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.

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.

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.