Ok, I know I need another coffee, so I apologise in advance for being the Grinch here, but...
This is pure CEO puffery. When will these guys get it? When will they start looking up to Steve Jobs instead of treating him like a guy who just happened to get lucky eight times (Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, Macintosh again, iPod, iTMS, iPhone, App Store, iPad)?
Steve does not talk about what will ship on every Macintosh next year. He might talk about what will ship in the next sixty days if there is an SDK he is shipping to developers today. Steve does not talk about Apple investing in R&D. Steve invests in R&D.
Talking about the future is the action of a person interested in how he looks and sounds, rather than the actions of a person interested in how the company performs.
Steve ships. Leo had better spend less time with his PR people and more time with his engineers. I have nothing against shipping WebOS on every HP PC next year. But please, Leo, just fucking do it. Talk to your engineers, not to me.
"HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn't have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship." - Leo Apotheker, Jan 27 2011
This is kind of cultish. Jobs being successful with a certain approach doesn't mean that it's the only possible successful approach and everyone else should copy it.
Not that you can't make an argument for his approach to disclosure, but it'd be better if not couched in hero-worship.
I admire what the man has accomplished. That doesn't make me blind to those of his policies that I dislike. For example, I do not develop for iOS at this time, despite owning a collection of said devices, and knowing lots of people who have made excellent coin developing for iOS.
Anyhow, I'd like to admire Leo as well. I have opinions. They are often based on feelings. Those feelings are often backed up by rational thought and are perfectly reasonable, but they are still feelings and opinions.
If you're looking for a dispassionate argument where everything is in the passive voice, I am not the right person for you. I take the same approach to my work. I try to make things I can admire. Or at least, I try to make things that are less then contemptible. It's the same thing.
Anyhow, I don't think that admiring what Steve has accomplished and pointing out his track record is inappropriate when criticizing Leo's choice of announcement in a personal forum like this. It's a personal opinion, which means it's personal.
Thanks. Sometimes writing can convey a sense of objectivity which is not really justified. It can be a kind of affectation, which I've been guilty of, and can come off as pretentious or even bullying. My post had a pseudo-objective tone, but it was my personal reaction as well.
I'm very cool with that, and I especially agree that there are many paths to success. IBM was especially famous for pre-announcing things to undermine the competition. Microsoft picked that up as well, and it was an effective business strategy.
Fair enough, however looking at the industry, the correlation between announcing products a year in advance and actually shipping them is low.
I conjecture that if we go out and measure things, we will find that the correlation between announcing products a year in advance and being successful with said products is actually negative.
I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion. The Jobs approach is clearly sufficient, but by no means necessary, for a company to succeed.
Take a look at Apotheker's predecessor Mark Hurd. The man is revered in and out for literally saving HP after the Fiorina era and returning it to powerhouse form. He did this by focusing in on financial fundamentals and efficiency - business basics.
True, he's not by any stretch of the imagination considered a "visionary", at least in the same way Jobs is, but he helped build a potent rival a different way.
I am extremely interested in seeing how Apotheker's tenure will play itself out.
Personally, I can live with CEOs of all stripes talking about or even writing books at a very high or abstract level about "The Road Ahead." It's puffery, but it doesn't masquerade as management. It's just a guy (like me) making predictions about the future.
My vituperation is reserved for those CEOs who pretend that they're making product announcements or strategic direction announcements when they're vaporous or non-actionable. Maybe WebOS will be on every PC next year. Maybe not, and if we try to get Leo to eat his Claim Chowder, he'll say that "new information has come to light that caused HP to make new decisions."
Puffing about the company's specific products (see also: Playbook) is really bad. But you are absolutely right that they're both puffery. Different kinds of puffery, IMO, but still puffery.
I think Steve's puffery is more of an explanation; it says something about why they're doing what they're doing, from their perspective.
Compare and contrast with the other kind of puffery, seen in this article. Steve's puffery can actually be valuable to interested parties, as it reveals the thought behind the actions, whereas Leo's puffery is just vacuous promises that may or may not be upheld.
Yeah, he does that on the day he is shipping the device that represents the direction in which the entire industry is heading, the device that is the harbinger of the post-what era in question.
The iPad 2 isn't shipping yet (it begins on march 11). So it would be more accurate to say that he does so when he's really close to shipping it, not on the day he is shipping it.
instead of treating him like a guy who just happened to get lucky eight times (Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, Macintosh again, iPod, iTMS, iPhone, App Store, iPad)?
and what about Taligent, Apple Pippin, 20th Anniversary Macintosh, Motorola ROKR (colaberation with Apple), Macintosh Portable, Apple Lisa, Apple Newton, Apple ///?
I'm not saying it's bad, after all the saying is "if your not failing your not trying hard enough" but Apple has had it's share of failures as well.
That one yes, though it was not actually Apple's design he did demonstrate it I believe.
> Macintosh Portable
Apple during Job's exile
> Apple Lisa
Jobs was forced out of the lisa more than a year before release and went to work on the other Apple project at the time (project which you might have heard of)
> Apple Newton
Apple during Job's exile
> Apple ///?
Involved neither Jobs nor Woz.
You can hang the ROKR to his neck, and the Apple /// and the Lisa if you stretch reality a lot, but the rest makes absolutely no sense at all.
It's interesting that you didn't mention NeXT though: it failed technically (never succeeded on its own), but managed to lead to an acquisition and most NeXT people took control position at Apple.
I don't think we can hang all of those failures on Steve. Some of them, but not all. By my recollection, Taligent, 20th, Portable, and Newton were all released during his exile (if you want to call Taligent being "released"). I think they were all on Sculley's watch, but I might be mistaken.
Lisa was definitely all Jobs, all-singing, all-dancing Jobs. And ROKR... I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now. You could slough it off as being a Motorola failure. It was about as successful as Microsoft's investment in Danger, minus the six hundred million dollars invested :-)
Anyhow, yes of course Apple has failures. So has Steve personally (NeXT!), and I never suggested otherwise.
My point was that very few people trying to compete with him adopt his methods. This is really the crux of my perspective: here are these companies getting beaten up by Apple and by Google, and somehow they refuse to learn from their opponent.
Steve wasn't even involved in most of those. Taligent, Pippin, 20th Anniversary Macintosh, Mac Portable, and Newton all happened after he left in 1985. Apple III wasn't Steve's project--and Steve wasn't the head of Apple at the time, either. That leaves the Lisa, a project Steve Jobs was forced out of a year before it was released, and the Motorola ROKR, which was designed and released by a separate company entirely.
On the other hand, there was the NeXT Cube, the Power Mac G4 Cube, Mobile Me, and the Apple TV. But out of those, the NeXT Cube is the only real failure Steve ever bet the company on. Meanwhile, Mobile Me and the Apple TV are projects Apple is at least working on improving.
Not that it's at all related to HP, because they aren't anything more than a niche player in that segment, but Microsoft used to use talking about stuff that wasn't shipping to great effect to beat up on their competitors: even if the competitor shipped sooner, everyone would wait around to see what Microsoft shipped.
> every HP PC being able to run WebOS and MIcrosoft Windows as an integrated experience in 2012
I have an HP touch screen laptop/tablet. It has a mode where you can boot into a "light" OS that just has a web browser.
BTW, I've never used it.
> Instant Web is an instant on software solution that allows users to quickly and easily get to a browser, an IM client, and their media in a secure, fast booting environment.
I'll be blown away if HP is actually the first company to put their mobile os on a full desktop computer. I always imagined I would love running something like Android on a desktop; easy to use for everyone, no worries about viruses or software updates, nice modern UI design...really, it's a wonder that these machines don't work like that already.
I can't believe I'm rooting for HP on this one, but I sure hope this works and I hope it kicks ass.
Fair point. But that's the way it's supposed to be. I guess my comment might seem humorously ignorant given the current Android situation, but it'd be tough to argue that it's not directly in Google's interest to get all that fixed up.
On the other hand, it's not in Microsoft's interest to make software updates easy or viruses to go away. They're side problems that other companies deal with. HP's webOS should be more like Android than Windows, at least in the user experience philosophy.
>On the other hand, it's not in Microsoft's interest to make software updates easy or viruses to go away.
Huh, why not? How easier updates should get? If set to automatic, they're almost done Chrome style (except for the reboots GRR).
And what about MSE?
>HP's webOS should be more like Android than Windows
With Windows, it gets updated instantly whichever OEM built your PC. With Android. it can take upto a year after getting released, or never come out at all.
Business. Look at IE6. Microsoft can't force system-wide updates for all their customers, so nearly 0 customers get dramatic software improvements. Of course, everyone gets security updates.
> With Windows, it gets updated instantly whichever OEM built your PC. With Android. it can take upto a year after getting released, or never come out at all.
This isn't really relevant to the point I'm trying to make. I understand that right now, OEMs aren't updating Android frequently. I meant more user software updates; my Android apps seem to get updates every week that add features, fix bugs, etc. This process is streamlined and automatic. This is not true with traditional desktop operating systems (aside from most Linux distros).
Microsoft could simply add an automatic update service right into the operating system, similar to how they have MSI for installations, and then apps would be updated similarly. It's quite possible they're actually working on something like that -- updates seem to get better and better all the time.
For at least the last 15 years, there has been no central way to upgrade user software on Microsoft Windows. Today, in 2011, there is no way to do this. Maybe it's coming eventually, sure. But again, these points are seriously minor issues compared to what I'm trying to suggest:
The "mobile" OS space is consistently more user-friendly than the desktop space.
Maybe desktops can catch up. Maybe MS is working magic behind the scenes. Forgive me if I'm pessimistic here. I find it far more likely that there's a slow, worldwide shift to "mobile" OSs on all computers. It'll probably resemble some sort of iOS/Android/webOS future spawn, or something. I don't know.
The automatic software updates was merely an example to show where "mobile" excels and "desktop" fails. There are many others, and even those this example may change I feel my point is still made.
> For at least the last 15 years, there has been no central way to upgrade user software on Microsoft Windows.
For most of the last 15 years, most people installed their software by sliding shiny round things into their computer.
> The "mobile" OS space is consistently more user-friendly than the desktop space.
Unless you want to print something. Mobile OS's are considerably more limited, which with very little effort makes them much more user-friendly. A pocket calculator is also consistently more user-friendly than a smartphone.
> The automatic software updates was merely an example to show where "mobile" excels and "desktop" fails.
But that's actually such an easy problem to solve. Mobile operating systems (and, in my cases Linux in general) are very bad at solving the hard yet common problems -- like seamlessly printing documents or working with arbitrary hardware and software.
I agree that there will be a shift to "mobile" OS style on computers -- it's already happening with Mac OS X and the Mac App store. No doubt Microsoft is already planning a UI for Windows that is also much more limited and they are certainly working on an app store. Taking a mobile OS and making it work on a PC is much more difficult than taking an existing desktop OS and making it function more like a mobile OS.
>Mobile operating systems (and, in my cases Linux in general) are very bad at solving the hard yet common problems -- like seamlessly printing documents or working with arbitrary hardware and software.
You're out of date. Printing is actually easier on Linux than on Windows.
Part of why you can't take a stock version of android and install it on any phone because the hardware discovery on cell phones is entirely lacking. Think back to the days when you had to select the type of sound card and it's address and all that jazz. Now apply that to every single hardware component.
I think doing knowledge-worker things on an Android-alike, let alone an iOS-alike, would be _awful_. My workflow sometimes involves "have the pdf of the research paper with the equations in it over here, matlab open over here, emacs with some C++ code integrating with matlab in it open over here, and a terminal open over here to build the C++, all arranged so I can see each and every thing (actually emacs and the terminal are transparent so I can see the research paper through them)". I break into a cold sweat thinking about trying to do something like this on iOS, and this is far from the worst case scenario - I do scientific computing, so most of the applications involved, apart from matlab, are pretty integrated into the OS (e.g. compiler, terminal, general dev tools). But what if I were a mechanical engineer, and I have Pro-E/Katiya/AutoCAD, whatever piece of crap windows application I use to program a CNC mill, and whatever other piece or crap windows application (LabView if I'm lucky) I use to integrate with the fucking DAQ, and, of course, Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint?
Being able to see and copy/paste between multiple windows simultaneously is crucial. "Mobile" OSes just _seem_ more user friendly because people only try to use them to do dipshit pseudo-productive tasks. Engineering on one would be awful.
Paper doesnt have copy and paste, still there doesnt seem to be any shortage of mind bending work that people do with paper. In the absence of copy and paste your workflow would probably look a bit different - possible read things one by one in sequential order and form a complete working model before opening the editor to actually write code. Depending on what you are doing this might/might not be a good thing.
Paper has a desk, which allows me to look at several pieces of it at the same time.
When doing derivations on a legal pad, I often get angry flipping between pages and wind up ripping out of all of the pages of work and arranging them on a table so that I can look at them all at the same time. If I'm working from a book, I'll xerox the pages I want so I don't have to flip back and forth.
Android/iOS lack this important characteristic of paper, but traditional desktop OSes emulate it pretty well.
I have to see equations in a pdf and code in an editor at the same time. This is non-negotiable. If I worked at a company using some iOS-alike on their desktop workstation where there was only one app on the screen at a time I would be killing a whole lot of trees printing out papers so I could look at them while I code.
Oh Lord, am I really about to argue that a Microsoft policy 'makes sense'? How the mighty have fallen. :-/
Not from my perspective, but from a corporate perspective this actually makes sense. gag
The problem is that corporates in general tend to test certain things to a ridiculous extreme, and other (usually more important) things not at all. Wherever I've worked at a large gov dept/corporate in the last ~4 years and they haven't updated from IE 6 the (lame) excuse is that it would require too much testing. Not of the new app, but of all the thousands of old apps, any one of which might get sideswiped by this change and you wouldn't even know why.
Last year I took a contract at a major govt dept where they were still using Windows I shit you not 95. That wasn't the only thing that prompted my swift exit, but it weighed heavily in the decision making.
Yes, apt-get for Windows would be fantastic, if you were forced (or wanted) to use Windows. Right now a few Windows programs do updates well, like Steam and Chrome, but a platform-wide solution (like dpkg+apt, or rpm+urpmi/yum) would be better.
First thing: Don't assume that this means they're going to replace Windows! :-)
Besides the guts of the OS which talks to the hardware (a very slick Linux build) on webOS phones, the platform is basically just HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It has always been easy to run and debug applications in Chromium.
You can download the SDK today and run an x86 build of webOS in VirtualBox. If you haven't played with webOS before, I urge you to try it.
Web developers who care about mobile will go absolutely bananas for it, and their new framework 'Enyo' is an even better experience for developers.
It will be so great if HP gets its groove back. It's really sad to see one of the great American companies flounder for so long. Ever since Carly merged it with Compaq they've been basically stagnant, IMHO, I think WebOS might really set them up for a big power play against Apple over the next few years.
I just like to say that some of HPs offerings are really well done. Just like Apple they can't make a decent computer <$500. Unlike Apple, they'll happily take your money to prove it. I've held the 13" Envy and it could give a Macbook Pro a run. Also, their dm1z laptop comes in at half the price of a Macbook Air and is quite impressive from the reviews I've seen. I was tempted to get one but they are sold out.
As a WebOS developer I think most people don't know what they are missing. It's really a beautiful OS (far better than Android, and better in some respects to iOS) I hope it continues to improve. And now that the designer behind it as at Google (Matias Duarte), Android users will be in for a great surprise.
$549 - $100 instant rebate puts it into strange category of being over or under $500 depending on how you interpret it. In this day 3GB is the bare minimum for a new laptop.
The only PC I've ever hated was a HP. Overpriced for poor parts, slow as hell for its advertised purposes and using their provided software, and when parts broke I had to pay for special HP parts because they used custom sizing and screws.
Exactly! How is this supposed to jump-start the market for TouchPad apps when a desktop and a tablet involve completely different interaction models?
I remember Tog or another early Mac team member reminiscing about the lack of arrow keys on the original Mac keyboard. They were intentionally left off (so the story goes) to prevent companies from creating shovel-ware ports of their existing applications.
There is value in getting developers to write for a desktop variant of webOS if it gets them downloading the SDK and familiar with the development model, just as the iPad obviously benefitted tremendously from the existing iPhone development infrastructure, but I hope no one thinks that you can simultaneously optimize for both desktop and tablet experiences. (Unless you're the sort of person who says "very unique" or makes multiple things your "top priority.")
The thing I'd really like to see in a portable computer is a touch-interface/mouse-interface hybrid. For example, you dock your iPad in a keyboard docking station (with mouse), and the interface morphs into standard OSX, with all the power and abilities that come along with that. Take it out of the keyboard dock, and it's an iPad again, with the finger friendly iOS touch interface (and limited to touch apps). Desktop apps and touch apps could share data, but would ideally have different interfaces. E.g. OSX's Mail.app and iOS's Mail app.
For HP of course, substitute webOS "slate" for iPad and custom desktop Linux distribution for OSX (I wish).
This is a stupid idea, imho. If you want Windows as the OS, get a PC with Windows. If you want WebOs, get a PC with WebOs. But getting one with both, is just an annoying thing and most users won't really care.
I'm not buying a powerful machine with GBs of RAM and a dual-core processor, to just run that WebOs thing. It works well with a tablet, but a PC is a computer and not a tablet.
It'll be a good idea, though, to install WebOs on Free DOS machines.
It's impossible for me so far to picture how a dual-OS system will benefit users. I keep hearing about some ability to boot the "little" OS when you just want to surf the web a little... that sounds horrible and I don't at all understand why you wouldn't just unsleep the machine from the "big" OS instance and use that. Is it just that sleep mode doesn't work well? ... So we're gonna throw on a whole other OS, too, to mitigate that? Surely I'm missing something because this sounds ludicrous.
How about battery life? If you could throw in a arm chip in there and have the webOS parts always on then you could get great battery life. Essentially this would work very similar to nvidia's optimus technology where machines ship with a low power intel gpu alongwith an nvidia gpu. When you do real 3d work the nvidia gpu kicks in, otherwise youre running off the intel chip. Key thing is how seamless the transition between webos and windows is.
Dell shipped this (Latitude ON or something) and then never spoke of it again. Yo dawg, I put a computer in your computer so now you have to learn two different UIs, configure all your settings twice, try to sync data, etc. just to save some battery.
A shame that HP are coupling webOS with HP PCs, instead of putting webOS on the Web, where it might better thrive and spread.
With webOS on the Web, Pre3 and TouchPad owners could log in at webos.me (or similar) from any WebKit browser and see their apps and data pre-synced; isn't that a better vision for a company that 'believes the Web is the future'?
HP's new Enyo SDK already allows developers to build apps for WebKit-based browsers that resize for desktop, tablet, and mobile screens[1]; it is a joy to use and targeting multiple screen sizes works great, so it feels like a missed opportunity that webOS developers will spend their time building apps in a WebKit browser, but be unable to publish them for others to use in a WebKit browser too.
If they're trying to attract developers -- the Web offers a much larger userbase than HP machines ever will. I think it worth sacrificing desktop and laptop sales to build mobile sales and create a healthy future for webOS.
I think WebOS will be like Steam is on PCs or like the Apple App store is on Mac based computers. In this case the purchasing and updating of apps will be consistent and easy to maintain, however they will still run side by side Photoshop and Games.
WebOS apps will run on WebTops to compete with ChromeTops on the netbook side, but those apps will also run on the desktop.
A key difference between WebTops and WebOS apps and Chrome apps will be the "Touch to Share" feature that will allow you to wirelessly share data between paired devices. This will make it really easy to have a phone, watch, TV, netbook, tablet and PC and share data between them.
I bet you will even be able to configure a home network by using some sort of "Touch to Share" configuration stone.
Only WebOS apps will have this feature and you may need special HP hardware to allow that functionality to work. With 100 million devices using "Touch To Share" next year, I hope we have a click-wheel level UX experiance to Rival Apple.
So that's why they were porting that to Windows. I just hope this won't end up killing WebOS. It was great on the Pre, I think it will do great on a tablet, but porting it to a PC might require HP to take WeBOS in a direction that will be worse for the platforms it was originally designed for.
There are two ways this could go, using WebOS as an instant-on OS.
Or some form of framework running within Windows to allow WebOS applications to be run, with notifications being forwarded over Wi-Fi from WebOS devices. Remember the new Enyo framework was actually demonstrated running within Google Chrome.
Either way this could be a boast to the developer eco-system, and reduce the cost per HP PC.
The great thing about webOS is that it's all HTML5 and CSS based, even the apps. For their mobile devices they choose to run a Linux kernel on the hardware but in principle it doesn't matter what the kernel is, as long as they have some way to show the apps.
Well, to start off with the initial SDK was just HTML5 and CSS. Later the PDK was released to enable actual native level coding, most of the higher end apps are PDK apps.
As a side note, the original iPhone was also all web technology based. It wasn't until a year or so later that a native SDK became available.
I'd say the "higher end game apps" are PDK apps, often because they're just porting existing iOS code. They have no need for the HTML UI.
With OS 2.x there are now options for hybrid apps as well - native code, but HTML UI. And the option to do backend work as node.js based services.
Essentially they've got a great mixed model depending on what you want to build.
All HTML/JS in the app.
Or abstract backend services but still code in js (node.js).
Or ditch all that and write a native code app with its own custom UI.
Or write a native code plugin with HTML UI.
This is crazy! Say goodbye to HP. Who will be their client base. Google will beat them at the simple platform of straight to the internet! I have the Google Chrome CR-48 and its my first choice to surf the internet.
When there is now an Android phone running Linux when connected to a laptop shell, HP is doing the opposite!
This is pure CEO puffery. When will these guys get it? When will they start looking up to Steve Jobs instead of treating him like a guy who just happened to get lucky eight times (Apple II, Macintosh, Pixar, Macintosh again, iPod, iTMS, iPhone, App Store, iPad)?
Steve does not talk about what will ship on every Macintosh next year. He might talk about what will ship in the next sixty days if there is an SDK he is shipping to developers today. Steve does not talk about Apple investing in R&D. Steve invests in R&D.
Talking about the future is the action of a person interested in how he looks and sounds, rather than the actions of a person interested in how the company performs.
Steve ships. Leo had better spend less time with his PR people and more time with his engineers. I have nothing against shipping WebOS on every HP PC next year. But please, Leo, just fucking do it. Talk to your engineers, not to me.