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I Convinced HP's Board to Buy Palm for $1.2B. Then I Watched Them Kill It in 49 Days
(philmckinney.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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WebOS was amazing. I was convinced it was the future of mobile computing. iOS was completely proprietary and Android was a dumpster fire. But HP was the worst buyer imaginable. It’s such a shame. What could have been?
I had a similarly high opinion on Meego's future at Nokia and then they suddenly went all-in on Windows Phone.
I also had a somewhat high opinion of Windows Phone before MS killed it.
No one wants to maintain an OS for any less than like 25% of the market — which pretty much only leaves room for Abdroid and iOS... and KaiOS I guess, though I don't know how much effort the put into maintaining that. webOS and Tizen (resting place of Meego) are now pretty much only in TVs.
I'd say SailfishOS is the final resting place of MeeGo, especially since it's maintained by ex-Nokia devs.
Nokia didn’t suddenly go all in on Windows Phone, they were bought by Microsoft.
There were only ever like 2 phones that used MeeGo. Nokia primarily used an OS called Symbian before they were bought out.
Nokia switched to Windows Phone in 2011, just before the N9 came out. They weren't bought by MS until 2014.
And yes, I know about Symbian. Meego was their intended replacement for it.
IMO, Nokia's bread and butter was the hardware and the simplicity. The phone apps were just Java.
Sounds like a sex toy!
Counterintuitively, ms phones good reviews were also a good reason for ms to kill it. By the time ms got moving with phones, they were way behind and the market was already consolidating. They had a lot of inertia to overcome. They dumped tons of money into phones, exercised the famous ms marketing arm twisted, pulled out all of their usual tricks … and no one bought them. They ended up with phones that people liked, that got excellent reviews … and no one bought them. Even worse, phones were being sold on the strength of their app stores, and despite sinking tons more money persuading developers to port apps to windows phones, they could never get the critical mass of a sustaining ecosystem. It was pretty clear that even ms would not be able to overcome the consolidation of the market into only two
Loved my windows phone. Lack of apps made me go back to android at the time.
yes! I was just a child/teen when all this unfolded, remember clearly that I wanted to get the Palm smartphone with WebOS but never could as it never reached the stores near me. It was smooth and multitasking so many great UI/UX details.