Ex-Apple guru Jon Rubinstein came out of retirement to run Palm. Now he's leaving Hewlett-Packard, the company that acquired Palm for its webOS mobile operating system.

Rubinstein had high hopes for an HP-owned Palm, saying at the time of the acquisition that he was confident webOS would "reach its full potential" with HP's backing. Perhaps it didn't turn out the way he expected.

AllThingsD is reporting that Rubinstein left the company on Friday with no immediate plays. His exit comes after the fulfillment of a commitment to stay with the technology giant for 12 to 24 months after the acquisition.

"Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well," HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.

Rubinstein said, "I am going to take a well-deserved break after four-and-a-half years of developing webOS."

Rubinstein Unhappy?

HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in April 2010. At the time, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the Personal Systems Group at HP, said Palm's webOS operating system was the ideal platform to expand HP's mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience that spanned multiple connected devices.

Rubinstein came on board as senior vice president and general manager of the Palm global business unit at HP. He soon rolled out the Palm Pre 2 and webOS 2.0, which offered true multitasking. HP then got out of the mobile handset business and tried its webOS luck with the HP TouchPad, which was a dismal failure.

In July, HP shifted its webOS strategy. HP announced plans to accelerate the global expansion of webOS and moved Rubinstein off the project. HP appointed Stephen DeWitt as senior vice president and general manager of the webOS business unit and shifted Rubinstein over to a product innovation role within the company's Personal Systems Group.

But the ultimate deal breaker for Rubinstein may have been HP's move earlier this week. On Wednesday, HP started executing its plan to deliver an open-source webOS by September. Bill Veghte, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at HP, called it a "decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform's development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of Web applications."

Retired Again

Michael Gartenberg, principal analyst at Gartner, said it doesn't come as much of surprise that Rubinstein chose to exit HP, what with webOS going open source and HP essentially shutting down the Palm brand.

"Rubinstein was brought in to run Palm. With that operation winding down it's not surprising that he is leaving to pursue other interests," Gartenberg said. "Certainly in his position he has enough options to do whatever he feels like doing.

"He was semi-retired before he went to Palm, and my guess is being a cog in a large corporate machine didn't appeal to him. I don't think he would have come out of retirement just to be an executive at HP."

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