What the webOS Community Needs (Hint: It’s Not What We’ve Been Doing)

Every day I hear these same words from key figures in the Palm webOS community (not employees- fans), “When is HP/Palm going to announce new hardware! I need new hardware now before I decide to switch!” To which I have taken to saying, “Will you please shut-up?”

You might say that my reaction isn’t very nice, and you would, in fact, be correct. But I can’t really be too sorry about it, because it’s exactly how I feel. People who are leaders in the webOS community, who are more than just your average power user, are creating an atmosphere that is not conducive for strong community growth. In my opinion, people who plant seeds into a community that cause disorder and dissent need to either change their attitude or leave – because it is only going to cause bad things to happen.

Before anyone gets too defensive, let me explain why I feel this way about those types of statements. It’s not about having a desire to see a new device announced (we all want that), and it’s not about only saying good things about Palm and webOS (every company should be held accountable for their flaws). Here’s a list to show you what this IS about:

What Everyone Wants:

1. It’s about seeing a new device released
2. It’s about seeing new features added to webOS
3. It’s about enhancing the mobile web as a whole with standards that webOS thrives on
4. It’s about creating a larger community that can make anything possible in the tech industry

Everyone in our awesome webOS community wants to see these things happen. However, for any of those things to happen, we need this list to be fulfilled:

What webOS Needs:

1. We need more consumers to buy devices.
2. We need more developers to create applications.
3. We need more investors to see the potential in the OS
4. We need more journalist (and bloggers) to share news about it

If any of those four things begins to succeed, then the other three will as well. If none of them do, though, then webOS will just stagnate and HP will once again fail in its pursuit of mobile device market dominance. How can HP hope to win in this game, though, when the people who have been converting people to webOS over the past year are now creating an atmosphere that is hostile towards the company and less-friendly to newcomers?

If you walk into a crowd and everyone is complaining about the person who is about to present, you may decide to walk out or tune-out the presentation. Here’s my final list to demonstrate the effects of that continually repeated phrase:

What Is Going Wrong?

1. Consumers aren’t buying because everyone keeps saying that a new device is coming soon. If they wait too long, then they end up just going with a different phone (like Android).
2. Developers aren’t building applications because people currently in it keep complaining about the lack of consumers and the lack of financial income (which is mostly their fault, actually, cause many of them are marketing to each other rather than to the consumers – but that’s another blog post).
3. Investors don’t see any potential because no one is saying anything positive about what is to come, only that it hasn’t come yet (and now there are rumors that it won’t be coming at all, so why should they take it seriously?)
4. Journalist and bloggers aren’t writing about it because it’s not popular for people to read. AND because the people in the community aren’t writing anything unique about webOS (it’s all the same circulated stuff that everyone else has already read or wrote about elsewhere).

Yes, it is up to HP and Palm to release a new device. In the meantime, it is up to us to spread the word about the great things in webOS that make it better than the competition. The more we spend time complaining about not having any news from HP, the less time we spend creating cool wallpapers and apps exclusively for the Pre or getting into development or even just writing about cool people in the community.

So yea… shut-up. We’ve got better things to do, and you’re just getting annoying. When you cry louder and more often you don’t make Palm hear you any better, you can’t force them to release a product that they don’t believe is ready. All that you do is create a bad environment for new people to get into.

We Need More of This:

We need more videos like these to start getting attention from consumers (not current Palm fans). The only way to do that is to get out into the community and talk to other people about the good things that are happening, not sit here and complain about the bad.

Palm Commercial from Arno Arni on Vimeo.

UPDATE:

MrKal_El created a thread for this article over on the Precentral forums. There’s a nice discussion going on over there, so check it out.

Had a few nice replies show up on Twitter:

Photo Credit