Comment by maxsilver

(as someone who was a WebOS fanatic back in the day, both as a day-one Palm Pre user, and as someone who bought a TouchPad)

The launch was rough, but it wasn't as rough as it seemed. (Reviews were mostly promising, and positive leaning -- check out something like Anandtech's review). The problem was trying to compete with Apple on both product and price -- which no one could do back at that time.

An HP TouchPad that had launched with no immediate margin, would have been able to get a foothold and slowly secure Palm a 2nd place position. (TouchPad's launched with a slightly-rushed slightly-buggy WebOS, but it wasn't unusable -- they worked pretty well, and they flew off the shelves the second they reduced the price)

A HP TouchPad that had to match an iPad for features, polish, and still command an iPad's premium pricing -- simply couldn't. But that's a really high bar no one could regularly do -- even today, you don't see strong/popular alternatives to the iPad, unless you move upmarket enough to get into the laptop market (like say, a Surface Pro).

The problem wasn't "the product shipped and wasn't perfect". The problem was, "we're trying to gain a foothold in this market, and we need more dedication and patience to nail it" -- and being in the market for less than two months wasn't ever going to be enough to do that.

Leadership needs to buy in on strategy, if you want it to execute well. If you agree to start a moonshot, and then panic and quit at the first hiccup, you'll never leave the ground.