Jon Rubinstein is no stranger to success. He was the engineer that architected the iPod, Apple’s single most successful product for years, until the iPhone was released in 2007. After more than fifteen years working with Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein left Apple in 2006. Around ten years earlier he had returned to the company with Steve Jobs and the rest of the NeXT crew. In those early years as a senior Apple executive he helped design some of the computers that turned the company around. The original iMac, the G4 Cube, the Power Mac G5 and of course the iPod. When he took on the position of CEO at Palm, he was shown significant confidence by those bankrolling the company’s new existence. Yet, Jon Rubinstein had not proven himself as a great CEO, but a great engineer; his long experience, his time close to Steve jobs and the other talented top executives at Apple would have definitely been much needed qualifications and experiences, however his lack of managerial experience at the CEO level was cause for concern, given that Palm was a company given a second chance.

Pre. An interesting curiosity and a failed delivery.

In early 2009, Palm announced the Pre, its latest device in the first running WebOS, a brand-new operating system for mobile phones that promised significantly improved user experiences, a low-barrier development platform based on Web technologies, and a much more aggressive marketing strategy, capable perhaps of competing face-to-face with Apple, Google and the other companies fighting for smartphone domination. Despite several months of building hype, a couple of (really bad) ads, and good coverage by the press, by the time the device was out in the market, the initial enthusiasm about it had waned. The Pre was an interesting device, yet it was also flawed in many ways: early hardware issues and slow software were detrimental to its failure, as was its absence from the market. It was a time when the iPhone was crossing the boundaries from an innovative, friendly, next-generation ‘phone’ to the powerful mobile computing platform most have come to love, a platform that encompasses the consumer, enterprise, gaming and lifestyle realms. Pre remained an interesting curiosity, a device with an innovative yet incomplete operating system, few applications, extremely little marketing and practically no mind share in the general public.
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Apple may have produced a great, polished and closed device in the iPhone. Revolutionary? Nope, but very impressive nevertheless. As a device, as a user interface and — soon — as a platform. Yet in some years from now, what will probably be the iPhone’s single most significant contribution to the world was the belief that sometime in 2007 or 2008 a single, competing device would come from the dominant player of our times, Google. A device called gPhone. It isn’t. It couldn’t be. Instead we got something Open. Open as in Open Source, open as in Open Standard. We got Android and the Open Handset Alliance.

They may — on the surface — be very similar to a number of existing open platforms for mobile devices, but there’s one, major difference: It’s got Google’s backing and along with it that of most of the leading manufacturing, service and research companies of this industry. nVidia, Qualcomm, SiRF, Synaptics, TI, Marvell, Intel, Broadcom, eBay, Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC, T-Mobile, Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, Telefónica and Google among others are all there. Something tells me that with proper coordination this can change the market in more ways than glossy UI widgets, animated lists can and a polished closed device could ever possibly do.