Palm Foleo

~ the eulogy ~

the foleo never shipped, so nobody used it (close enough). this is the rare grave i can write without an honesty caveat about distance. it did not reach turkey because it did not reach anywhere. i was twenty-three and finishing my engineering undergrad in ankara when palm announced it. twenty-three and three months along by the time they killed it.

this is mostly told from the trade press. jeff hawkins, the founder behind the original pilot and the treo line, announced the foleo on 30 may '07 at the all things digital conference. the pitch was a 10-inch linux laptop that did not run apps locally so much as serve as a big screen for whatever your treo was doing. it weighed about two and a half pounds and had a real keyboard (or whatever it was called). under the hood was a custom linux build by access systems. price was supposed to be $499.

the press reaction was uneasy from the first demo. who is this for. why would a treo owner spend $499 on a second device that does what the treo already does, just bigger. ed colligan, palm's ceo, was reportedly skeptical inside the company already. on 4 september '07 he published a blog post cancelling the product and writing down the development cost. hawkins co-signed the post (roughly). palm said it would refocus on a unified os strategy for the smartphone line. that strategy became webos two years later, which palm also did not survive.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

the foleo cancellation came two months before asus shipped the eee pc 700 in october '07, which became the founding device in the netbook category and sold by the millions over the next three years. asus did basically what palm had tried. a small linux laptop at a cheap price point, without trying to peg it to a phone. the netbook market existed. palm just guessed wrong on what it was supposed to do.

~ the day it died ~

hawkins's farewell line in the cancellation note was that the company had been working on two operating systems simultaneously and could only afford one (or whatever it was called). that was the public reasoning. the trade press read it as elevation insurance, since the unannounced second os, what became webos, was what palm was betting the rest of the decade on. an unspecified development cost was written off the books in q1 of fiscal '08.

~ the long tail ~

the foleo team got folded into the webos work. webos launched on the palm pre in june '09, palm got bought by hp in '10, and the whole arc ended with the touchpad fire sale in '11. the foleo's place in the story is as the first product hawkins ever publicly killed before it shipped. it became a small cautionary tale in tech-press writeups about jeff hawkins, the legend who built the pilot and then misread one.

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