Former Palm CEO says HP's purchase of webOS was a 'waste'

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has come out in the open against HP, three years after the latter acquired Palm.

In a candid interview with Fierce Wireless, the former Palm chief said that if he could go back in time, he's not sure if would have sold Palm to HP and that HP's wasted it. Rubinstein, however, said that he didn't have much of a choice with regards to the sale as it was not just his own decision, but the decision of the company's board and shareholders.

"Talk about a waste," Rubinstein said. "If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."

Interestingly, Rubinstein also talked about other mobile platforms borrowing concepts and user interface ideas from webOS. On being asked how he thinks webOS influenced other platforms, Rubinstein, who also worked with Apple and played a key role in development of the original iPod and iMac, said that even Cupertino's operating system for Macs, OS X, took cues from webOS.

"It's not just mobile platforms. If you look at the notifications on Mac OS X, it looks just like webOS, too. We did a lot of things that were very, very innovative. Obviously, multitasking, notifications, Synergy, how we handled the multiple cards. There's a long list of stuff we did that has been adopted by Microsoft, Apple and Android," said Rubinstein, who is now serving on the boards of Amazon and Qualcomm.

He added that even over-the-air updates and its mechanism, which first featured in webOS, has been adopted by all platforms.