Where are they now? Palm's loss is Nokia's gain 25
by Dieter Bohn Mon, 20 Sep 2010 4:56 pm EDT
We've covered the many people who have left Palm in the wake of the HP buyout, but it turns out that there are plenty more to speak of - many of whom have landed at Nokia. In addition to the already-mentioned Peter Skillman, we learn from a PreCentral forum post that Nokia has snapped up some pretty great people from Palm:
- Matt Crowley, former Director of Product Management, Phone at Palm (who you may have seen discuss the meaning behind the name "Pre"), now current Director of Product Management at Nokia
- Karl Townsend, former Principal Architect (focusing on electrical hardware) at Palm and a founding Handspring employee, now a Distinguished Hardware Architect at Nokia
- Phil McClendon, former Director, Smartphone Product Management at Palm (among other roles - see him talk about Pixi here), now Senior Product Marketing Manager, Nokia Messaging at Nokia.
- Radhika Sarang, former Senior Product Manager at Palm, now Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nokia
- Although he hasn't been in the Palm fold for some time, we'll note that Rob Haitani, former director of Product Marketing at Handspring (see him discuss the Treo from way back in 2004) and a Product Design Architect at Palm until 2007, is now a Distinguished UI/UX Architect at Nokia.
That's a lot of the Palm brain trust working at Nokia on, as we said, a very similar project: helping a company reinvigorate a linux-based smartphone OS for the 21st century. Now to see if Nokia can get their game back in the US market, eh?
Source: PreCentral Forums, LinkedIn; Thanks HelloNNNewman!
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25 Comments
Why didn't they just buy the whole damn company when it was for sale.
It sounds like Nokia is set to aggressively take on the smartphone market, not HP. Otherwise, you would think key Palm executives would have stayed on after the acquisition.
"Take on"??
They're already the world market leader.
They're not building, they're reloading.
All those people that are now with nokia were from the products and marketing department, and last time i checked the products and the marketing were the two biggest palm failure. I'm sure HPalm will not miss them at all.
1. Not all of them and more importantly, 2. through reputation and (some) personal interaction, I know these are quality people who have done quality work.
I'm not saying they are not quality people, i'm sure they are otherwise they wont be where they are. I am nobody to judge, all i'm saying is that products and marketing people, no matter who they are, will not be missed.
Wow, and here I was thinking there would be at least 5 posts before people start minimizing the experience of these people.
I don't think they will help much especially if what RCR wireless reported, they won't be working to develop the CDMA networks.
Why buy the company when you can hire the former employees? What Nokia did was actually pretty smart.
Palm is basically an empty shell now. Nokia will keep on copying the webOS interface, and block Palm from ever being able to really make a dent in the European market.
So HP bought an incomplete OS, whose main designers all left, and a fading brand...
So when is Jon leaving ship?
Okay, just feeling blue about this whole thing. Palm will release killer hardware with the cash they got from HP, and they will be the coolest guys on the block again.
Nokia is dead nomatter what. The smartphone is the new battleground now, and it's a battle to be fought by the good old PC guys. Apple, Google, and soon MS and HP. RIMM, Nokia, they're all as dead as Palm was as an independant maker.
The majority of people in the US will never buy a Nokia smartphone. It's an image thing. Hiring american designers, nomatter how talented, will not fix that problem.
The culture at HP must be pretty awful for all those guys to abandon Palm. Hopefully that will change with the next CEO.
them leaving was all your A-typical routine of a company that got bought. Their jobs were obsolete because you tell me which one of those people would of agreed to have their title changed to a lower ranking person? Jon did because he believes in the product enough to see it do good. Not to mention he's back to the company he started at HP.
Nokia will do well over seas but it will take ALOT to get noticed on U.S. Shores. Honestly iOS, Android OS, (soon to be released) Windows mobile and WebOS(which I believe will make a wicked comeback) it's going to be hard for RIM to keep ground with their behind the curve OS and Nokia. The battle field is being stacked and those 2 players are gonna have the hardest time to survive in the U.S.
so to me it really doesn't matter which Palm employees went over there. Now if Rubinstein was one of the people making the Norwegien move then I'd be worried.
You honestly don't see an issue with anyone leaving Palm except J. R.? He's the only one that mattered? He's the only one that believe/believed in the product? Really?
"Nokia is dead no matter what"
People said the same thing about Motorola. And if that is the case Palm is in deep trouble because at least Nokia sells outside of the U.S. By comparison Palm is pretty small outside the U.S. I don't think it's over "no matter what" like you do but Palm marketshare wise is in a much much worse position. And if it's automatically over for Nokia, Palm is in deep shit. Again, i don't think it's dead "no matter what." I just don't think there is nothing that can be done. The question is will either of them do what needs to be done.
Poor Palm... With Nokia's new WebOS styled OS & the headstart it has on Palm, I don't see the light @ the end of the tunnel yet for Palm... By the time Palm release a device, everyone will be locked into contracts with other devices (with the exception of a small few). Oh well, "good things come to those who wait" right! We'll see....
Poor Palm... With Nokia's new WebOS styled OS & the headstart it has on Palm, I don't see the light @ the end of the tunnel yet for Palm... By the time Palm release a device, everyone will be locked into contracts with other devices (with the exception of a small few). Oh well, "good things come to those who wait" right! We'll see....
Nokia is far from dead... Nokia didn't need HP to come save them... Most ppl think Palm has already gone outta business. No matter how super, innovating, spectacular, mind blowing the new Palm device will be, they are already outta sight & outta the minds of most. Hopefully they can make a commercial WITH THE DEVICE IN IT this time. & maybe as a bonus they should MENTION THE NAME OF THE DEVICE (I'm just saying)...
Out of sight, out of mind? Really? Esp considering that we ADDED users the last quarter and maintained 4.9% market share in the midst of overall growth.
I'm seeing more Pres these days than I had after launch.
haha I did it even better then nokia I slept with all the key position guys wifes from palm hp apple htc nokia and,blackberry and will soon bring out the ghetto phone powered by dennys and bk...we will steal the os and hardware from the best seller on the market and sell it for cash and guns...we taking over the most important phone market after the geek market :)
Yes, it is important for Nokia to grab key high level people, but they just have the vision. What is really necessary to get a huge jumpstart is the people who implement those decisions. How man people did all these execs bring along with them? How many engineers that actually built webOS are no longer with the company? That is the answer that I want to know.
it's not like palm is one of the best smortphone company so them morons leavin palm would make anything better for nokia or worse for palm.. The only reason palm is still alive is cuz of the webos otherwise freakin Pre and the Pixi isn't a great phone.. So fuuck em... We need new ppl anyways so we don't see the same $hit (pre&pixi) again..
yes Palm ADDED users to only maintain with no gain.. Which means that just as many left... Either way, at this point & being outta production for so long, the new device (regardless of how good it is) is gonna be the smartphone division of HP going down fighting. So far, the 2.0 stuff is only ALMOST getting them caught up to the rest of the industry. WebOS is great, just too bad it's "late!"
no, with an increasing total number of smartphone users keeping the same marketshare really means that palm got more new customers than it lost old customers. If just as many left as they arrived the marketshare would have dropped.
Late? What's that supposed to mean? The reason why Android is such a big deal has a whole lot more to do with it being openly available to put on every piece of crap Taiwanese generic knockoff device rather than being a really polished OS. As for iOS, it's got shortcomings. What, you thought that Apple chose to half implement multitasking? There's a really good reason that they didn't. It reminds me a heck of a lot of the roadblock that Microsoft ran into with WinCE about 8 years ago...they knew they had a robust handheld OS, but that was the problem...if they pushed it much further, the battery life would go down past the point of acceptability.
Let's put it this way: webOS does have an opportunity to gain momentum. I'm not sure how it'll fit, being only offered on devices released by Palm through HP, but there will be a niche for it simply because the architecture seems considerably cleaner and less kludgy, and that equates to longer term potential refinement and improvement. The only way it'll croak is if Palm and HP let it stagnate for too long...like years...and they give up on it entirely and move on. But the presence of a mobile OS with so much potential like webOS does force the bigger players to take bigger risks and make bigger strides (although, you could be like Microsoft and overstep your market entirely).
They've got their work cut out for them. Symbian was an unmitigated piece of crap, though, so lucky for them they're not stuck giving that dog a makeover. From the impression I got playing around with Meego, though, it felt kind of cheesy. With Skillman on their hands, they'll either do what he says and change things around quite a bit, or he'll be miserable and eventually quit.
Okay... I'll give you that one... If Palm added more users than they lost, is it because ppl went shopping for a WebOS or is it because carriers have been selling them for pennies (that old yard sale phone). HP gave them away for free... Is that the only way to get new ppl onboard? If it is, it's lights out for Palm... If HP, Palm, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon don't blitz the media with WHAT THE OS CAN REALLY DO, it's over. That's a wrap! Most customer reps sell the Pre as an alternative low end smartphone for idiots (which make ppl wanna go with the cooler devices that they've ACTUALLY SEEN & HEARD OF).
If they do for Nokia what they did for Palm we should see Nokia going bankrupt or being bought out in about a year.