In January 2010, many tablet computers were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Nobody really remembers them, mostly because they either failed to reach the market or failed to sell. This was a pre-emptive strike on the tablet everyone does remember, introduced just days later: the iPad.

Once the iPad started shipping in April 2010, the impact was swift and shredded roadmaps across the industry – including three other key April events:
– Microsoft cancels the Courier project
– HP cancels the Slate tablet announced in partnership with Microsoft at CES
– HP purchases Palm for $1.2 billion

By scaling up its mobile operating system and hardware instead of scaling down their desktop counterparts, Apple immediately superseded years of work by Microsoft and its partners to establish a consumer tablet market. Left flat footed by the rejection of Windows 7 running on Intel Atom processors, Microsoft was at risk of being left behind completely in the tablet market, as HP bought Palm and Dell (and many other PC manufacturers) went with Android. This would seem to be the genesis for what was to become Microsoft Surface with Windows RT Surface RT.

But what if…

Suppose that instead, Microsoft – not HP – had purchased Palm, an idea at least one person, Jason Hiner floated in 2009. First, let’s look at the reasons why this didn’t happen:
– Microsoft was already well into ruining Danger Inc Project Pink (the Kin phones)
– Microsoft already had a nascent tablet UI idea in the Zune/Metro Style
– Palm WebOS had no lineage or compatibility with Windows CE or .NET
– Microsoft was already rebuilding a smartphone OS from scratch: Windows Phone 7

Had Microsoft jettisoned Project Pink earlier, it easily could have re-provisioned those funds into an acquisition of Palm. At the time Palm was acquired, it had the Veer and Pre 3 smartphones in development, as well as the Touchpad tablet. Microsoft could have released the Veer as its feature phone idea, with the Kin social elements on top of WebOS. The Touchpad could have become a development unit for its merging of WebOS and the Metro UI. Here, the card’s UI metaphor in WebOS could have made a lot of sense by calling them instead … Windows. The social information strategy is actually similar between WebOS and WP7; both wanted to combine your various information sources and present a unified interface for communications. Backwards compatibility, as it turns out, is a non-issue, as WinRT has none, and both WP7 and WP8 have broken it as well.

Armed with a well-developed mobile OS, Microsoft could have introduced Metro OS for use on tablets in late 2010/early 2011. This would have brought the manufacturing partners closer, rather than pushing them further away as WP7, Windows 8 and Surface RT have done. This could have led to Windows Phone 8 instead being Metro OS 2.0, now for tablets and phones, featuring app compatibility with established developers, apps and ecosystem.

By allowing HP to purchase Palm instead of acquiring it for themselves, Microsoft let the relationship between itself and  many PC and smartphone manufacturers sour, encouraging an “everyone for themselves” survivor mentality. This represents a missed opportunity to quickly bring to market a competent mobile OS that anyone would want to license, rather than everyone fumbling with costly, amateur attempts at vertical integration.