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Hands Down, Palm is Now Number Two
jamesl writes "InformationWeek reports that the number one PDA operating system now comes from Redmond, 48.1% last quarter (41.2% a year ago) compared to 29.8% (46.9% last year) for PalmSource. The big gainer was RIM, up to 19.8% from 4.9%. Linux ... a valient 0.9%, off slightly from last years' 1.9%.
The article has some thoughts about where the market is going with phones taking on more PDA functions."
I think it was from the stagnation of palm. They had the number one spot for so long they rarely made any large changes to their os. When Microsoft came out with their os for mobile devices palm tried to catch up and wasnt able to
I'd quote from the linked article but it seems to be slashdotted so I'll quote from an infosync article:
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/5526.html
"It should be noted that these percentages apply only to the handheld market, which for the purposes of this study excludes the widely-popular palmOne Treo 600. The Treo line has had a long history of reclassification, and often bounces back and forth between different market categories in different studies."
Gartner has had a long history of producing studies that suggest Palm is losing to Microsoft. Their latest tactic seems to be to exclude the best selling Palm product from their studies.
http://nyamenation.org/
Business success has more to do with partnerships and deals, in reality, both OSs are adequate for use as a PDA, so it's really just what kind of business deals that each company can secure.
As it seems the world wants to run a Windows like OS on mobile chips. If they want a Win32 like OS then we should give them a free one.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I'm an enthusiastic linux user and advocate (and a kde developer), however I don't think Linux, or Windows is the right OS for a PDA.
They were designed for intel processors, multitasking was a requirement, and various other design factors optimising them for "normal" computers.
PalmOS, however, is optimized for handhelds, doesn't do multitasking (I don't know about palm OS 5) simply because it's not neccesary on a PDA, and has one of the most intuitive interfaces i've seen. Also, PalmOS leaves me loads of space on my 2MB Zire for all of my data (several hundred contacts), and the entire new testament (seriously). I really doubt Windows could run with so little storage, and with Linux, there really wouldn't be that much room for data.
They're still releasing devices with PalmOS 5 which is the saddest apology for an operating system I have seen. Writing PalmOS GUI code is hard - there are so many legacy features you need to check for and deal with. It's clear that the whole thing has just accreted without planning over the years. The current schizophrenia between 68000 and ARM is a nightmare with the worse endianness horrors you've ever seen. I won't even mention proper OS features like memory management, multi-threading and so on.
Customers have been begging for proper wireless support on Palms for a long time and Palm have failed to deliver. A device, today, without at least 802.11b, is a dinosaur before it's born. What the hell are the Palm engineers doing over there?
The software that delivers with the Palm is a little pathetic. Not even a file browser. And main memory has a completely flat file hierarchy so that even with a file browser it's hard to find what you want. No word processor (well, there's an awful 3rd party thing).
It's no surprise they're losing the war. But it needn't have been like this. They had the advantage. And they simply sat on their laurels.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think there's a huge segment of the handheld users that are project managers, managers, analysts, etc. These people depend on (because of market penetration) Microsoft products such as Excel, Word, Project, and Outlook.
It would make sense that the the most popular "take with you" version of these would be on a PocketPC running Microsoft CE.
If Palm had wanted to remain on the top, they'd have had to offer *seamless* integration with these products, but how can they when they're competing with the company that MAKES them?
This is the a great example of how a monopoly can be used to extend into another market via a "one-off" mechanism.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
RIM Blackberry is strong, but IMHO that's only due to 2 things:
- a keyboard
- an easy to use system
- unmetered email
Ie. it tries to serve customers instead of thinking about milking them dry. Not that it's not they long term goal (maybe) but they provide a decent service for a decent fee.
But that's just a functionnality-based success. Any WinCE, Palm or Zaurus call plan which would offer the same functionnality would quickly become as big. Time to think about new functions too - say unmetered instant messenging (like SMS but free!)
Note to cell phone operators : stop thinking about milking your customers dry. Start thinking about offering services, such as voip roaming (ie if my cellphone finds a wifi network, use sipphone instead of $lousy_gsm_provider - especially when roaming abroad !)
This is IMHO the key to success. Then whatever hardware or operating system that goes along, if it is not too lousy, will grow.
The Zaurus 6000 could have become big. The user interface needed only minor tweaking. If only it had had GSM built it (smartphone like) + some good voip software + a call plan where email and instant messenging would have been free...
The market is lagging not because of lack of functionnality or technical capabiliies (GPRS makes possible to receive calls at the same time you have a data connection on a multiplex-capable GSM phone) but only because a shared monopoly between shitty operators prevent this innovation from appearing. "what if it eats my profits?" is wrong spririt. With the same mentality horseless carriage ie cars would have never existed. "it will eat every competitor alive and grow my market share and thus skyrocket my profits" is right.
Where's entrepreunership and risk taking? I just see deep-coma business !
That's free advice from a disgruntled french cellphone customer.
Obviously competing on a closed source basis with microsoft is hopeless. The market brought out a viable competitor to windows in linux despite the governments hapless efforts. hopefully we'll see some legitamte copmetition that will better the market and people won't wine too much.
Remember smartphones, the growing market segment (unlike the shrinking PDA segment)?
p ?r eport_id=222287&t=e&cat_id=20
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"2003 was a breakout year for mobile operating system vendor Symbian Software, which shipped 6.67 million operating systems worldwide--an 88 percent market share of advanced OS-based handset sales. Before 2003, the Symbian OS was resident on only five handset models--all but one from Nokia. At the end of 2003, the number of Symbianbased handsets remained modest, at 11 models from four vendors, with five more scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2004."
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reportinfo.as
http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?id=388
This one Palm did to themselves. Palm had half a dozen years to turn PalmOS into a modern, reliable 32bit operating system, instead they are still shipping handhelds that emulate bits and pieces of an old 68k design, don't multitask properly, and make it hard allocate more than 64k at a time. Apparently, PalmOS 6 has been released, but neither PalmOne nor Sony are even bothering to make handhelds with it; it's too little too late. The only thing that has kept the platform alive is the fact that there are lots of good applications for it and that kept the original GUI more or less intact.
All Microsoft had to do is show up to the party. WinCE isn't a great operating system, but it's a lot better than PalmOS. The thing that has been holding PocketPC back is its awful UI.
My hope would be that PalmOne (the hardware part of Palm) explores some new ideas: Symbian is a great system they could ship right away, or they could adopt one of the Linux-based PDA environments and port a PalmOS emulation layer to that to run all the Palm legacy applications.
While this is bad news for Palm, it's not so bad in that this really just reflects their current strategy: stay in the PDA business, but don't break the bank on it. They believe convergent devices are a huge part of their future (they're already selling 2 different treo models, and are definitely going to continue making more), and who's to blame them? Nowadays, I don't want to carry two devices when I can only carry one. If bluetooth had taken off more in US cellphones (thank you very much Verizon) then we might be seeing a different picture, but as it is, the PDA market is considered dead and/or stagnant.
2 98
"A decline in Palm OS shipments was expected in the third quarter of 2004, but not of this magnitude," Mr. Kort said. "The company is pouring the vast majority of its resources into its smartphone business. A reduction in the number of PDA models palmOne offers is expected in 2005."
Most certainly bad for Palm, but not quite a deathknell. Another two aspects of trickery in this report: this only includes numbers of units *shipped,* not numbers of units *sold.* There is indeed a difference. I'm sure that PalmOne sold less devices in this quarter, but I'm pretty sure these numbers don't include much in the way of the new T5 (meaning it's likely people were still waiting to see what new stuff Palm would have) and who's to say that there isn't a backlog of iPaqs sitting in some warehouse somewhere, waiting to be sold?
Link to another article with the same numbers: http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=7
PalmOS is nowhere near as clunky as Windows CE.
For one thing, PalmOS has got a much simpler and more elegant user interface than its rival (Why the hell would anyone think that a desktop metaphor is suitable for a PDA?) and for another it's far faster than it too.
When I'm looking up an address or want to enter a quick note then I don't want to have to navigate through a menu system to get there first and wait while everything happens.
The key advantage PocketPCs have over Palms is the Microsoft factor: just as it has with other markets (eg, web browsers), Microsoft has leveraged its dominance in one market (desktop OS) to achieve success in another.
To suggest that PocketPCs are intrinsically superior to equivalent Palm models is hilarious.
If I were a tad more paranoid, I'd suggest that your comment and one or two others like it I've seen posted about this story were classic cases of astroturfing.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Haven't hacked the Palm OS, but I've developed applications for PPC using eMbedded Visual Tools. and some embedded applications for different platforms using the GNU toolchain. I've not developed anything for PalmOS, BUT I've a clear perspective that's based in the comparison of being a power user of both platforms. POINT No.1: Almost all apps I use to have in PPC I've them now in Palm. Man... it's sad... the difference is huge in aspects such as graphical presentation, switching between apps, theme handling. I conclude that the OS is not really a multi-tasking environment. POINT No.2: The filesystem. That approach of everything being a pdb man... my grandmother would have changed that since v3 of the OS!!!! On the other side PPC uses a simple FAT filesystem, any kid could upload an mp3 to the handheld. It's not that easy when you have to convert everything to a pdb format!!! POINT No.3 PPC is always ahead in hardware performance (I know that's not free, the point is that the OS is ahead in running on more roboust hardware).
exactly what it needs to do very well.
Maybe the problem is the market is already saturated with Palm's that do exactly what their owners need to do? I mean, why would you buy a new palm if it has the same features you already have?
The advantage Microsoft has is that PocketPC hardware has followed Moore's law, and thus there is an insentive for consumers to keep purchasing new devices. By the same token, Moore's law has reduced the cost of the hardware (and end product) for Palms (the low end models) to such a level that it probably isn't nearly as profitable anymore. You can't even compare PocketPC's and Palm devices anymore, they are so much different from eachother in what they do it's unfair.
That's serious? Would you believe that even more then half a percent of Pocket PC users have done that?
And I just bought a Palm, since the iPod only displays stuff -- I need to input, too. You have no idea how badly I wish there was a way to do input on the iPod (while still using Apple's software -- Linux doesn't count)!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz