In early June 2007, Palm was teetering on the edge of obscurity. Their flagship Treo product line had gone stale, numbers were down across the board, and rumors of a sale were abound. On June 4th, 2007 it was announced that Elevation Partners had purchased a 25% equity stake of Palm for $325 million. Flash forward to today; just two years later (almost to the day), Palm has launched the Pre, a phone which managed to nab the attention of just about every blog and blog reader out there.
So what changed? What had that new-found $325 million bought them? Talent. Lots and lots of talent – from their competitors, no less. With a good amount of lucky timing and some decent salary proposals, Palm managed to snatch up at least 8 people who were just oh-so-damn good at what they do, ending up with the Palm Pre and webOS as a result.
The Ex-Applers:
Jon Rubinstein: Perhaps the most well known of the Palm to Apple switchers. Rubinstein worked at Apple from February 1997 to April 2006, serving as senior vice president of hardware engineering and, later, senior vice president of Apple’s iPod team. When a trip to a Toshiba plant yielded a 1.8″ hard drive that no one really knew what to do with whilst Jobs was looking for a portable music player, Rubinstein put the pieces together – and the iPod was born. Rubinstein joined at Palm right after the Elevation Partners investment was finalized in October 2007, serving as executive chairman.
Lynn Fox: Take a look at how the Pre was handled: Employees were sworn to secrecy, with all information shared on a need-to-know basis. The product announcement looked like a parallel universe Steve-note. They pushed every morsel of information in a way that was sure to hype the hell out of the thing – without promising more than they intended to offer. Doesn’t that sound like a very Apple-esque way to go about things? It should. Prior to joining Palm as head of PR in March of 2008, Lynn Fox was Apple’s head of PR for at least 8 years.
Mike Bell: After 16 years at Apple as VP of CPU Software for the Mac team, Mike Bell changed his title to Senior Vice President of Product Development at Palm in January of 2008. It seems like he’s liking it there – in December of 2008, he was quoted saying “I’m fundamentally convinced we’re onto something huge. Some of the stuff we’re working on here is mind-blowing—better than anything I’ve seen before.”
The Helions:
No one would have been interested in the Pre based on the hardware alone. Yet another QWERTY slider – big deal, right? But that webOS.. it just seemed so gorgeous. Everything just seemed to flow together, both visually and functionally. Though it’s still up in the air whether or not it’ll prove itself as viable a platform as the iPhone OS/App Store combination, the software is really what sealed the deal here.
As odd as it may seem, webOS’ existence may lie in the untimely (or, for Palm, incredibly timely) demise of wireless MVNO Helio. Helio started going under, and their UI team bailed – right over to Palm. A significant portion of Palm’s User Interface/Experience team is made up of ex-Helions, all the way up to the guy who introduced webOS at the Pre’s debut.
Matias Duarte: Wherever this guy goes, awesome user interfaces follow. At Danger, he helped lay the foundation for the circular homescreen UI they still use to this day on the Sidekick series. At Helio, his team churned out one of the best user interfaces to grace a feature phone – that of the Helio Ocean. Matias was chief designer at Helio before becoming Senior Director of User Experience at Palm sometime in late 2007.
Unfortunately, we don’t know all that much about the rest of his team – but we do know of a few who went with him from Helio:
Wes Yun: Worked at The Designory prior to Helio.
Michelle Koh: Also worked at The Designory prior to Helio.
Nate Streu: Ex-Helion
Daniel Shiplacoff: Ex-Helion
From what we’ve been told, Matias’ past teams at Danger and Helio were both somewhat restricted, be it in freedom or funding. At Helio, for example, they designed an incredible user interface intended for use on the Helio Ocean 2. Unfortunately, technical limitations of the WIPI platform that then parent company SK Telecom insisted they use kept it from ever seeing the light of day. Palm, however, granted Matias and co. free reign – and webOS emerged, with hints of the Helio OS that never was tucked throughout.
This list is by no means exhaustive, of course – nor are we trying to say that these are the only folks responsible for Palm Pre/webOS. It’s simply a list of the talent we know for sure made the jump to Palm in the months and years leading up to the Pre. If you know of any we’ve missed, drop a comment below.
What about the Symbian OS ??
There’s a pile of ex-Adobe people at Palm too.
Another bullshit post by mobilenoob. Just as many ex-Palm people now work at Apple.
The fanboys don’t understand that, or if a couple of them do they don’t want to listen
LOL. Too bad that webos is DOA.
Now, there’s a post that shows a good amount of research, unlike that garbage that Arrington posts all the time. Thank you for the insight, Greg.
quite the complement. I love when people complement me by ripping out my co-workers – much less the person that signs my paycheck… cmon bud
Didn’t a bunch of BeOS folks go over as well? People who worked for Apple before they went to BeOS.
yes, see my post down below – travis led that charge, and in fact there is a lot of history between teh BeOS folks and the original danger team too…
Half my team from Apple left to join Palm the past 18 months. I shoud’ve known something was brewing…
Basically, Palm didn’t have the people, expertise, or vision to build anything that looked like it might be a competitor to Apple’s iPhone… so they hired a bunch of people from Apple to build it for them.
Just like Apple did. They hired engineers and others from other companies that built the Ipod and Iphone.Some of those that built that for them went on and built the Pre for Palm! You make it sound ike it is OK for APPLE to hire peopel to mrove and make their high tech items but no other company is allowed to do it? WOW hypocritical double standards are really rampet for apple fanbois
Amen brother. These sheep are so blinded, from sitting on Jobs’ johnson the past 5 years.
Oh well, I enjoy these drones walking around mindlessly with their underspecced, and locked down OS. Makes my cell seem that much better when I show them what it can do.
NOBODY CARES WHAT YOU THINK OR WHAT YOU USE
Palm Pre is another great storm to come.
Companies are only as good as their people. Palm had a vision for what it wanted and they hired the people they needed to get the job done. The fact that they were able to woo so many people away from Apple should say something about the opportunity to innovate that Palm gave to these experienced players. Sure, money helps, but people want to play for winners, and they wouldn’t have all come on board if they didn’t think the Pre/webOS could be a winning product.
I know it’s unreasonable to expect flawless journalistic integrity from a blog, but this is the third article I’ve read (from three different writers no less) demonstrating a clear, inexplicable editorial bias against Palm and the Pre, and it’s really leaving a sour taste in my mouth.
I bought a Pre today, and it’s an amazing device – certainly not one without faults, but the good outweighs the bad by an order of magnitude. I’ve made a $200 investment in the future of Palm and webOS in that this will be my phone for the next two years, and I’m counting on the strength of the platform to be there for me with updates and support for the duration of that commitment. When I read articles like this that are a blatant attempt to weaken and devalue Palm, what I see is you trying to turn my investment into a $200 paperweight.
You haven’t quite warranted a removal from my RSS feed, but you’re damn close.
You hadn’t noticed the mobile trade press is full of iPhone toting fanbois?
..This is a blatant attempt to weaken and devalue Palm? I know some of these people, and consider them absolutely amazing at what they do. Acknowledging that Palm knew who to draft at the right time should not be an insult.
My rant was about TechCrunch’s overall editorial bias against Palm, not just about this article. Asmittedly, this particular article is the least anti-Palm of the three I’ve read, but the term “poached” certainly lends a negative tone to the entire piece, especially after TC has had nothing but criticism for Palm and the Pre in the last week.
Whatever your intention, this article came across as “Palm isn’t good enogh to innovate on its own, so it brought in these people.”
I’ll be honest here, I don’t see a single negative word in this article, it seems all positive to me: giving props to Palm for recruiting the right folks to get the job done. There is certainly no “clear editorial bias” against them, nothing even close. Are you sure you commented on the right post??
Yeah I don’t see the ias in this one article but I am sure if you put it all together with the other biased artcles and then you see the sensationalized POACHED word in the Title,it leeeds you to come to the conclusion it is more bias same ole sam ole. I think thugh GREG was just saying they go the right people at the riht time to make a fantastic device. Apple fanbois wil use it as one already did to say Palm can’t innovate on their own they have to POACH. Definitely similar to the Main Stream Media with the mis-leading Title to elicit a certain degee of hatred for their intended Scarlet letter(generally in the MSM it is anyone that isn’t a hard core liberal or anyone going against apple-palm in this case…soo yeah there is a history of bigotry going on in here and there)
DAMN iphone keyboard I need a Pre too.
PRE IS BORING. THEY HAD TO POACH EVERYTHING. RE: ITUNES SYNC
A famous person once said to imitate is great but to copy is genious!
That’s how you get it done Palm.
sure, nice research, but bearing in mind that this is sort of what i do for a living, you have forgotten the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT HIRE made at all of palm: travis geiselbrecht, father of BeOS – which almost became Apple’s new OS before they went with BSD (well, travis was the kernel guy)
…but he’s the core of what makes WebOs work…read more about him at LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/travis-geiselbrecht/0/ba7/507
or his site: http://www.tkgeisel.com
…and of course these other key folks:
Paul Chambers, Lead Architect on Palm who left a couple of months ago to join Amazon: http://www.bod.org/
Olivier Boireau, VP of HW Platform who also left in February to go out on his own and consult
Chris McKillop, Senior Director of Core OS, ex Apple iPhone team figure
Andy Grignon, Director of Platform Experience, also ex Apple iPhone team figure
Jeff Bush, Director of Advanced Media (critical), also ex Apple iPhone figure..previously central to original Danger team too
…these are all folks who were stolen and joined in ‘97ish time frame to push this product to delivery…there are others who were palm figures before, but these folks drove the evolution along with others you’ve found…
NOW we’ve got a nice list going ;) …email me if you’d like to waste an hour or two over IM together ripping apart the ENTIRE Palm organization!!! ;)
@dave: With all respect to Travis, who is a superb engineer and has clearly accomplished a great deal at Palm, I think calling him “father of BeOS” or even “the kernel guy” is overstating his involvement at Be.
Even Travis’s work history on his LinkedIn profile, which you point to, bears this out. BeOS existed in fairly complete form well before Travis started at Be in 1999. BeOS was running on PowerPC-based Macs in 1996, and on BeBox hardware well before that. Wouldn’t have happened without a kernel. ;-)
Again, Travis did great work at Be, but there were a lot of engineers who built the BeOS operating system, and most of them were there before Travis. It’s a disservice to them to suggest that anyone arriving in 1999 is the “father” of that product.
i completely hear you – and that was definitely an overstatement (!) – props to all of the beOS folks who worked on this – but of course, as i understand from apple sources involved when hancock was reviewing beOS, it simply still didn’t live in what apple felt was the ‘real world’ and so got pushed aside in light of bsd…
Hah, actually yeah I was just an intern at Be. Was a hell of a lot of fun!
dude, you weren’t supposed to tell anybody that – i was trying to rig you for a hire as pike’s protege at elgoog …now they’re just gonna hire you in some kinda qa role ;)
Palm had a vision for what it wanted and they hired the people they needed to get the job done.
It is a vision … that’s been available on the iPhone for years and on the G1 phone as well.
It looks like but there is absolutely nothing compelling in there to gather developer mindshare away from Iphone and Android development.
I see Pre selling out to BB in a year or so as Blckberry doesn’t have any major new shakes going on.
Blogreader why do you and other folk like you think in terms of “either/or”??
“It looks like but there is absolutely nothing compelling in there to gather developer mindshare **away** from Iphone and Android development.
If I was a developer I would be looking at as many opportunities to increase my revenue and look at the webos as another. Its the same with people thinking that there is a war that is going on trying to take Apple iPhone users away from their beloved smart device. There are plenty of users out there who are on non smart phones that may consider an iPhone, Android or other smart device.
There are also plenty of folk who want an iPhone but won’t buy one without a keyboard. There are plenty of people who are waiting for the next iPhone and may not buy the pre.
“I see Pre selling out to BB in a year or so as Blckberry doesn’t have any major new shakes going on.”
That is a very BOLD statement (no pun intended). Once again you are assuming that BB users (who use these devices in the enterprise are going to
a) Give up their current investment
b) Accept the lack of security features (even if they get added)
All in a year !
Thanks for the reasonable comments.
When it comes to development it really is an either / or unless the two platforms are remarkably similiar. Maybe Pre programming is like that of Android (java) but it is nothing like objectiveC. That’s an either / or.
By selling out to BB I don’t mean that RIM’s going to drop the BB in favor of the Pre, I mean the Pre will be folded into RIM’s lineup, maybe improving their own craptucalar programing environment.
The only way the Pre’s sales are going to get big quickly (and in this market that’s essential) that I can see is if they drop the price to $0.
WOW blog bigoted much? Don’t hold back your hatred now,we wouldn’t want to acknowledge that some people(phones) are as good as others.You would rather KILL those that have a diferent vision then you do. What a swell guy you are blog!! You deserve A$$hole of the year award!! Sorry Steve Blog earned it this year
“In the case of development it is either or”
So programmers only know one language ! C’mon buddy you know better than that!
Before the Apple SDK came out there was no real knowledge on how to develop for the iPhone.
There are programmers out there (and I know a few) that look to these platforms and choose several, especially when the lure of reusing skills they already have is a big draw. So WebOS usings basic web skills that almost all developers have is going to be a draw.
Also apparently there are 7-8 million Palm owners. Don’t you think at least a portion of these will buy the Pre? Add to that the folk who need a keyboard device, don’t like Windoze mobile or BB and you can easily see 5million users within two years. Then you have the non smart phone users and that within a year there will be many WebOS apps (heard of Pre Dev Camps?)
Add to that the fact that Reuters (or one of the big writers out there) mentioned this morning that half of those in line at the Flatiron Sprint store buying the Pre were iPhone owners (yes that was a real surprise to me and may not be representative) suggest there are lots of tech geeks out there willing to just swap around.
Lastly, it is obvious that Palm have several other WebOS phones in the pipeline. So 6-7 million phones in 2 years is not inconceivable.
So with all that going on (excluding any unforseen disasters) do you really think Palm aren’t going to make it on their own?
AKA the traitors
thanks….
http://www.beymod.com.tr
Basically, I take a few notes from this article:
1) It’s business as usual in the high-tech world in CA. Surprise, surprise! This has been going on since the birth of the integrated circuit revolution with Fairchild.
2) Palm had the foresight to realize that the only way to produce something spectacular was to pull together a bunch of experts in the field.
3) It was successful at pulling some real talent.
Not bad for a company that was near the end of it’s life.
As a side note, Apple is part of a recent anti-trust investigation specifically because they illegally prevent others from hiring away their talent.
If talent isn’t free to move around, then there would not have been a Silicon Valley and we would all still be working on 4 function calculators.
would this explain why all mba students are still using the hp12c from the 80’s??? ;)
Have a iMac, like it, but don’t worship it, I will buy another for my next computer (go figure). Have iPod, great device; practically perfect.
Just bought Pre. Fantastic. If iPhone had been with Sprint, I’d have an iPhone, but all this exclusivity with carriers hurts consumers. I can’t afford to cancel 4 lines. Having played with an iPhone, and now using a Pre, I see no reason to have iPhone envy. The Pre does everything I need it to do (and things I didn’t know I even wanted it to do!). Great job!
I also see the wisdom in Sprint/Palm’s low key marketing. The Pre is easy to use, but being capable of doing more than any other phone, requires a little training (not that much). They don’t need people walking around complaining that no one told them they can’t have long finger nails and type on a Pre or making any other complaints. Instead, they “screen” people to see if this is a device they will need, teach them to use it and send away a happy customer who will be able to show off the product to others. A 30 second spot with cool graphics and music can’t do that. Word of mouth can. Brilliant!
I am one happy Pre user/Sprint customer. (Sprint might be the smallest, but I have NEVER had a problem getting assistance from them. Polite and helpful. The Pre isn’t why you should switch. Sprint service is the reason. (Admittedly I’ve had no experience with any other carrier other than listen to friends complain about ATT).
Getting smart people with experience is how many companies build up from ashes.
Now this article is gold… original & a bit in-depth
Kudos to Greg Kumparak for writing this!!
It particularly shines because of all the junk the Techcrunch has been turning out lately.
Seem to me that the Pre interesting advantage is the multiple app situation, which several apps run at the same time, while in apple only one run at the same time (except iTunes). I’m pretty sure this is dependent on the capacity of the CPU and Memory. I hope Pre hardware is stronger than iPhone otherwise it will be very slow. On the other hand apple could always put more muscle inside the iPhone and make it support a few apps at the same time.
All in all Palm was the leader in this industry and now its not. It let Blackberry take over and later iPhone. I don’t think the Pre will make much difference.
Can we get some international GSM love with all these phones. Sprint sucks and our company is in Sprint land (Kansas). I used to live next to the international headquarters and still got dropped calls, go figure :).
come on dude. that makes no sense. have you any idea how saturated that hq is with towers and repeaters. did you buy a piece of shit phone and abuse it and still expect it to perform as intended?
if you don’t like sprint, that’s fine. you’re allowed to like or not like whatever you please. but don’t fabricate reasons, especially absurd ones.
I don’t understand what are you trying to assume , This team of newbies get Big Money for a job well done, What old Palm could not do without acquiring fresh new idea’s, Which is so obvious by the way even the Japanese knew a good and better copy gives market value , But no stubborn as they where it was all kept just with little innovation steps.
The market wants video we do video a little better.
The market wants mp3 we do it a little better.
The market wants push email lets excel this up.
Innovation comes from getting it not following small steps.
Welcome to your wake up call Palm don’t forget this lesson the next time you fall asleep again.
I’m glad they hired these people because now I have a Pre in my pocket!!!
You guys totally missed Matt Kern (@lightcap), one of the lead developers that was a critical in shifting the strategy towards WebOS (HTML, CSS and JavaScript), built much of the OS and the mail client.
I’ve worked with Wes Yun before. He is a super talented designer (and a generally great guy).