope that it won’t be used much; something would be very wrong with the design of the tablet if large numbers of consumers have to seek help in using it.

Amazon gains a considerable leg up in this fight because of its unique combination of retailing chops and deep technology skills. Amazon Web Services represents a very sophisticated technology infrastructure that Amazon can throw behind a project like Fire that no one, except maybe Google can approach.

 

How Close Are We to Steve Jobs’s Apple TV Dream?

The latest edition of Jean-Louis Gassée’s always stimulating Monday Note takes a highly informative look at what Steve Jobs may have meant in this comment to biographer Walt Isaacson that he had “cracked” the TV user interface. A key, Gassée speculates, is the idea (which he credits to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber) of channels-as-apps.

Old TV with Apple logoI remain skeptical, probably more so than Gassée, about Apple’s intentions of getting into the TV display business. But I have no doubt about their ability to–eventually–revolutionize the TV business by building the ultimate TV content controller, whether it is integrated into a TV or in a separate box connected by a single cable. And it’s the business, not the technology, that’s the problem.

The key, as usual these days, is the iPad. First, an observation. To the extent that people want interactive content while watching TV, whether it’s stats during a sports event or cast information in a movie, I am not at all sure they want it on their TV display. Directors, whether of movies or football games, do an excellent job of putting the images you want to see on the screen  (and stations already mess it up with ugly irrelevancies like promos for other shows.) There isn’t any spare real estate.

But an iPad–it could be another tablet but Apple is way ahead in this game–makes a wonderful auxiliary display both for extra content and for navigation. The trick is integrating it properly with the TV or set top box, so you can get that cast info without having to go to a separate IMDB app.

A lot of this might be possible with the equipment, even the miserable set top boxes supplied by cable companies, we have today. My iPad already can control my TV, my experience with Verizon’s FiOS remote app being happier than Gassée’s with Comcast. What it mostly needs is a completely redesigned user interface that does better than mimicking the existing on-screen displays.

Even better. my iPad “knows” what I am watching, even without help from Verizon. Yahoo!’s Into Now app does an amazing job of identifying what content your TV is tuned to. All we need is the software glue to connect the pieces.

If the cable companies and their allies in the content business were smart–a large if–they would be racing to enable this new world by disrupting their own business before someone else, like, say, Apple or perhaps Google, does. It requires will, not rocket science.

What the Mac OS X Sandbox Means to Users

There has been considerable unhappiness, even outrage, in the developer community since Apple announced that as of next March, all software sold through the Mac App Store would have to run in a sandbox, that is, its access to system resources would be restricted, the exact restrictions based on the type of program.

“Why the Mac App Sandbox Makes Me Sad,” wrote OS X developer blogger Pauli Olavi Ojala. “Apple’s Mac OS Lockdown To End Developer Independence,” screamed a headline on Forbes.com, though the article, by Roger Kay, was more reasoned in tone.

I’m sure Apple’s new restrictions will make life harder for App Store developers, and they may have to choose between the easy distribution offered by the App Store and the greater programming freedom of delivering their software the old fashioned way. But to consider this from the users’ point of view, ask yourself a question: What do most people like better, their computer or their iPhone or iPad?

My guess is that if you asked 100 people who used both a computer and an iOS device which they were happier with, 90 or so would vote for the iPhone or iPad. Mac owners probably hate their computers a little less than Windows users. But both types of systems have the same problem: They are full of software, often poorly written and poorly tested. that can cause all manner of mysterious, frustrating problems. This has gotten better over the years, but as long as there are atrocities such as the Adobe Flash plugin for Chrome, to pick an example not at random, there’s going to be trouble.

One thing Apple has learned from iOS as that a tightly controlled software environment is one way to produce a great user experience. iOS apps rarely crash and when they do, they don’t else with them.The arrangement is much more secure because apps’ access to the system is so limited.Yes, the sandbox can cause some frustrations for users. The restrictions on apps’ access to each other’s data is one  reason why document handling is such a pain on an iPad, for example. But I find it a price worth paying. And if the sandbox policy makes Macs more iOS-like in this sense, users will love it.

One very important caveat: My views on this would change dramatically if Apple were to restrict users’ ability to load any apps from outside the App Store, as they do for iOS. For people who use their Macs as creative tools, the sandbox’s restrictions could be a crushing burden; they almost certainly would for anyone who writes software, which is why Apple won’t restrict their freedom.

Apple does have a tendency to be heavy-handed  in its administration of rules, so I’m sure there are going to be some problems. But many of the fears seem to be to be vastly overblown. Roger Kay, for example, writes: “The longer-term consequence?  A lack of innovation in consumer software.” The fact is that iOS, for all of its restrictions, has produced an outpouring of highly innovative software, putting iPads and iPhones to uses that I am sure Apple never imagined.

 

The Slow, Sad Death of webOS

Sad face TouchPad

When Hewlett-Packard killed off TouchPad and Pre hardware in August, executives said that the webOS software that powered them would, somehow or other, be kept alive. At the time, I was skeptical if for no other reason than that HP would have a terrible time hanging on to key tallent while the future of the software was being resolved. Sadly, that prediction is coming to pass.

The latest blow to what little future webOS may have is the departure of Richard Kerris, head of developer relations for the (now defunct) webOS Global Business Unit, who is taking on a similar role at Nokia. The success of a mobile operating system is heavily dependent on the work of third-party app developers and the shortage of webOS apps played a significant role in the platform’s failure. At the end of August, Kerris had been at least guardedly optimistic about the future of webOS.  “Once we come out with the right hardware partner, which we will announce, we’ll be fine,” he told me.

But soon thereafter, HP broke up the webOS business unit, laying off most of the staff and transferring responsibility for the software to the corporate office of strategy and technology. But that office will cease to exist Nov. 1 with the retirement of Executive Vice President Shane Robison.

At this point, it seems extremely unlikely that much of anything can be salvaged from the webOS debacle. HP might find a buyer for a pile of code and whatever intellectual property rights its acquired from Palm, but it no longer seems to be much of a going concern.

This looks like the last chapter in the strange history of Palm software. Back in 2006, PalmSource,  the struggling company that had been set up to develop and license Palm software after the original Palm was split into software and hardware pieces, sold itself to Access, a Japanese software company. Access had planned to rewrite the Palm software, then used in the pioneering Treo smartphones, on a Linux base. Both nothing ever came of the project and Palm OS, like it would seem, webOS, was never heard of again.