I remember The Register, early attempt at blogging, surprisingly still going - Charlie Hoult
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Talent flees Palm
PDA PIONEER Palm, which has just been bought by the maker of expensive printer ink HP, seems to have lost one of its finest minds.
Mobile user interface expert Matias Duarte has left Palm and joined Google.
Duarte cleaning out his desk is a bit of a blow for HP. He led development of Palm's WebOS GUI as the company's senior director of human interface and user experience.
We guess that Duarte will be working on Android eventually. HP was looking to Palm's WebOS to redirect its mobile and tablet strategy and Duarte was a key resource.
Before Duarte landed at Palm in 2007, he was design chief at Helio and he created the Danger Hiptop mobile device.
He was so high profile in the industry that when Palm announced its Pre smartphone at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2009, it was Duarte who introduced the design of WebOS.
Google has confirmed that Duarte joined it as User Experience Director for Android. So it looks like Android might get a bit of the WebOS mojo. µ
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Palm have been a cat with nine lives. A few great ideas but struggle with execution and timing. Now that HP has bought them it will probably be driven into the ground in favour of a Microsoft solution. The only way it can succeeded is with lots of R&D money thrown at it and get a leading product with the whole package like it was yesterday (fast).
I have to say that I admire Edward Berridge (author of this article) for his great journalistic work. He clearly analyzed how the departure of Duarte would hurt HP. Along the road he also found a source that told him that the reason why Duarte left is because he didn't want to work for HP and he "guesses" that Duarte will eventually work on Android at Google.
I hope that Edward Berrige does this as a hobby and that The Inquirer doesn't pay him to write this garbage.
Gomez is right - I too left HP a few years back when things started going downhill.
Started with the stupid idiot (carly) screwing HP up badly.
It hasn't really recovered since then.
Gomez is dead on the money! HP is a rotten, festering dead pig. Essentially everything is outsourced to the third world. R&D is a joke. It's a slave factory. Remember HP is one of Foxconn's biggest customers. The guy was right running for Google, it can't suck any worse than HP!
I don't think Duartes had anything to do with marketing or company direction in either Palm or Danger. He was the main UI guy and from what I have heard and seen it seems to me these products were great. The problem was elsewhere on the reason failure occurred.
I would think that since Android has done so great without a fancy UI really means something here. Now Android will get a UI wizard to really offer something great to consumers and he (Duartes) really doesn't have to worry about a bunch of losers messing up his products again (ie. Palm).
I can't wait to see what kind of UI he will be able to achieve with Android.
Yes, this is a big loss for Palm/HP but I can fully understand why he left. I have lots of friends who work for HP (even more who have left also) and it is an absolutely awful company to work for. Almost as bad as ATS but not quite.
Given that Palm and Danger are both failing businesses, maybe it wasn't such a loss after all.
My guess is that HP has changed the focus for the WebOS away from mobile to more general purpose. I think that WebOS is going to die from lack of innovation at HP.