Marketing push required exclusive deal

Apple veteran and current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has admitted several shortcomings of its initial strategy with Sprint, according to an interview with Fortune. The executive admitted that he would have wanted a shorter deal with Sprint, the carrier that established an exclusive agreement to distribute the Pre handset.

"Sprint wanted to do an aggressive launch on webOS. They were willing to invest significant marketing dollars," Rubenstein said. "Now, if I sit today and I kind of roll back the clock and go, okay, now if I could have launched in October with Verizon, and done a shorter exclusive with Sprint, and the world would be completely different today, yeah, I mean, that's easy to say."

The CEO played down rumors that his company was reaching out for a takeover bid, despite dwindling funds to push future projects. He believes the company will persevere even without a large budget to spend on things like brand advertising.

"When we get to scale the economics of the business completely change. We went through that same thing at Apple, by the way," the executive added. "I mean, it was a similar situation many, many years ago where you just didn't have the economies of scale. And once we crossed over that Apple became a cash machine."

By Electronista Staff