Palm's Jon Rubinstein named a 'Geek of the Year'
By Darren Murph 
posted January 3rd 2010 1:06PM
posted January 3rd 2010 1:06PM
Just to clarify right out of the gate, the "year" Fast Company is referring to is 2009, but nonetheless, it's an award we're sure Jon is happy to have. 11 geeks were found worthy of the "Geek of the Year" award in '09, with the likes of Evan Williams and Biz Stone (Twitter), David S. Goyer (the creator of Flash Forward on ABC), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Neill Blomkamp (the writer of District 9) joining him. The justification for Jon making the cut?After speaking with him on our first-ever Engadget Show and falling head over heels in love with webOS, we can't help but agree. And yes, after last year's introduction at CES, it's all we can do to contain our excitement for this Thursday."He came on board as the new chairman of Palm and brought about the Web OS and the Palm Pre, the start of a line of products that is the best hope for reintroducing the geek masses to Palm."
There is not "i" in "team", and it is specially true when some group (who?) will give a award to a simple person even when this person may be was a simple executive or a simple accounting guy or the guy that stolen the project from some other group (for example, Facebook).
May be it is not so glamorous to give some credits to the bunch of Indian programmers that do the job, or the chinese, Bostonian or russian guy that directed the team, or the guy that came with the idea, but the goal to give the credit, not for the team, or the quarterback, neither for the manager but the guy, that sometimes doesn't have a clue about the game, that simply sign the checks.
Geek of the Year? Is this good or bad?
Test
WebOS is great, now get some decent hardware for it to run on..OMAP3430 is great but Palm crippled the thing with the low spec'd camera and tons of other downgrades...the samsung OmniaHD and Motorola Droid both use that same exact CPU and have way better cammeras (Droid is 5mp, OmHD is 8mp and 720p video!) and the OmniaHD has TV out as well. Also lets see some larger OLED screens please.
"Rubinstein … who was instrumental in developing the iMac, the PowerBook, the Power Macintosh, and the iPod, retired quietly a little over a year ago, on April Fools Day, 2006 — the 30th birthhday of Apple. Interestingly, about six months before that, he gave a rare interview to the Berliner Zeitung in which he threw water on the idea of converging a cellphone and an iPod media player into a single device — basically what is now the iPhone. “Is there a toaster that also knows how to brew coffee?” he asked. 'There is no such combined device, because it would not make anything better than an individual toaster or coffee machine,' Rubinstein argued. 'It works the same way with the iPod, the digital camera or mobile phone: it is important to have specialized devices.'
"Strange words, considering that Apple’s iPod group was already working on what would become the iPhone. Stranger still, when you look back and see that Apple publicly announced Rubinstein’s upcoming 'retirement' less than three weeks after that interview. I think you can safely surmise that Ruby, who had been with Jobs for more than 15 years at both NeXT and Apple, wasn’t on the same page with his boss."
@airmanchairman my previous post was cut and pasted from a 2007 blog http://grouchygeek.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/06/04/beware-of-geeks-bearing-grudges/
Apparently Rubinstein lost the argument concerning what OS to use on the upcoming iPhone - he was in favour of using the erstwhile iPod OS and grafting a mobile phone on top of that.
What a disaster that would have been!!
I like what I see in WebOS. It's the 2nd best mobile OS out there, though it still can't dethrone the king.
However, Palm is going to need some new hardware and new carriers *QUICK* if they plan on being around for New Years 2011. A company can't survive on promises.
WebOS is the best phone os I've used and I've used them all except symbian. Grats Rubinstein!
@Doax It really is. Every time I see my friend I mess around with his Pre, it's just so much smarter than iPhone OS 3. It's funny because he likes my iPhone more than his Pre, and vice-versa.
greek of the year Pappaspankedalotofus
Eh... Rubenstein was responsible for one of Palm's biggest mistakes in recent memory: trying to beat Apple at their own game. Jon thought he had an iPhone killer ready to go, but forgot the one thing that most companies (and Apple-hating troll commenters on Engadget) seem to forget: Apple is a moving target.
"Look, we got this Pre and it's awesome, and it will KILL the iPhone. What? What do you mean 3GS? Oh shit."
That, combined with their idiotic iTunes sync hackery and utter refusal to simply do it correctly just to spite Apple, is hurting them. If they cared about their customers, they would eat their pride, make the Pre sync to iTunes correctly, and then go about competing with the iPhone, not trying to kill it.
Until they do that, they're still stuck in "trying to beat Apple" mode, and it's not going to get better for them until they get over it. I'm not sure Rubenstein is a "geek of the year" because he started a grudge match with Apple (and lost, badly). But let's see if they can do any better in 2010.