There’s no crying in baseball, but there’s plenty of boo-hooing in Silicon Valley. The latest sobs come from Jon Rubinstein, CEO of Palm, who’s having a tough time accepting that Motorola’s Droid won the foot race into Verizon.
"If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better," Rubinstein laments.
Maybe, maybe not. By the time Droid came to market, the Palm Pre had already been available for four months, and it’s probably not fair to cast the blame on Sprint, the Pre’s exclusive launch partner and th reason why Palm wasn’t available in Verizon stores.
Rubinstein might also be underestimating a little freight train called Android, currently the fastest growing OS on the market. Whether the Pre could have made it into Verizon first or not, it’s hard to imagine that the Droid wouldn’t have been popular either way.
More bellyaching here.
