WebOS was worth fighting for and it was in better shape than the 1st and 2nd Xbox IMO. What a waste.
You can use a monopoly to get monopolies in other markets. You go into those other markets and take losses, until all others have quitted.
Then, when you have another monopoly, you can earn back the money. It might not have worked so well in the hardware games consoles.
Enyo let you write HTML5 apps in Chrome, Firefox or whatever, and essentially (to simplify) add a few WebOS hints and you have a fully functional native app. More than anything else, I hope Enyo becomes completely open source so we can write html5 cross-os apps that are as snappy as those on WebOS with a framework that lets you create reuseable parts.
edit: booting into webos would be booting into a browser the same way booting into chrome os is booting into a browser.
I was just on a Virgin America flight where they were lending out Chromebooks to try and part of me thought why aren't they lending out tablets on a plane instead?
And porting some of those chromeOS apps would've been pretty easy...
I played with one for a bit at Best Buy, but it felt clunky and didn't look as good as the ipad. OTOH I didn't buy an iPad either, as tablets just don't work for me.
WebOS 3.0 finally implemented GUI HW acceleration because if it was bad on the smartphone it would be unusable at tablet resolutions.
When people say that android is slow this what they mean, the interface doesn't flow it jerks.
A fruity brand is important these days. Fashion dictates what people buy. "Fashion over function".
HP was really stupid launching the "Ouchpad" at prices similar to the iPad because the sum of iOS and its application support make it a better product. With a lower price, it could win some market share. WebOS deserved better management.
I do understand. The iPod is an excellent product and is priced very competitively. It's not, however, the best choice for everyone and you cannot neglect brand plays an important role in how consumers pick products. I would love to use a Macbook (and I could - a nice, shiny one has always been one intranet form away from me) but then I would have to struggle like my fellow colleagues do to tailor it to my rather specific tastes. For me, it's just not worth it. That's not to say I wouldn't love to have one - my heart wants it. My brain denies it to me because it's not the best choice.
And therefore, being unable to run iTunes (unless under a VM running Windows or a hackintosh) an iPad as useful to me as a brick.
> b) appears to think complex decisions are binary.
Have you ever seen a teen shopping for clothes? Why do you think shopping for a tablet is any different? Why do you think most people (who don't understand the differences between tablets) turn this into a complex decision? iPads are cool, Touchpads aren't (and they really lack appealing applications) and Androids are clunky (they really are, but they have other things to offer)
Saying "it's about the brand" is too simple because it could mean "Buzz / clinging to past glory" (i.e. the Sony strategy) or "well earned reputation for producing products people like" and heavily papering over the reasons in the latter case.
If you think 90% of people really weight pros and cons of a mostly technical decision, you are an optimist. I am not sure most people who buy iPads know every other tablet available (and that includes things like the Nook) can browse the web, use e-mail, watch videos, run Flash thingies and play Angry Birds. Apple enjoys a powerful reputation and it's often a good enough decision to go with an iPad when you are confused by a lot of slightly different offerings.
The Touchpad appears to have been rushed out before it was ready and its software has a great deal of problems, but I am quite sure those problems would have been fixed relatively soon. It's been on the market for only 45 days, after all.
They know how to do hardware and know how to market hand held IP devices. Why shouldn't they jump head first and give Apple/Android significant competition?
Microsoft really pushed having an integrated console dashboard and operating system, and Sony has slowly caught up with the big pieces over the life of the PlayStation 3, but whenever it's mentioned to Nitnendo, they seem to take pity on the questioner for seeing any importance in it, giving online, connectivity, and software as service a grimace-ridden "that's nice, dear," before going back to putting more gyroscopes and polarized displays in their disconnected, single player peripherals.
I just don't think it's in their culture, and they don't seem ready to make a shift.
A scenario I can see developing itself would be one where Samsung, LG, or HTC buys WebOS. Either, to have an edge in this patent mess, and/or in response to Motorola acquisition by Google.
Interesting times.
(1) Wii U will be a huge bust for holiday 2012 leading to...
(2) a huge bidding war a couple quarters later for Nintendo as an exclusive 3rd party.
(3) Microsoft will win, overpaying heavily.
(4) Shigeru Miyamoto's swan songs of Mario and Zelda with Kinect will be Co-Games of the Year 2013 but...
(5) less than a year later Nintendo will opt out of the Microsoft deal and produce for everyone.
The Wii U and 3DS might be disappointing, but Nintendo is a survivor. It has the internal support to last through dry spells on the strength of first party titles alone.
It would be very difficult for a company as resilient and conservative as Nintendo to sink itself in such a short time frame. Remember, too, this company also started off making playing cards 100 years ago.
The only bad end I could see in Nintendo's immediate future would be an aggressive if not hostile takeover. I believe its market cap is only $20 billion, and supposedly half of that is in cash. If Apple or Microsoft wanted to pay a premium for the ultimate maker of killer apps this is the time to make a move. In another cycle it will be too late: the mobile wars will be decided and/or Nintendo will likely have recovered. Who knows how well the company would survive a takeover though.
The same can be said about phones and portable video game systems. It's all ARM CPUs with Imagine GPUs. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, webOS, Nintendo GBA/DS/3DS, Sony Vita all use the exact same chips from the same design firms.
The big hardware differentiator is what cost/performance balance you want to strike. Newer architectures with newer manufacturing processes cost more plain and simple. And there is a spectrum of other off the shelf components to round out the package.
There can be some play in getting more out of a design with engineering tricks or getting better components at the same cost with economies of scale. Or you can corner the market by buying out the entire manufacturing capacity of the best components to deny your competitors (or vice versa). But it's pretty much you get what you pay for.
Nintendo builds hardware two to three generations behind to save a lot on costs. Not because it doesn't know how to get something faster and better. The upcoming Wii U is basically an older PowerPC CPU with an older ATI GPU. If Nintendo wanted, it could create a crazy powerful console with a $1000 CPU and dual $600 GPUs that nobody would buy. All it needed to do was tell IBM and ATI what it wanted. It wasn't a matter of engineering that steered them away, but a matter of economics. Which if you remember right worked great in the short term for the Wii. But as everyone already knew wasn't a long term play. Hence the earlier-than-everyone-else release of the Wii U.
If it flops, who cares? They didn't spend huge amounts on loss-leading hardware, and they didn't need to make a huge investment in a cutting edge FPS only to be told it's not as good as Halo.
Apple (along with the Angry Birds developers) stole their lunch, with another cheap game machine, with an even cooler new control system. Eventually, that market will start to mature, and you will need 100 developers to make a good iOS game. And Nintendo won't want to touch that market with a barge pole, because it becomes a winner-takes-all bloodbath with huge entry costs.
The question is, is iOS an existential threat to the gaming market as a whole? If so, Nintendo will lose. If not, Nintendo will come up with some other wacky control system, and build a few fun (but simple) games staring Mario. People will buy it, because they want a bit of a change from their familiar, mature, and eventually boring touch games. Apple won't hurt them this cycle, because they are busy consolidating their monopoly on tables. Apple doesn't want to take over the gaming market - the 3DS was just a piece of collateral damage. Apple wants to sell a boring mature platform (with simple updates to performance, but no fundamental changes), not novelties that will need to be redesigned every 5 years. But the iPad just happens to be new enough to still be a novelty, and thus devastate Nintendo.
It's not about ability, it's a cogent choice to step back and not play into the arms race. They did the exact same thing with the DS, and outsold the (very significantly) more powerful PSP almost 3:1. And a few years earlier, the GameBoy brutalized the Game Gear.
In terms of raw power, the GC was the most powerful console of its generation (or tied with the Xbox). So was the N64. Neither panned out (though neither lost N money either), so Nintendo went into a different direction. And — at least for a time — struck gold.
You could argue that Nintendo will sell that converged home device but Wii U sure ain't it. No it will probably be the big app platforms (Windows, iOS/OS X, Android/linux) that win the home.
Nintendo harbors great will with consumers like Apple. WebOS seems to be a great mobile operating system.
To witness some true, fierce competition, Nintendo should mix their branding/games into WebOS & then allow developers to create games for their platform. WebOS already has 1,000s of apps created for it now.
Everyone currently in the market (RIM & Windows) are stale brands and do not harbor excitement amongst many demographics. Nintendo's brand loyalty stretches many demographics. From 16 to 24, 24 to 35 to 35 to 50.
How many iOS and Android users have searched for a mario game for their devices? HOw many people own Wii just so they can play these games?
And do what Access did for the original PalmOS?
I'm sorry. I am just not feeling optimistic right now. It's bedtime for me. See you all tomorrow.
Seriously HP, how do you expect us to trust you next time you woo us to develop for your platform?
Maybe there won't be a next time.
It's a shame Nokia didn't have the balls/foresight to buy Palm, they could have been shipping gorgeous Nokia crafted WebOS phones for the last couple quarters instead of getting slaughtered by Android et al.
What next time? HP jumped off a cliff. There will be no next platform. Not from them.
I'm gutted. Genuinely.
When I was younger, before Fiorina stepped up to be the first to rape the corpses of the founders, I was a massive fan of HP. My first graphing calculator was an HP48G, which taught me the joys of Lisp... well, Psil, because it came with Reverse Polish Lisp.
WebOS could have been the resurrection of that culture -- fully JavaScript development environment, app development across multiple mobile and tablet platforms with a single environment... just genius. It's sad to see that vision evaporate, along with some of the novel telephony and interactive features that made WebOS a joy to work with.