Kind of reminds me of the famous line about “Xerox will never sell anything called a ‘mouse’!”

Succeed or fail, good or bad, Jobs has consistently shown vision and guts with Lisa/Mac (abandoning the CLI for the GUI), iMac (abandoning the floppy and intro’ing USB), and now iPhone (abandoning the tiny keyboard for the soft, multi-touch interface.)

Rubinstein may have just highlighted the difference between someone who can competently run a division, and someone who can excite an industry, and that worries me for Palm. They may have needed an Ive much more than a Rubinstein (and Apple has probably locked up their Ive and thrown away the key…).

(And this doesn’t even, yet again, get into how amazing Hawkin’s team did with the original Palm, the Palm V, the Handspring Visor and Treo, and how they’ve just fubar’ed it all since then — the opposite to Apple’s decision-making indeed).

John Rubinstein Palm vs. Steve Jobs iPhone - Sramana Mitra on Strategy

Rubinstein and Jobs could not agree on the iPhone’s strategy wrt the Keyboard. This tells me that Rubinstein has a separate but perhaps also compelling vision on how the keyboard needs to be incorporated into smartphones. I can’t wait to see what that vision entails

January 5, 2008 - Apple, Palm -