Rubinstein: From "Podfather" to "Prefather"

From "Podfather" to "Prefather," two years after his arrival at Palm, Jon Rubinstein has shepherded the Palm Pre and webOS to market.  A story by Hugo Miller and Connie Guglielmo at Bloomberg.com talks about how Rubinstein brought Apple culture with him to Palm.

“I helped to create a lot of the engineering culture at Apple during the turnaround there,” Rubinstein, who worked with Steve Jobs for more than 15 years, said last week during a technology conference in San Diego. “Palm’s engineering culture has a lot of how Apple runs instilled into it.”

The article mentions how Rubinstein helped develop the all-in-one iMac (1998) and the iPod music player (2001), noting when he left Apple in 2006, the iPod had conquered the digital media market with more than 208 million having been sold.

Brad Williams, a fund manager at MTB Investment Advisors Inc. in Baltimore remarked:

“Palm had a very hard time doing new product design quickly and launching it effectively -- those are things that Apple has excelled at. You bring somebody over who’s played a major role there, the impact they can have in terms of improving Palm is pretty significant.”

The article is an interesting read and a nice shift away from talk about technical aspects of the Palm Pre and webOS.  And if you have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal Online, you might want to check out the story written about Rubinstein in December 2007 ("Apple's'Podfather' Now Aims to Revive A Wilting Palm"), at the beginning of his "Pre" adventure.