It was four years ago today that the Palm Pre, our first WebOS device, was released out into the wild. At that time we had great enthusiasm and hope that this was the start of something that would reshape mobile devices.
It didn’t work out the way we’d hoped.
But you know what? I’d do it again. I’d try to do some things differently in how I handled some things. I doubt that’d make a difference in the final outcome, but we all live and learn. Since you can’t go back in time and try again, what you need to do is learn from it, move forward, and try to apply those lessons to what happens down the road.
Life is too short to waste it making the same mistakes twice. There are more than enough mistakes out there to make to bother repeating one.
It’d be easy to focus on what was broken and screwed up at Palm, and that list could go on for a while. There were days when it wasn’t a lot of fun, because once you’re in that swirling funnel and you can see the drain getting closer, it’s hard to find fun in anything.
But what I prefer to remember are the people. I worked with the best damn group of people there. Fun, fascinating, intelligent, and every one of them working their ass off to make that product succeed. It didn’t work, but not for lack of trying.
And I would go to war again with them, even if I knew up front it was going to fail and we were all going to die at the end, just because they’d make the fight worth fighting.
Happy Birthday, Palm Pre. If only you’d been what we wanted you to be….