Skunkworks

It wasn't looking good. Just months into Elevation Partners' investment, morale in Palm's engineering corps was already flagging. Executives had sold them on a change-the-world mentality and Duarte had delivered the blueprint for a revolutionary user interface, but Mercer's operating system had few believers beyond the small group of engineers (around four, we're told) that he directly controlled.

Platform director Greg Simon and VP Andy Grignon — who'd worked together many years prior at Pixo — thought they might have a solution. The two set aside a weekend to see if they could take a radically different approach to the UI layer: create it using WebKit alone, the open source web rendering engine best known for underpinning Apple Safari and Google Chrome. At Lampdesk, Simon and Chatterjee had created a product called WebVM that allowed developers to incorporate web technologies into standalone apps, so there was already a sense that this could be done. Prima's inability to easily align text was clearly a sore point for engineers, several of whom mentioned it during the course of our conversations. "Instead of having a guy write code that centers text, we could stand on the shoulders of giants and let WebKit do it," one source told us.

"Instead of having a guy write code that centers text, we could stand on the shoulders of giants and let WebKit do it."

The way Simon and Grignon saw it, using pure HTML and JavaScript would have a few key advantages. One, it would allow large chunks of functionality to be implemented very quickly because the underlying standards were simple, straightforward, and widely understood. Two, Duarte was intrigued by the notion that his designers would be able to apply their handicraft to apps, screens, and UI elements without extensive assistance from engineers, all of whom had other things to worry about. And perhaps most appealing, WebKit already existed — Palm just had to port it.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. WebKit simply wasn't created for doing this kind of thing. No one working on the core WebKit project had a mobile device with limited RAM, processor, and battery in mind — certainly not for the entire user interface, anyway. Granted, Nokia and Apple had already ported WebKit for use in their mobile browsers at that point, but what Simon and Grignon were spitballing was a considerably more ambitious idea.

One weekend later, though, the two believed they'd cobbled together enough of a mockup to prove that Matias' vision could indeed be realized using nothing more than a web engine. They took the demo to software boss Mitch Allen; Rubinstein saw it not long after. Allen was impressed enough that Grignon was given approval to peel off ten staff members and crank for a month with the goal of bringing up WebKit and basic functionality on a very early prototype handset called "Floyd," essentially a modified Treo 800w. There was no guarantee from Palm leadership that this was the direction they were going, only a promise that they'd be allowed to give it a shot.

And the project had a name: "Luna."

The ten-strong Luna team went into full-on stealth mode, taking over a conference room inside Palm's Sunnyvale offices and papering over the windows. It was, for all practical purposes, its own startup inside Palm. "That's the way you do it inside a big company. You have to protect the engineers," a team member told us. Mike Abbott, who'd just been hired by Ruby from Microsoft to take over software duties from CTO Mitch Allen, ran interference with the rest of the company so the "startup" could stay focused. Sunrise to sunset, they hashed out the details of what exactly it would take to make a phone based entirely on web standards. Personalities clashed, arguments ensued. It was an emotional time — everyone involved was united in their desire to get away from Prima, and they wanted to get it right. Considering the schedule, they had one shot, and there wasn't a spare second to be wasted.

But after a month, Luna was real. It worked. The team celebrated late into the night at Cupertino haunt Alexander's, running up a several thousand dollar bill and nearly giving Abbott a heart attack in the process. It was a pricey outing, yes, but perhaps not when put into perspective: "This was effectively their bonus," a source pointed out. "Think about it. If you gave a [Silicon Valley engineer] a $500 cash bonus for that level of effort, he'd probably quit on the spot."