HP reportedly no longer counts Peter Skillman, a lead designer of the Palm Pre, among its ranks. The loss of Skillman, the last of the Pre team, comes just days after the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd.
Peter Skillman, the lead designer on a team that created the Palm Pre, has left Hewlett-Packard,
Tech Crunch has confirmed. Where Skillman is headed has yet to be announced.
HP purchased smartphone-maker Palm in July, and Skillman was the
final remaining member of the Pre design team, which had been assembled
by then-Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein. According to a 2009
Forbes
profile, the team, originally culled from all areas of the mobile
industry, consisted of Apple-veteran Mike Bell, who last month left to
join Intel; Matias Duarte, a contributor to the T-Mobile Sidekick and
Helio Ocean, who was hired to work on Palm's WebOS and is now with
Google's Android team; and Michael Abbott, who left Palm in April and
is now Twitter's vice president of engineering.
The news of Skillman's departure comes just days after
the sudden resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd Aug. 6,
following findings of ethical misconduct, after an inquiry into sexual
harassment allegations made by a former consultant to HP.
Until a new successor is chosen,
HP will be led by Cathie Lesjack,
a 24-year veteran of HP who has served as the company's CFO. Lesjack
and other executives insist that Hurd left the company well positioned
for success. In a quickly called Aug. 6 conference call, Lesjack told a
select group of analysts, "I have never been more confident in the
company's future. Our strategy of profitable growth is solid and our
ability to execute is irrefutable."
How Skillman's departure will affect HP is less clear. HP executives
have confirmed that Rubinstein and a Palm team are working on a roadmap
for future handsets, and the industry has buzzed with rumors regarding
the tablet devices - head-on competitors to the Apple iPad - that HP
has planned. In mid-July, All Things D reported, citing unnamed
sources, that HP was putting plans for an Android-running tablet on
hold, likely to better focus its efforts on two other tablets: a
Microsoft-based, enterprise-geared model, and a more consumer-focused
tablet running WebOS.
The name of the latter is expected to be the PalmPad, following
HP's July 14 filing of a trademark request for the name.
For now, HP still has its key Palm player in place in Rubinstein. A
former Apple employee who contributed significantly to the Apple iPod
and iMac,
Rubinstein was named CEO of Palm in June 2009,
just days after the relatively successful launch of the Palm Pre.
Rubinstein, as head of the Palm global business unit within HP, now
answers to HP Executive Vice President Todd Bradley.
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