HP has an impossible task ahead of them but I really respect them for trying.

I tend to agree. Kerris left just before the introduction of the iPhone. All the developers didn't come till afterwards. Worked at Lucasfilm, a place where everyone wants to work at. Seems that his experience at attracting developers is somewhat untested so I wish them luck.

You seem to suggest that HP is hoping to compete with Apple and this is not at all the case. You should keep in mind that while HP did buy Palm their ideas for WebOS have nothing to do with the misguided Palm desire to fight the "man" which they considered to be Apple (go figure). HP has a serious problem with east Asian competitors and the fact that they all offere essentially the same product i.e. an Android device or a Windows PC only HP tends to cost more.

WebOS is a huge problem for Android and not for Apple. After all HP products are cheaper than Android and are going after a market that is not going to get an iPhone because it is too expensive. No offence to Google but if Android 3.0 is the best they can do for tablets than WebOS will eat them alive.

I have been insulted on this site and the moderators don't give a stuff.
These people who insult should be banned, instead I am being ignored or belittled.
If these moderators cannot do their job properly, I think they should step down.
Come one ban me, this will be just like censorship, because you don't like criticism right.

Kerris's work for Apple's technical marketing strategies surrounding their professional applications better not be what they are banking on.

There is a reason he no longer held that position during 2007.

This is the last guy I would have hired to perform these tasks. No offense to him, but this was one of the glaring problems at NeXT. We had Marketing Management who had no technical backgrounds in applied sciences and thus no experience in those fields and zero contacts and/or pull to expand into those markets. Of course, we also had technical guys with absolutely zero marketing and business experience who couldn't manage themselves out of a paper bag after the merger, but I digress.


Richard's background in Communications and all his non-technical work history in the Computer Graphics Arts is commendable:

http://web.mac.com/rkerris/RichardKe.../About_Me.html

However, he has no technical background in any applied science and it doesn't come as a surprise that Apple has suffered severely in growing their Professional Markets beyond the Visual Arts.

Getting AutoCAD in 2010 has to be the fruits of labor by management that was put in place after his departure and other departures.

For Apple to continue growing it's Mac Markets [which continues to thrive and expand quarter over quarter], getting technical management with a taste for networking and making relations [Traditionally known as the MS Windows centric engineering space] will them to have the talent in place that can walk the walk while talking the talk.

For me, seeing the emergence of OpenCL made it clear they were going to take those markets seriously and offer an end-to-end solution where the iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch are two more tiers of devices that can attract big industry heavies in the Automotive Industry, Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace, NASA, etc.

I don't see how Richard's prior 3 years at LucasFilm is really going to be a big catch for HP. Personally, his career is in the Animation world and I'm surprised he has ventured out again.

Best luck to him.

I would like to see a few articles on the talent that has taken his place and other individuals positions over the past 3 years to give us all a broader understanding as to where they may or may not focus their talents in the near to far future.

HP is trying to emulate Apple so hard. They already have Jon Ribinstein, an ex Apple exec that worked on the ipod for all things. Believe when I tell you that in those late night board meetings, those top managers worked the idea to turn Jon into their little Steve Jobs.
But in the end it will be a Gordon Gecko and Bud Fox romance. You saw how that turned out.

WebOS is being narrated as this mythical mobile OS but all I see is UI eye candy and sliding cards. Spare me that bull****!
WebOS ain't nothing but HYPERCARD reinvented.

They went to the wrong company to get a guy for developer relations. To be fair, Microsoft are much better than Apple at this.

To be honest, I'd say I tend to agree more with Apple's approach to the Mac developer community.

Their approach has been basically:

"Here is what you can see of Mac OS X - we won't tell you it all, nor give you all the control you want, but we will give you what you need to get the job done."

This competes with Microsoft, who give away everything to their developer community, and are slaves to it. Microsoft are very much a group of developers. They empathise with their non-microsoft friends and give developers what they want.

Microsoft's approach is very developer-friendly. They compromise on user experience because they are trying to placate developers' every whim and don't stop to consider how it could negatively impact the user when a developer does something stupid that a user doesn't like.

Apple reserves the right to protect large amounts of the system from developers. Developers can get frustrated at the limitations but working through them is a system that has provided Mac OS X some of the most impressive applications available on any OS.

The question realistically is "who are we making the OS for: the end users or the developers." Apple sided decidedly with the users and developers must concede control to Apple on the Mac. Microsoft, however, has a lot more trouble answering this question. And that isn't a good thing.

When did they say they would bring web OS to WINDOWS PC's?

I never saw that written anywhere