Palm Chief: By Birthright, Palm Should Have Owned the Smartphone Market
What Palm chief Jon Rubinstein's appearance at Web 2.0 Summit today lacked in news, it made up for somewhat in perspective-on the mobile space, Palm's smartphone birthright, its acquisition by Hewlett-Packard and its future under HP.
Context & Ripple Effects
Rubinstein's 'birthright' framing closes a three-year arc the corpus has tracked closely: the 2007 board overhaul and 25% stake sale marked the moment Palm lost strategic independence, and the 2009 relaunch — arguing webOS was bigger than the Pre base, then giving away apps, free development, and free phones that October — was the attempt to reclaim it on ecosystem terms rather than hardware terms.
First-order effects
- Rubinstein's Web 2.0 Summit appearance is the first public articulation of Palm's identity under HP, recasting a failed independent challenger as a legacy asset whose potential HP now owns.
- The claim directly frames HP's obligation: having bought the 'birthright,' HP inherits webOS's roadmap and the developer ecosystem Palm tried to seed with its late-2009 free-phone and free-development offers.
Second-order effects
- HP's entry forces the platform contest onto subsidy economics — if free devices and free tools were Palm's 2009 play on a constrained budget, HP's balance sheet changes what rivals must match to hold third-party developers.
- Rubinstein's retrospective positioning pressures Apple and Google's camp by reframing webOS not as a newcomer but as the rightful incumbent displaced, an argument aimed at press perception more than market share.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone mobile OS vendors without carrier-scale distribution consolidate into larger computing firms, leaving smartphones to vertically integrated platform owners who can absorb years of ecosystem losses.
- The episode strengthens the template of the acquirer-as-second-chance for stranded software platforms, where valuation rests on the parent's willingness to fund the original vision.
The trend: Smartphone platform competition is consolidating around companies large enough to bankroll operating-system ecosystems, turning once-independent OS makers like Palm into acquired assets seeking a second life.