Canceled: HP kills TouchPad, webOS, Palm Pre, Jon Rubinstein’s future

by Bill Palmer

Jon Rubinstein’s dream of taking down his former boss at Apple is officially dead. In a major revamp of the company’s product line, Hewlett Packard has announced the end of the road for its webOS based products including the Pre smartphone and the TouchPad tablet. HP will also spin off its line of Windows PC computers. The latter move comes as a shock, as just a few years ago HP acquired Compaq in a failed bid to become the world’s largest PC maker. But the webOS move could be seen coming a mile away (in fact eleven days ago we predicted it), as HP slashed the prices of the TouchPad again in an attempt to blow out remaining inventory before dropping the hammer. While the news is bad for those who just sunk money into webOS based hardware which now has even less of a future than before today’s news, it’s even worse for one man in particular: former Apple exec, former Palm exec, and perhaps soon to be former HP exec Jon Rubinstein.

Rubinstein was one of Steve Jobs’ right hand men at Apple for years, before “retiring” a few years ago back and ultimately landing at rival Palm. There he spearheaded the PDA maker’s bold move into smartphones, with the Pre line of phones running the “webOS” mobile operating system which was intended to compete head-on with Apple’s iPhone and iOS devices. But without the kind of heavy carrier backing which floated the rival Android platform into marketshare success, the Pre went nowhere with the mainstream despite heavy applause from the geekdom. Eventually Palm went up for sale, and Hewlett Packard scooped it up. The Palm Pre became the HP Pre, and a webOS-based tablet called the TouchPad was added to the mix. Nevermind that the TouchPad was such a blatant hardware ripoff of the iPad design that Apple could have sued and easily won; the writing was on the wall to so early for the TouchPad that Apple didn’t bother to sue HP in the way it’s suing Samsung and HTC because it was so clear that the TouchPad didn’t have a future. But now that HP had dropped the hammer (on itself), questions abound regarding not just the future of the company, but also Rubinstein’s future and how it could ultimately affect Apple and the iPhone…

When Palm first went up for sale, there was external talk that Apple could scoop it up for relative pocket change in order to add the webOS engineers to Apple’s own iOS team for the sake of swifter development. Such a move would have reunited Jobs and Rubinstein, and some have inferred that the reason why the Apple-Palm deal never happened (despite Apple’s massive cash hoard and ability to acquire almost any smaller company) is the same reason “Ruby” left Apple to begin with: some kind of undocumented bad blood between him and Jobs. The question now is whether Rubinstein remains at HP, which is now swiftly on its way to becoming a printer company and doesn’t sound like the kind of environment which would keep a tinkering geek like him motivated, or whether he “retires” once again. If it’s the latter, there’s the issue of just where he ends up. Might he end up back at Apple, working on iOS, where he arguably never should have left? That’s a matter for Jobs and Rubinstein to figure out. But regardless of how Ruby’s future plays out, the questions regarding Hewlett Packard are now almost limitless until the smoke clears…

Earlier this month I derided HP, at least on the consumer side of things, as being essentially a printer company which liked to pretend it was more for the sake of impressing its shareholders. Instead of being an active participant in the PC market, it sells Windows-based PCs manufactured by a third party which have no connection to HP itself beyond the logo on the minitower. Instead of having its own role in the MP3 player market years ago, it literally licensed the iPod from Apple in a move which took HP nowhere. And instead of trying to be a player in the smartphone and tablet market, it bought a dying company like Palm and rebranded it as an HP product while giving Rubinstein a bit of funding so he could carry out his failed webOS experiment a bit longer. HP could brag to its shareholders that it was making bold moves in the mobile device market, just like it could pretend it was a real computer maker. But now the computers, the smartphones, the tablets, the in-house mobile operating system are all being tossed out.

So what’s really going on? Sounds like HP has reached a point where it’s ready to admit that its consumer-level forte really does consist primarily of peripherals like printers and scanners (I’ve got a very pleasing HP laser printer sitting right here, lest ye think I’m some kind of HP hater). That means the pretend-businesses like tablets, and the disconnected businesses like PCs had to go. Of course this could just be a matter of HP clearing the decks so it can make another pointless acquisition and pretend to be moving into yet another trendy market. But really, with smartphones and tablets and even computers and laptops now off HP’s roster, what’s left to move into? Sounds like maybe, for the first time in a long time, HP has decided that honesty about what it really is as a consumer company is the best policy. Here’s more on the end of the TouchPad.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.