Ex-Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein says the sale of his former company to HP was a "waste" and that he regretted the deal with hindsight.
He said HP never gave webOS "a chance to flourish" before abruptly shutting it down and that he wouldn't make the same decision to sell again.
"I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP," Rubenstein told Fierce Wireless. "Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that."
I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste
HP spent $1.2 billion acquiring Palm in 2010, giving it a potential foothold in the growing smartphone market. But it never gained traction against iOS and Android and, just over a year later, then-HP boss Leo Apotheker said the company would discontinue operations for devices running on webOS.
Replacement CEO Meg Whitman then farmed parts of the system out to the open source community at the beginning of last year. LG salvaged the rest at the beginning of this year to use in its smart TVs.
That, said Rubenstein, meant webOS never got "a chance to flourish".
"If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?" he said.
Rubenstein also blamed some of the company’s troubles on Verizon backing out of a deal to carry the Palm Pre, leaving Sprint as the only carrier option.
"I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight," he said.
"We almost had deals with Verizon and with Vodafone, and in the last minute both of those guys decided not to go through with the deal, so we had a deal with Sprint."
He added that "Palm was dying" when he joined the company in 2009.
"It wasn't like we had the pick of the litter. Everybody forgets that Palm was pretty much dead when we did the recapitalisation. It had no future at the time."
However, amid reports that iOS 7 has taken inspiration from webOS, Rubenstein insisted the OS has laid the foundation for other operating systems.
"It's not just mobile platforms. If you look at the notifications on Mac OS X, it looks just like webOS, too," he said. "We did a lot of things that were very, very innovative. Obviously, multitasking, notifications, Synergy, how we handled the multiple cards. There's a long list of stuff we did that has been adopted by Microsoft, Apple and Android."
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