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."

Comments

Re:Legal attacks soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Convergence

[FiReaNGeL]

With dirt-cheap-to-make phones taking over the (simple) functions of PDAs, I can't see the market for pure PDAs improving much. Honestly, I always found a 400$ device too costly to replace my paper address/notebook. But its a different thing altogether if they can offer me the functionality on my phone, for just about the same price.

Gartner's numbers are always suspect

[jomas1]

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.

Re:Gartner's numbers are always suspect

[Anonymous Coward]

Gartner is completely full of crap. I'm posting anonymously now because my current company's product is climbing up Gartner's recommendation list. We're doing it by rimming Ronnie Colville basically, and in return we get the joy-love treatment from Gartner and in turn the press. We start doing well on the magic quadrant, next thing you know we're getting in depth magazine lab reviews that praise us for features we don't actually have.

On the flip side, a few years back I worked for a company that was on Gartner's shit list. There we were regulary beaten up on the magic quadrant for not having technology that we'd INVENTED and brought to market first. Hello?

Making decisions based on Gartner's recommendations is about as smart as using a dartboard.

Why the Surprise?

[Spencerian]

PocketPCs are more versatile. I know this and don't even own one.

Meanwhile, Palm has tried more to generate cash than generate a strategy that makes their product diverse enough to work like an operating system, and not like an appliance with canned tasks.

I've watched them cut their market support to where essentially only Windows is supported. Not the best plan without something better to offer. It's the same battle that MP3 player makers have against Apple--they can't offer much better since they don't have a better online music interface to match the iPod's simple operation.

No offense . . .

[Maradine]

. . . 'cuz I love my Zaurus too, but 1.9% to .9% is not "off slightly". Its a shellacing.

It's no surprise

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Palm (the two halves) must be the worst example of complacency I have ever seen. For a start they frequently release hardware, after a long period, that is the tiniest incremental improvement from previous hardware.

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.

Re:It's no surprise

[Billly Gates]

What I see here is Palm is dying.

Not in a troll sense but they laid off a good number of people after the .com bomb and a year ago they were trading in at close to $.60 a share!

Now they need to improve the palm yet do not have hte resources to do so.

Netscape and wordperfect met the same fate when MS undersold them and had exclusive deals with OEM's. They had to cut the price and lay off the workforce. After that they no longer had the resources to improve their product.

Its sad but I think their lack of innovation that you mentioned shows how behind the times they are and how they are struggling.

Microsoft Office is killing palm...

[Not_Wiggins]

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.

Re:Microsoft Office is killing palm...

[GarfBond]

Someone should have informed you of the product Documents to Go, widely regarded as better integrating with Office products than, well, Office.

For instance, Pocket Word tends to screw up formatted tables, inline images, formatting, the like, while Docs to Go has repeatably demonstrated in the past that their product does not. Sames goes for things like Pocket Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Walt Mossberg had a great article on this a while ago. What's more, DTG practically comes with every Palm product nowadays.

While this may have changed in the most recent future (last I heard "Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003" still had this problem), I doubt 2005 greatly changed it. Now of course, perception is everything, and one might *think* PocketPCs would be better with office, but as we know perception is not always in line with reality.

Linux is the future.

[Guylhem]

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.

Re:my opinions

[Cheeze]

why would you think a PDA wouldn't need to multitask? I want a PDA that I can leave my mp3s playing in the background while i compose a document or spreadsheet. I don't want the whole device to freeze while it checks my mail.

Storage also is not an issue anymore, since flash memory prices have dropped so much it's like a $5 difference between including 64MB and 256MB.

If you're just looking for something to store contacts and text files, you can get a brand new Sharp YO-P20 Handheld Organizer for about $20. If you want a small, portable computer that will allow you to do most of your desktop functions quickly and relatively cheaply, buy an IPaQ or Dell Axim.

Getting a PDA only for storing contacts is WAY overkill.

Note: I'm a Dell Axim owner. There's just something cool about being able to be outside mowing the lawn while streaming mp3s over 802.11 to a small device in my pocket.

Very different when smartphones, Symbian included

[Burz]

Remember smartphones, the growing market segment (unlike the shrinking PDA segment)?

"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.asp ?r eport_id=222287&t=e&cat_id=20

http://www.mobilemonday.net/mm/story.php?id=3884

Palm did it to themselves

[geg81]

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.

They deserve it

[wyldeone]

I would have to say that PalmOne deserves whatever happens to them. Until the release of the T5 I was a die-hard Palm OS fan, owning now less than six different Palm devices over the years (starting with the original Palm Pilot.) However when PalmOne released the T5 it was such a slap in the face to all of their customers that I couldn't believe that a company could be so stupid. For the T5 is essentially a T3, execpt with some more memory. And no Wi-fi. And no Cobalt. And did I mention no Wi-fi? The day after PalmOne released the T5 (October 4) I decided against upgrading my Treo 600 to a Treo 650 (which has a meagre 32mb of ram and NO WI-FI) and instead bought a Dell Axim x30. It has Wi-fi, a exteremly fast processor (624mhZ) and tons of memory. While I find the OS unstable, I now see how much the PalmOS has limited me.