Dan Frommer Says Palm’s Decline ‘Shows That Apple Is Screwed Without Steve Jobs’

Obviously, this is the pessimistic take on the “What happens to Apple post-Jobs?” question:

Palm is basically Apple, Jr. And if a bunch of Apple geniuses can’t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?

He has a point, insofar as that Palm is staffed with many former Apple employees, and, in terms of design and feel and concept, WebOS is the most Apple-like, by far, of any other software platform in the world. But Frommer’s logical presumption that Palm’s former Apple employees are interchangeable with those who are at Apple today is headache-inducing.

Worse, with regard to mobile, today’s Palm — the Rubinstein-led, stocked with former Apple people, WebOS Palm — only came into existence after the iPhone debuted. For the sake of argument we can concede that the team at Palm today is just as talented as the team under Jobs at Apple and it still might not be enough to dig the new Palm out of the hole it started in.

As I stated in my talk at Macworld this month, what Apple will be like post-Jobs is simply unknowable.

★ Thursday, 25 February 2010