Web Directions

Burning ships — Palm abandons PalmOS, stakes all on webOS

• In: Blog
• By:John
• February 13, 2009
• Leave a response

In 1519, Hernan Cortés (quite pos­si­bly one of the most mur­der­ous peo­ple in human his­tory), arrived in the New World seek­ing fame, and more impor­tantly for­tune. Legend has it that after land­ing, but before set­ting off for the inte­rior, he burnt all his ships — as proof to his men, and the indige­nous south amer­i­cans watch­ing, that the con­quis­ta­dores were “all in”. The truth is not quite so clear cut, but this has come to stand as a metaphor for a very effec­tive approach to going into bat­tle (or any other venture) — burning your bridges, and mak­ing suc­cess (or epic fail­ure) the only options.

I wrote about Palm’s recently announced Pre, and webOS strat­egy, which par­tic­u­larly excited us here (and many at Web Directions North, includ­ing the Ajaxian duo of Ben Galbriath and Dion Almaer), in par­tic­u­lar, the strat­egy of using HTML, CSS and JavaScript as the way of devel­op­ing “native” Pre and webOS apps. Palm has clearly gone all in with this strat­egy, hav­ing announced that the PalmOS is no more. Their ships are now burnt. I’m sure there’ll be a great deal of dis­quiet from the many thou­sands of Palm devel­op­ers, who over the last decade or more have built thou­sands of PamOS apps. Palm would seem to have decided that the best chance for suc­cess is to har­ness the mil­lions of web devel­op­ers out there to build appli­ca­tions for the Pre (and other hinted at webOS devices).

No word as yet as to when we might see a release of the Pre, or pre release SDKs for webOS, but we’re kee­ing our eye’s peeled.

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