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Palm's Mistakes
putko writes "Mike Singer has an article at ZDNet called Five reasons for Palm's slide which describes succinctly how Palm went from owning the palmtop platform -- OS and apps -- to getting chopped into pieces (some recently sold to a Japanese firm), using an OS from Microsoft and teaming up with Microsoft. The author claims, among other things, that Palm's stuff never worked well enough with Windows (while the RIM Blackberry did), which ultimately allowed Windows Mobile to eliminate them. A hard fall for a company that really did innovate."
"Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales. Palm announced its m500 and m505 products early in 2001, before they were ready, stalling sales of older devices, such as the Palm V. Then, to compensate, the company massively overproduced the m500 and m505. In 2001, it got stuck holding onto excess inventory when sales of the devices fell short of expectations.
Some of those devices still linger in inventories..."
They did not see that the Palm cost too much and delivers too little. I don't think anyone likes to write with a Palm stylus either, it was just too slow and difficult. Cell phones were being given away, Palm prices stayed high and could not communicate with each other easily. Innovate quickly or die seems to be the motto in this industry.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Count me in that group. I've always found everything on the Palm to be intuitive, especially Graffiti. I even take notes in some classes on it.
As for the Pocket PC stuff, I can't figure out how to use the OS on them, much less the rest of the software. Plus I've never heard of one with more than a few hours battery life to it. My Palm gets plugged into my USB port approximately whenever I remember to (read: not often,) and I've never had the battery below 75%.
I guess I'm just in the minority on this.
People have been saying Palm lost the market for years, but don't they still own as much of the market as any competitor? Isn't the Treo 600/650 a huge success?
I own a Win Mobile 2003 device, and I would never give it to one of my users. It's far too complicated. To the degree that most people want the basic address book, calendar/todo, and notes, the Palm is far superior: Endless battery life, far more stable, far easier UI.
No, that's why it was so sucessful at first - it did exactly what people wanted to do, at a sane price point. Making something that worked, and had weeks of battery life at typical usage (and many hours of continuous use), with the hardware available at the time (remember, they were designing this thing in 1995), was a major achievement.
It was usable, acted very well as a 'tentacle' of a desktop machine, and had just (barely) enough juice to attract third-party developers, which ended up coming in droves. Programming for it is quirky but doable, and despite some limitations stemming from the very restricted original configuration (128KB of RAM - remember, 1995), very neat things could be done with it. The sycing Just Worked - unlike ActiveSync which still has issues from what I gather.
But Palm didn't expand the platform very well. I don't mind using Dragonballs per se - their power consumption is tiny compared to even modern ARM processors - but their software model needed updating badly. You just can't write a reliable server-type program on PalmOS, or do any multithreading (or even multiprocessing). That makes it way too hard to get anything sophisticated done on the device.
Even given those limitations it's remarkable what can be done on a Palm platform. See, e.g., this little gem. Does all kinds of neat things (including WiFi and such) and yet a wondrous battery life (6 hours of continuous WiFi traffic, anyone?).
If they'd gotten a real update to their OS to at least enable multitasking of some kind, even cooperative multitasking - they wouldn't be in the situation they are today. There were ways to do it without even trying that hard. Oh, well.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!