back to article webOS daddy Jon Rubinstein exits HP

Jon Rubinstein, late of NeXT, FirePower, Apple, and Palm, has resigned from his position at HP, where he endured the mismanagement and eventual overboarding of Palm's webOS mobile operating system. "Jon Rubinstein has fulfilled his commitment to HP," an HP spokesperson emailed The Reg. "We wish him well." And that's it. The …

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  1. Eddy Ito
    Unhappy

    [GASP]

    "... he'll be able to pop for a bottle of Herradura Selección Suprema Extra Anejo for that eventual margarita."

    Are yOu tRyiNg to maKe me aPoplECtic? [breath slowly, relax, inhale, exhale] What kind of heathen would suggest such a thing? Repeat after me, margaritas are made with blanco or, if you must, joven. I suppose depending on which brand you have, I could forgive even a resposado. To suggest making any mixed drink with that añejo is not something I can let pass without comment.

    Let us see what kind of man you are Mr. Myslewski, handbags at dawn!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Reading the news nowadays

    is like reading a bad Ayn Rand novel:

    "incompetent heads of large corporations bribe government to favor them while they promote their bumbling idiot friends and drive the true talent underground."

    Also seems like we're approaching a similar fate. Now where is that town in Colorado where we can all go to be free? Can't seem to find it on my map...

    1. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
      FAIL

      Bizarre, isn't it?

      No matter what you think of HP's handling of WebOS and Palm, for a major computer designer and manufacturer to let a talent like this just walk away is beyond belief. Surely they must have some role for him, or have they given up innovating new systems completely?

      GJC

      1. Chris Miller

        Innovation?

        We have people in India for that - and they're *much* cheaper so more money for my bonus, bwahaha!

        Can anyone think of an example of a big IT company buying a small company and the small company (and its product or any of its intellectual workers) still being around after a couple of years? After a couple of beers, the best we could come up with was Lotus, and that hardly qualifies as a success story.

        1. David Dawson
          Happy

          @Chris Miller

          The reverse takeover seems to happen every so often.

          Eg Apple buys NeXt, but look a few months later and its the next people in charge.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            it happened

            twice to HP. First the reverse take over by Compaq, then by EDS. Now look at the state of the company....

            1. Chris Miller

              But neither Compaq nor EDS could be described as 'small' (neither could Lotus at the time of the IBM takeover, except in relative terms). David makes a good point with NeXT, but that was exceptional circumstances in which a badly failing business (Apple as then was) desperately wanted their former CEO back, and the price was to buy out his new company.

              It's usually dodgy to say that 'X always happens' and there are normally some exceptional cases. But 99 (point several more 9s)% of takeovers where the buyer is (say) more than 10x the size of the business being bought end with no trace of the small outfit left within 36 months. I'm sure in some cases this is just a cynical attempt to eliminate potential competitors, but there must also be a lot of instances of executives thinking "this time we'll make it work". Repeating the same action and expecting a different result, remind me what Einstein though that was the definition of?

          2. Giles Jones Gold badge

            Apple were in the shit though, they knew their OS and computers had stagnated. They needed an OS and to build one from scratch would have taken forever.

            Plus Jobs created Apple. Nobody from Palm had founded HP.

        2. Mel Bournian

          Well there was Floating Point Systems: - acquired by Cray Research Incorporated to form their SPARC based Cray Superservers division. When CRI was acqured by SGI, Superservers was sold off to Sun Microsystems just as project "Starfire" matured. From memory, the Sun E10000 sold quite well during the dot com boom.

      2. Master Rod

        Jon is Evil....

        I can't believe that you are so ignorant that you can't see through the lines. Rubinstein does nothing more than run companies into the ground making them easy for take over. He's never worked a day that prospered for a company. I could run a company into prosperity in no time. I've done it before. Where is my beloved Palm OS, PDA's, Palm phones? In the toilet, that's where. He and his ilk need to be strung up for fraud, and deceiving the public. I bought many a Palm PDA for business use. The same with the Palm Pre. Talk about a loss! I'm not at all happy with that clown.

    2. QrazyQat

      The phrase "bad Ayn Rand novel" is redundant.

    3. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. bolts25

    bolts25

    HP does it again !

    Make sure it gets rid of any real talent so the crumbling mess called the "Executive Management Team" can carry on marking time while HP slowly decays into oblivion.

    At least they are on track and remain consistent. Shouldn't be long now.

    1. Robert E A Harvey

      Slowly?

    2. Asgard
      Big Brother

      Many corporations don't want good people. Good people make bad people look bad and so bad useless people don't want good people around them to show them up, so the good people will be endlessly attacked and undermined by the bad people.

      The thing is while the Executive Management Team are earning lots of money, they don't want anyone good upsetting their nice little earner roles. So they have a vested interest in maintaining things the way it is for as long as they can. That means they prevent any new good upstarts bring in any new product ideas because if the new product ideas are successful, that would threaten to highlight the rest of the bad management as incompetent wasters.

      That's why most corporations without any dominate technically minded leaders are very conservative in their product designs, because their predominately bad management are far more interested in infighting to hold onto their positions of power which earn them good money. Which is why they are bad because they are not focused on doing a good job. They are instead focused on preventing anyone else climbing up higher than them and so threatening to sideline them.

      Their behaviour is showing a passive aggressive form of Narcissistic personality disorder. They are entirely self-interested with an often hidden two faced obstructionist resistance against anyone else doing well around them which shows them up as bad. Its the same problem we have in politics. Its therefore no wonder their self-interested underhanded two faced behaviour is also referred to as office politics.

      The bad management will continue to milk the company of money until its near collapsing, at which point they will try to sell it and then walk away with millions more from their shares in the company. But even if the company just collapses, the bad management has already earned millions out of it, so they have little money worries unlike their redundant staff. But then the Narcissistic bosses don't really care about the redundant staff and they will simply argue the company failed due to market forces. In their mind, its not their fault. Narcissists refuse to even hear they are to blame, so its no wonder they never really learn they are wrong and so they continue to believe they are right. They are Narcissistic and that is why they are bad management. Their behaviour is arrogant self deception but you won't convince them of that and if you try, you will be thrown out the company.

      A company run like this can last for years if the industry its in has continuous good money to earn, but in a constantly changing industry like technology, they will eventually fail due to a total lack of vision preventing them adapting sufficiently to change. So the bosses fight to control and prevent changes in society by lobbying law changes to give them control over anything they feel they don't have enough control over. Its why for example the patent system has become so corrupted by them that it now only serves billionaire corporations, because that prevents a lot of disruptive technology companies taking the corporations markets from them. It doesn't always work of course, but the control freak bosses try hard to prevent it working whenever possible.

      Its also why anyone with any good ideas will find a lot of resistance to getting accepted in any corporation and any ideas that are accepted by their bosses will be argued that the ideas are really the bosses ideas and the staff who worked hard to make it happen will find they still get held back and pushed out the company. Corporate office politics is employment hell for anyone who wants to be creative & innovative.

      1. Yag

        @Asgard

        Too bad only one upvote is allowed...

      2. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
        Boffin

        The term is "injellititis" (C. Northcote parkinson)

        A dangerous combination of a high degree of incompetence and a high degree of jealousy, which react to form injellitance. Injellitant individuals in an organization prefer "sound" character over true ability. Creativity is anathema to such people. An organization infected with such people in management has contracted injellititis. A reverse competition results, in which everybody in management tries to hide his or her ability in order to secure promotion. Third rate people are promoted because they are no threat to the second rate management.

        See "Parkinson's Law" byt C. Northcote Parkinson. He said it all.

      3. Master Rod

        Who left the fools in charge?

        Well said! Greedy control freaks tend to hire lower forms of greedy control freaks. What a devolution. I feel sorry for the investors.

      4. joejack
        Trollface

        Finally a convincing argument for why corporations are like people.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Sis works for O2 and got given a pre-release Palm Prē, prior to its UK debut, which she passed onto me.

    As many others have said, webOS itself had a lot of potential but was let down by horrible, slow, cheap feeling hardware [the original Prē feels like a £50 piece of plastic junk, with an iPhone price tag] and that perennial problem with newly launched platforms —a complete dearth of apps.

    BTW —anyone who thinks Appletards or Fandroids are fanatical should head over to the PreCentral forums and check those guys out. We're talking serious Obsesso-Geekism there!

  5. sueme2
    Happy

    remember

    Netscape? That was opensourced, after it "failed". I have mine on webOS repeating history.

    1. Not That Andrew

      I don't see WebOS becoming the Mozilla of mobile OS's, there is already a free, popular and somewhat open one in Android.

      1. P. Lee

        Not sure what webos is like on phones, I suspect android is better there, but webos is a better tablet os than android and iOS. It takes advantage of the extra screen space where android assumes it has to conserve every last bit.

        By "better" I mean more elegant and pleasant to use.

        Also, it looks as though webos will be far more open than android currently is. We'll see if google responds in kind.

        There may not be massive numbers of apps for webos, but it does have quite a lot of functionality once you've got preware installed. X server FTW!

  6. Tom 35

    If HP put half the effort

    that they put into blocking 3rd party ink / ink refills (they even region code ink!) into new products / webOS they would still be great and not a sinking ship.

    We are selling our PC division, wait no we changed our mind... Brilliant!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone care for a harmless wager

    as to whether or not Rubinstein wanders back through the gates at Infinite Loop anytime soon?

  8. Master Rod

    Gofer it!

    The wager is on Anonymous Coward. $1 says that some company of fools will offer this turd the Brass Ring. He has absconded with millions, why even bother to work?http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/linux_32.png

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