Joe Hayashi leaves HP for Numenta, drinks with old friends 18
HP has lost another one from the webOS team, and this one’s a big fish: Joe Hayashi. If you’re wondering why that name sounds familiar, it’s because Hayashi was the VP of Product Management, webOS, at Palm. As in “he was the guy in charge of webOS.” He also was the lead presenter (Jon Rubinstein’s role) at Mobile World Congress this year in their European redux of the Think Beyond event, and played a major role in last year’s New York developer weekend.
Now, however, Mr. Hayashi is employed by Numenta. Chances are you don’t know what Numenta does, and it’s been so long that we had to remind ourselves too: Numenta is a small company specializing in Hierarchical Temporal Memory, in other words, figuring out how to make computers work the way our brains work. Numenta is led by a very familiar cast of characters: First up is Palm co-founder Jeff Hawkins, who serves as co-founder (and likely thinker-in-chief) of Numenta, with former Palm CEO Donna Dubinsky the other co-founder and chairing the Numenta board and serving as CEO. There’s also Ed Colligan on the board of directors – yeah, the guy that was CEO of Palm during the launch and development of the Pre and eventually handed the keys to Jon Rubinstein.
And now there’s Joe Hayashi, taking up residence as Numenta’s new VP of Marketing. He spent many good years at Palm, and we’re going to miss having him around. Hopefully we’ll be hearing more from him soon, now that he’s taking the reins of Numenta’s marketing machine. But first, we’re sure he’s going to be setting aside some time to have a few drinks with some old friends at his new home.
Source: Numenta; Via: Donna Dubinstky (Twitter)
18 Comments
I know it's all business, but you'd think the former stewards of webOS would care enough about its success that they'd leave some good guys behind. At least until it had achieved a modicum of success.
Yeah, I think they normally would.
Meh. Marketing of Palm/WebOS was horrible.
> Marketing of Palm/WebOS was horrible.
And so was the marketing for OS/2 Warp! which was the superior (x86) operating system at the time. We know how that ended.
M.
OS2 Warp was the superior operating system? LOL. Says who? OS2 was never regarded as being superior to anything. MSFT codeveloped that OS with IBM and sabotaged it at every turn to ensure Windows would succeed. OS2 received a tepid response from the public at best.
As far as Hayashi leaving, why do you Palm fanboys mourn the loss of people who ran Palm into the ground? You should thank the stars this guy is leaving and hope that Ruby is right behind him.
More to comes as HP is taking webOS into a different way than Palm planned it to go originally. Leaving either the current plans were not compatible or were told. ALOT of executive roles are gonna get meshed into HPs own list of execs in the next couple years so as sad it is but is expected...
seems product management has been palm's problem area
Anyone responsible for the hardware implementation of the original pre is a welcome exit for me. The primary failure of the original pre was almost complete from lack of good hardware. Poor battery life, speed, and flimsy design hampered the success of an excellent mobile OS. Too bad. Not sure if Joe was hardware or software when related to the webos. I dont like seeing anyone go but some are necessary.
> Anyone responsible for the hardware
> implementation of the original pre is a
> welcome exit for me.
Then Jon Rubinstein has to go. He was the one who constrained the hardware engineers to the "polished river stone" idea. There's only so much you can do with "a smooth, round" object.
M.
I think you are missing my point. I like the shape, size, and function of the hardware. I dont agree with the Processor choice, Battery and some of the internal slider mechanism or the USB placement. Palm might have consider a Li-polymer instead of a li-ion considering a li-polymer in the same space would yield 25% more mAh then the li-ion battery...ok it would cost more...but worth it. Speed and battery life were two of the biggest complains. Size and shape I heard none of. There was a dedicated hardware team at Palm that came up with this design and spec and they failed this product and that company. Jon had certainly something to do with it but his project team in hardware brought it to him. They failed him and us for that matters.
Nice back pedaling... Sorry, but the buck stops at the top, he had complete control if it failed (which it did) he has to accept that responsibility (and our barbs). He is the one who had his hands in everything: hardware, software, marketing, and sales. The only one of those 4 to succeed was software. This signals problems at the top to me...
I think HP should find their way into HTC Motorolla, Samsung, etc.. HTC did it with Android and Windows. Why not WebOS? This would allow WebOS to compete for real. Forget about making another HP phone. Too many Manufacturers can beat you at this. Just get WebOS out on other phones, and then you've earned your spot again.
IMHO
I can agree with that opinion, but I would like to keep a, pseudo Apple-ness to webOS. Keep one person's hand in the cookie jar. Know what I mean? One person can optimize and really bring out the full power of the OS with their own hardware...
>> One person can optimize and really bring out
>> the full power of the OS with their own
>> hardware...
I actually agree but this sure didn't help to get WebOS 2.0 to run on my Sprint Pre-? Not every new feature had to work but surely something would have been better than nothing.
Unless HP makes things right; I'll make like Joe and leave WebOS behind.
So, can we look forward to a Numenta phone that is announced 3-4 months before it is even available for purchse, during which time all of the innovations revealed get copied and surpassed by lesser companies? Oh, and will that scary chick be coming back to freak out potential buyers in another creepy ad campaign? Just asking.
Hawkins/Dubinsky/Colligan......sounds like some awesome computing power in the works. Would wonder if it's all academic, but with Dubinsky involved, I'd say there's products in the works.
Glad to see him go. Product Management at Palm was a week point. Don't think that WebOS was driven by this guy, it was the engineering and UI guys ( I seem to recall it was a skunkworks project for a while during the time this guy was managing the tired PalmOS and Windows phones). Don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out. Hopefully his replacement will re-earn my business.
For anyone who read the book Piloting Palm, Joe was essentially the guy behind "the zen of Palm". He was the reason PalmOS was so fast and take a minimum number of steps to do anything. Although I do feel that the zen of Palm was partially lost in webOS, I guess with the loss of Joe, there's no one left to make sure that last bit of zen is kept there.
Sad news to old PalmOS fans indeed.