All Articles Tagged ceo-snap

It’s been suspected for a while now, but PreCentral.net let us know that Palm has gone and made it all official-like:

Palm, Inc. (Nasdaq: PALM) today announced that its board of directors has appointed Jon Rubinstein to lead the company as Chairman and CEO upon the departure of Ed Colligan, who is stepping down after sixteen years of leadership at the company. Rubinstein, who joined Palm as Executive Chairman in October 2007 to help bring innovation back to the company, assumes his role as CEO on June 12. Colligan plans to take some time off, then join Elevation Partners.

As mighty Zeus did before him, Rubinstein came from Apple to slay the titans of Palm past and bring a powerful new pantheon of WebOS devices into their own.

So the former head of iPod hardware becomes the new head of Palm every-ware, and Ruby brings his vision of the iPhone-come-Pre head-to-head with the actual iPhone — and more interestingly — his once and former master, Steve Jobs.

Best of luck!

Meanwhile, TiPb would like to bid a fond farewell to Ed Colligan, who helped found the very industry we hold so dear. Many of us have owned many Palm Pilots and Visor and Palm Treo devices (and Dieter likely still has every single one of them on his desk!) and each was wonderful and innovative in its own time. Enjoy your much-earned respite and here’s wishing health, happiness, and much success with your future endeavors.

Standing ovation

(And who knows, a year from now Colligan might just pop up at RIM with a new OS of his own — how’d that be for poetry?)

Seriously, I’m beginning to heart RIM’s co-CEOs almost as much as I heart Steve Ballmer. Give the mobilemen a venue and a mic, and we get blog gold each and every time. Chronology will help context here:

Mike Lazaridis on touch screen devices:

THERE’S a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,” says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.”

This almost the very moment word leaked that RIM was set to release an “Apple Killer” which became the lamentably launched BlackBerry Storm. When reviewers and users alike generally panned the device’s initial, buggy software, Jim Balsillie said GlitchWare was the new Black(Berry):

[RIM and Verizon] made the crucial Black Friday deadline “by the skin of their teeth,” after missing a planned October debut. Mr. Balsillie said such scrambles — and the subsequent software glitches that need to be fixed — are part of the “new reality” of making complex cellphones in large volumes.

Now to put the disrespect cherry high atop of Storm owners frustration sundays, Lazaridis returns with this brain-boggler:

“That’s our first touch product, and you know nobody gets it perfect out the door. You know other companies were having problems with their first releases.”

The iPhone was Apple’s first touch product, and while iPhone 1.0 may have been limited in functionality (and 3.0 may still have boxes yet unchecked), it’s hard to take anyone seriously who doesn’t think Apple not only nailed their first touch product, but their very first phone product of any kind.

Maybe because 1) Apple wasn’t rushing for a Black Friday sales-focused deadline, 2) they weren’t trying to clone a competing device’s feature set, and 3) they cared about user experience more than 1) or 2)?

Many people still use an original iPhone 2G, some even still run iPhone OS 1.x. Storm owners have only themselves to blame for not waiting to buy Storm 2 instead? Ahem. Pitchforks to the right, torches to the left, north to Waterloo!

That said, if Dancing with the Canadian Stars ever becomes a reality, I would still vote for RIM’s co-CEO to take on the Woz role. Let the Laz dance! Ballmer could lend him the Monkey Boy choreography and we just know CrackBerry Kevin would bring out the push-powered voters!

(via Engadget, headline via Jeremy on Twitter)

We have to wonder if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has some insidious plot to make his PR people pull their hair out, so they’ll look just as Fester’ian as he himself. Or maybe he’s just jealous of the love TiPb’s been giving Palm’s Roger McNamee lately? How else can you account for the glorious (for bloggers!) content he keeps spewing in our general direction?

What now? From the man who once said the iPhone would be the most expensive phone on the planet (guess he didn’t see the Windows Mobile Xperia X1a going for $800…), now comes the following, courtesy of WMExperts:

“Windows Mobile 6.5 has touch on it. The way Apple does touch drives cost. [The] way they do it on the iPhone is not an inexpensive component. We’ll do it in a way that you can afford to do it on most phones.”

Bu-bu-bu-but…! We thought WinPho was all about choice? Shouldn’t manufacturers like HTC, who’ve made capacitive touch screen devices like the Android G1 (which is hardly that expensive!) have the choice to offer WinPho devices with capacitive touch?

So not only does Ballmer try to spin Microsoft’s abject failure to deliver on capacitive touch 2 years after Apple (and months after Android and even BlackBerry) as a cost saving feature, but for extra bonus bluster, claims Apple is “driving cost” on the $199 iPhone?

Next time, stick to dancing…

Ouch! According to PreCentral.net, Palm has just given uber-investor Roger McNamee the PR equivalent of the Price-is-Right FAIL buzzer. Bum-Bum-Ba-Bum-Bowwwwwwww…

Much of it is numbers and analyst based, but a few gems glare out, especially #5, #8, and #9. Words like “premature” and “withdrawn” are used. Double ouch.

Read the whole post for a great daily dose of schadenfreude.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad news for Palm yesterday: Engadget editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky hit Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to show off the Pre, and show techies are comedy gold as well.

No sooner did we report the outlandish statement from Palm backer Elevation Partners head-geek Roger McNamee that come June, every iPhone 2G owner would ditch the platform and AT&T to become Pre-verts on Sprint, than our sibling site PreCentral.net went and updated.

Seems McNamee thinks iPhone Mobile Safari ain’t all that, compared to the Pre (even though the Pre uses Apple’s open-source WebKit foundation — which we know comes from KHTML/Konquerer…):

“Our product is just going to run rings around them on the web. If you want to go the web, it’s going to be a million time faster, well, not a million times, several times faster and that’s a huge deal for most people.”

Really? And since Sprint can’t do simultaneous voice and data, the minute you answer a call, your speed drops to zero. How much faster is that?

Apparently, however, McNamee’s hurt turns to heart for Apple’s Mac platform:

I’ve been an apple fan for years and I would never use any other kind of computer!

Bulletin: Some may just feel the same about the iPhone, b’okay Roger? See the whole crash-and-burn on video at Bloomberg…

Hey, it’s nice to see Palm getting back into the game! No, not with their admittedly compelling — if Apple inspired — Palm Pre handset set to land sometime in the first half of 2008. But with their rhetoric. You know, the same rhetoric that had Palm CEO Ed Colligan, when asked about the iPhone before it’s launch say, Apple wasn’t just going to walk in and figure smartphones out.

This time time it’s not Colligan however, but Palm uber-financier and Bono-buddy Roger McNamee, he of the coolest utility belt since Batman, who’s firing the mouth-cannon Apple’s way. McNamee tells Bloomberg (via Daring Fireball):

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

Not one? Really? We’re certain some die hard Palm faithful and curious technophiles will become Pre-verts come launch day (we even suspect an editor-in-chief we know might just be waiting in line already…) but not one?

Given Apple’s statement that June is also iPhone product cycle, and that the Pre has fairly shamelessly glommed Apple’s iPhone style — and several high profile members of the iPhone development team — we’re certain Steve Jobs won’t make it a point to have a shiny new iPhone 3.0 ready for just about the same time, so that original iPhone owners have an easier, maybe even moe compelling upgrade path available. Can’t see that happening, can we…?

TiPb. Heart. Steve. Ballmer. Microsoft’s #2 has really become #1 in our CEOh-Snap department. See, he doesn’t just hit the mic, he pummels it to bloody, infuriating, borderline committable pulp. This time, however, D|All Things Digital brings us a little CEOh-Snap back in the form of Ballmer being on the receiving end for once, via an unhappy questioner at the CIO Summit:

“With platforms like the Google phone and iPhone coming out, it’s really tough to continue to stand behind Windows Mobile when our employees are bringing these consumer devices into our environments,” the questioner explained. “And in your presentation you put Windows Mobile right in the center there, but it was a phone that doesn’t work in America and an operating system that you haven’t released. I’m wondering what your commitment is to continuing to get newer versions of the operating system in our hands so that we don’t have to fight this battle on the ground.”

Ballmer’s come back? WinPho 6.5 this year is significant but not everything they want for higher-end phones; that’ll come next year(!) with WinPho 7. Microsoft is accelerating their efforts, and people still bought more Windows Mobile devices than iPhone last year anyway, so: nyah!

(Though we’d remind Mr. Ballmer that Apple’s international roll-out really only began in July 2008, more than half-way through the year, and he’s welcome to check the sales numbers for Q3 2008 to see how that worked out for everyone…)

Microsoft PR must hate it every single time CEO Steve Ballmer gets on a mic. Bloggers on the other hand…? From the latest analyst briefing:

“The truth of the matter is all the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android.”

Um.. Apple and BlackBerry manufacture their own devices there Steve, so while their internal momentum is enough to steamroll an industry, ODM’s can’t get their hands on iPhone OS X or RIM’s OS no matter how badly they probably want to.

Apple Insider rightly points out, of course, that this is the same line Microsoft used about the iPod when promoting their own PlaysForSure DRM platform (which later became closer akin to PlaysNoMore).

Check out Apple Insider’s full coverage to get Ballmer’s views on Apple’s Mac, Google, Android on Netbooks vs. Windows 7, and how Microsoft could be like RCA! (?!)

Engdget Mobile scored an interview with Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T Mobility. Our favorite carrier CEO (for recently telling Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Nokia’s CEO, and Euro-haters that “99.5 percent of the industry is trying to copy the iPhone”), shot from the hip on a wide range of issues, including AT&T outages, reports of iPhone reception problems, the success of the App Store, and the competitive landscape now that Google and Palm are (back) in the game.

Perhaps the best news for iPhone users on AT&T? He anticipates future firmware updates will continue to increase reception and reliability:

They’re continuously looking for, and we communicate with Apple and say, you know, if we tweak this it would work better, so they’ve been very good about working with us and making sure that as we look at things to do the drop calls there, they’re going to implement it.

Strangely, no word on dropping data rates or throwing in tethering gratis…

UPDATED: Daring Fireball nails it. Closed or open, the smartphone industry was stagnating before the iPhone…

ORIGINAL: Steve Ballmer is the gift that just keeps on grief’ing! Proven wrong about the iPhone already, both the Microsoft CEO and his counterpart at Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvu both decided to take fairly transparent jabs at Apple, who once again didn’t even bother to attend the show. CNet (via MacRumors) has the gory details.

Said Kallasvu (taking a break from iCloning the iPhone App Store):

Apple’s vertically integrated model, where its hardware and software are tightly controlled by the company, further fragmented the market. And he added that what is truly needed is more openness in developing applications.

Said Ballmer, (who’s been getting his own fair share of grief this week over WinPho 6.5):

“I agree that no single company can create all the hardware and software. Openness is central because it’s the foundation of choice.”

One disgruntled European expressed displeasure at all the iPhone talk, asking why it deserved attention when it had only a tiny sub-percentage of the market.

Responded AT&T Mobility chief Ralph de la Vega:

“Because the other 99.5 percent of the industry is trying to copy the iPhone.”

It wasn’t all hugs and kisses from AT&T, though, even with the iPhone providing life support to their bottom line. Jabbed de la Vega:

“The iPhone is a great success, but it would be even better if the applications were interoperable,”

Um, yeah, because then people might actually want to buy those other, less innovative, non-iPhone you have stockpiled in your warehouse?