{"id":521158,"date":"2010-04-08T17:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T21:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:feeds.phonedog.com:\/\/8c4acd8657805f6681919c204ceb2f97"},"modified":"2010-04-08T17:20:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-08T21:20:00","slug":"palm-ceo-jon-rubinstein-discusses-future-of-palm-with-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/521158","title":{"rendered":"Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein discusses future of Palm with Fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/r.phonedog.com\/shared\/images\/2010\/4\/99184-bg-rubinstein-jon.jpg\" alt=\"Jon Rubinstein\" width=\"500\" height=\"218\" \/><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s no secret that Palm is having trouble staying afloat.&nbsp; The company, which debuted webOS and the Palm Pre at CES in 2009, have suffered from lackluster sales across the board, and have been a primary takeover target for some time.&nbsp; Though he acknowledges that issues exist, CEO Jon Rubinstein continues to forge ahead.&nbsp; In an interview with <em>Fortune<\/em>, he discusses some of the strategies that the company is undertaking to return to success.<\/p>\n<p>When asked about success in the smartphone marketplace:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>&#8220;I still believe that there&#8217;s going to be likely five successful players  in this space.&nbsp; It&#8217;s a huge and rapidly growing market.&nbsp; And I think  that having a small share of that market you can have a successful  company. We just need to get up to scale, and that&#8217;s our number one  goal.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not profitability, it&#8217;s to get to scale. When we get to  scale the economics of the business completely change. We went through  that same thing at Apple, by the way.&nbsp; I mean, it was a similar  situation many, many years ago where you just didn&#8217;t have the economies  of scale.&nbsp; And once we crossed over that Apple became a cash machine.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When asked about partnering with Sprint at launch:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>&#8220;Hindsight is always 20\/20, but you have to understand that we had a  long-term relationship with Sprint. Sprint wanted to do an aggressive  launch on webOS.&nbsp; They were willing to invest significant marketing  dollars.&nbsp;&nbsp; But the quid pro quo for that is that we had to do an  exclusive with Sprint. Now, if I sit today and I kind of roll back the  clock and go, okay, now if I could have launched in October with  Verizon, and done a shorter exclusive with Sprint, and the world would  be completely different today, yeah, I mean, that&#8217;s easy to say. But you  don&#8217;t know these things at the time. And Sprint has been a really good  partner for Palm.&nbsp; They continue to be a really good partner for Palm.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Check out the full interview here.&nbsp; You&#8217;ll hear different things depending on who you talk to; some believe the blame falls on Sprint, while others chalk it up to Verizon, while others blame Palm across the board.<\/p>\n<p>My take on the matter?&nbsp; I chalk it up to the following: (1) A terrible marketing campaign throughout the life cycle of the webOS devices, (2) poor marketing on Verizon&#8217;s side (when compared to other devices like the DROID) until recently, (3) the lack of a touchscreen slate-like device (think HD2 here) to compliment the portfolio, and (4) a lackluster App Catalog.&nbsp; If Palm can fix those things (and they appear to be doing so as of late), then I could see them being successful long-term.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think?&nbsp; Will Palm be successful in the long-term, or will they be purchased by another company?<\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com\/2010\/04\/08\/palm-ceo-puts-his-cards-on-the-table\/\" >Fortune<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/RxV6zzpghNhLnMlikFUkZ91eeoc\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/RxV6zzpghNhLnMlikFUkZ91eeoc\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/RxV6zzpghNhLnMlikFUkZ91eeoc\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/RxV6zzpghNhLnMlikFUkZ91eeoc\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/phonedog_cellphoneblog\/~4\/PUfV2AqLcHo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s no secret that Palm is having trouble staying afloat.&nbsp; The company, which debuted webOS and the Palm Pre at CES in 2009, have suffered from lackluster sales across the board, and have been a primary takeover target for some time.&nbsp; Though he acknowledges that issues exist, CEO Jon Rubinstein continues to forge ahead.&nbsp; In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":671,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-521158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/671"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=521158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/521158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=521158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=521158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=521158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}