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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."
"Synchronization between the Microsoft and Palm became a critical issue, particularly since Windows is already in 95 percent of corporate environments" And that's the crux of the whole problem. And indeed poor decision/timing were also palm's mistakes.
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or it could be the 20mhz processors they used to use. God,when i first bought a PDA it was the $150 ipaq 1300 with a 266 mhz ARM processor and a huge screen and the only comparable palm was a fricking 20Mhz m100 with a tiny tiny screen. It also helps that pocket pcs are jsut that, they are like little hand held computers.
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I seem to recall that 3 incarnations of Windows PC (Windows Pocket Computer) worked perfectly well with Windows and flopped big time. Then when Palm came out, Microsoft "innovated" again and "invented" the PalmPC which everybody knows was far superior to the Palm Pilot except that it required 10 times as much memory.
Palm got into Cellular phones BEFORE PalmPC did too.
Palm didn't flop so much as its purpose was absorbed into cellphones and laptops with instant wireless connections.
It was an calender/address book with some note taking capabilities. No one really uses snail mail anymore for "quick communication" so the phone directory in a cell phone is more than enough and if you need more than that, most people are carrying around their laptops or can access GMail or Yahoo where their address books are stored online.
That leaves the calendar function which these days is stored centrally on company servers. So it's just easier to access it via the laptop everyone has then carry around yet another electronic device.
That plus its confusion as Handspring/Palm/Trio its hardware missteps over the last few years, lack of a clearcut development vision of what a PalmPC should do (it's been almost 10 years and its main functions are still... calender/address book/notes) and the perception of not being a multimedia device.
But it died because it didn't hook up to Windows properly? Nah... I still use mine and it hooks up to Windows just fine.
``Analysts say Palm just couldn't nail down the formula for over-the-air synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, which business users demand and RIM nailed with its BlackBerry device.''
That's not Palm's fault. Microsoft keeps their protocols and file formats secret, so as to make it difficult for competitiors to develop products that interoperate with Microsoft's. One more instance of Microsoft driving competitors out of the market by using their desktop monopoly, and one more reason why we must demand open formats and protocols.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The two main uses, aside from cell phone usage, of a Blackberry/Treo device, for these corporate employees, would be e-mail and calendar/appointment book.
Other than that, I really don't see the average Joe utilizing the full potential of the PDA.
Yah, but that's like saying that pine cones taste better than used tires.
Mobile computing in general has been stagnating. PalmOS completely failed to grow with the technology. Windows Mobile has never quite grasped that the hardware on which the OS is about the size of a stack of index cards and has a usage pattern that generally consists of pulling it out of a pocket, using it for 15 seconds, and putting it back in the pocket.
I killed my Tungsten|T2 last month. I'm making do with a dead tree notebook and my laptop until something worth spending money on comes out - not that I think that will happen anytime soon.
I'd say nearly 30% of my consulting income for 5 years was helping basic company managers getting their Palms to work. Once they worked (synced, etc), these basic users spent more time navigating the software than using it efficiently. The working install rarely worked for long. My corporate customers hated the software. "Just get it working" was common to hear.
I have used Palm devices since the Palm Pilot Professional and have reveled in their simplicity. I have a Palm m505 and couldn't do without it. I regularly and routinely sync it into my Macintosh and everything works perfectly. In fact, since I use Apple's iSync, my .Mac calendar and address book are kept up with data I enter in on my m505 every time I synchronize, which means I can log onto my account from any web browser and retrieve information. This is the epitome of Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips."
So you're wrong.
My fiancée rarely takes her m505 anywhere. She used to have all of her contacts on it but lost all of the data in a divorce when her ex-husband kept the computer and she did not hot-sync her data to anything (he probably did it for her). When her m505 lost power, it lost everything (I think). I don't think she regularly hot-syncs. She has a Dell laptop and is minimally-functional in Microsoft Excel. She runs a home-based business on the side and understands the value of data entry in order to track clientele, but simply won't do the work. She would not know how to harness the power of a template in Microsoft Word unless someone set it up for her and also wrote most of the document for her (thus making her need the "consultant" as a permanent appendage). She has two paper calendars where she keeps numbers, addresses, contacts, schedules, appointments and so on and leads a busy life that is pretty disorganized -- all things that could be organized with a little more computer literacy and better use of her Palm m505.
So you're right.
The Palm was designed to do few things and do them extremely well. I use my m505 for my date book, appointment book, address book memo pad, and play solitaire and chess on it. That's pretty much it. I have a cell phone that works just fine as a cell phone. I have an iPod that works just fine as a music player. I totally understand the desire on the part of many to reduce these three personal electronic gadgets into one -- fewer cords to haul around, fewer adapters needed, fewer things to plug in every night and so on. The Palm devices I have used over the years have always had more than enough memory, more than enough speed and more than enough features to please me. And they do one thing perfectly: They sync with my Mac (it is my understanding that Windows CE devices won't).
I noted that there were a few specific things that the Palm folks wanted put into the Windows OS for the upcoming Treo, like clicking on someone's face in one's address book to initiate a call. Microsoft still doesn't have "ease of use" down -- even for handhelds.
Perhaps it's time I got another Palm device -- quickly because the new ones next year won't work with my Mac. There are lots of people who wrote code for the Palm OS who are probably really unhappy about this announcement.
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I think this has been addressed already in other comments, but I have to vent anyway. From what I can see, a major mistake on Palm's part has been shipping one flaky-assed operating system. Let me illustrate: I was in the market for a new PDA. It HAD to have 802.11 and decent Mac OS support. I settled on a Sony CLIE TJ-37 running PalmOS 5.x. This machine was GREAT! It could surf the web, get my email, monitor RSS feeds, take photos, play MP3s, act as a bookreader, AND sync with my Mac OS X addressbook and calendar. I was happy with this machine for about a week, until I got the first hard crash. While using wireless, the OS would grind to a halt with some crazy error in Datamanager.c line 9052 or something like that. Turns out the only way to recover from this is to hard reset the machine (ie Erase it) and restore from backup. Fine, whatever, it's like owning a really flaky pre-OSX Mac. Until the crash returns. And returns. And returns AGAIN. There is NO rhyme or reason to how this error comes about - not that one certain website, email address, RSS feed, wireless network, or anything. There is NO information about it on the web. Calls to Palm and Sony are equivalent to running into a brick wall. So, I have abandoned using networking functions on the damned thing because its TCP/IP stack is apparently less capable than WinSock. Brilliant move, guys.
Right when I read that, I realized the article was ... well, if not nonsense, then at least half-way there.
I think Palm's biggest mistake was being idealistic. They had a great concept - zero start time, a low-power, very long-life device that works as a powerful memo book with some automagic features.
Their documentation is solid, the OS was great - simple, straightforward, and geared toward exactly the ideas that were a part of the hardware design. They even wrote a book - "The Zen of Palm" describing the guidelines and software design considerations that were to go into writing software for the platform. They said from the very beginning - this is not a palmtop notebook. It's a low-power digital memo pad/calendar.
Compare this with other PDA's - iPaq's, Dell's Axims, etc. - bulky, overpowered monstrosities. Oh yeah, great - I can read word documents on the PDA. Sweet. But someone better be running behind me with a diesel generator to power it. Axims have 5-10 hour battery lives. Palms could go for a month (sometimes more, depending on usage) on a pair of AA's.
But I guess the WinCE systems do have one advantage - you get to write windows code (oh joy) for them. Oh wait...there's something wrong with that statement.
So, palm in it's conception of the purpose of a PDA was just too naive - they thought people would realize that current technology doesn't let you have a portable workstation, and tried to get the best of what was available. But Joe Schmoe can't live without checking his email on his PDA - god forbid he should miss that all-important email from the President of the US. Basically, the windows devices got ahead on the whiz-bang factor, by pandering to people's sense of self-importance, and by counting on people to be stupid and not realize what they truly needed. How typical. So, to the extent that palm failed to recognize all this, they were too idealistic. What a pity.
Palm's biggest problem now is that they went to Win Mobile. What made Palm unique for years was their innovative operating system.
What made Palm truly suck was their unwillingness to upgrade the OS and to make it easy to upgrade as it went along. There are no decent controls over the quality of products out there and everything you could even consider adding to the OS costs too much money for what we've already spent on the device.
There are two versions now of the PalmOS that have yet to really see the light of day, and now they probably never will. Sad. They restricted the OS, when they could have made it free to download and even easier for people to get rid of their old palms, recycle them and get into the newer models. Moving from old to new was a pain in the ass.
Last year I bought a Palm 650. Now I'm sad I did, despite using everything from the Contact Book, getting an instant messenging client (Agile's an ok client when it's not crashing), Web browsing all the time (why is it so difficult to find a new browser for palm? the one they have onboard stinks!) for a variety of important tasks, and Versamail for email checking.
The thing is, the power users DO want Video and Music on our handheld. We want to be able to customise it. We want to be able to use it as a checkbook register AND to track our finances when we're not in front of the computer (thank you PocketQuicken!).... But no matter what you do, the applications are painfully outdated and as the UI gets more and more frustrating to use...Why spend $500 to get into a PDA that just doesn't expand and doesn't really allow innovation?
For Palm, going to Windows is an easy out for them. Their phone/pda (which isn't that great. It's just a shell to most folks, they just want it to work) at least has a solid if not innovative platform for what will amount to serious inflexibility.
No amount of Windows goodness (blech, I hate saying that) will change the hardware limits, and let's face it, we're entering a time when the Sony PSP is a step away from becoming a phone, when Apple's iPod is a step away from becoming a PDA, and basically everything handheld wants to really be a Phone/PDA/Media Device combination. It's use and adapt the technology time or lose the battle, and instead of releasing what was going to be a really innovative new operating system (Cobalt's next generation) out into the wild as open source for people to work with, Palm sidles up to this to keep the hardware sold. Again, Sad.
Within the next few months, I'm going to go buy a new PDA, and it's going to be a Linux or Windows box, since the Palm Hardware with Windows on it is crippled at best and horrid at worst.
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The main use of Blackberries at our place is to look important, as only senior people are given one, so they all wander around reading them wherever they go.
Their secondary use is to indicate boredom in meetings by starting to read their email in the middle of a conversation with you.
And their final use is to 'impress' people, and show how busy they are, by sending replies to your email while they're on the toilet.
Good info.
Unfortunately, in the free market, items that cost incredible amounts to develop need an incredible amount of users to bear a profit.
Devices need to work for your fiance before they're accepted by everyone.
The days of 128k memory were truly an alpha stage for the market. The hardware is almost where it needs to be.
The software is still in that alpha stage. The interface needs a breakthrough. The syncing is hit or miss for most.
I feel bad about Palm programmers but the same thing happens in any hardware market with declining numbers, especially when the numbers weren't large to begin with.
I love my MS based system. It rarely crashes, I can browse 3 sites, work in Excel, and still answer the phone without a bog down. I'm also a rarity as others I've met with the same device can't run theirs for more than an hour without a problem.
The PDA market will continue to be in flux for years. The interface pot of gold has not been found. I'm not sure myself where the solution is (less hard buttons, better text input, maybe finger swirls for common app needs?).
Someone has to find it, and soon. My PDA using customer base is about 70% down in 12 months!
I'll keep using mine, keep buying new models and keep finding what works for me. 1 person spending $500/year makes not a market.
I've used most of the devices you talk about. I used to develop for the Newton, the the Palm, then Pocket PC.
The Achilles heel of PalmOS was always HotSynch. It wasn't bad for individuals on their home computers, but it didn't cut it in the enterprise. And the consumers just aren't there anymore.
The Pilot was doomed from the start. As a basic contacts + calendar + to-do PDA, it was great. I guess that's why it failed: too basic.
As a PDA, simple is what you want. Well, we use PDAs as mobile data entry devices. The palm was probably the best overall. PocketPC is overcomplicated for users in my opinion.
Simple is good. As PDAs accrete more functionality, they become more annoying (IMO) because (a) there's more opportunity to screw up and (b) the functions run up against the limitations of the form factor. And if there's one thing Palm understood in the early days, ti was form factor, form factor form factor. Apple of the Newton era didn't understand that, but Apple of the iPod era does. Palm didn't do a lot of things, like multitasking, even though the underling OS could handle it, because it didn't fit well.
I don't think convergence killed Palm. I think what happened here is that time and technology has passed Palm's natural niche by. Palm's market position used to be great basic PDA functionality in a practical form factor. But you can buy a good enough PDA now for under $50; there's no margin to support the kind of business they had before. The market position they owned is not lucrative anymore, and the positions they might move to are occupied already. Blackberry owns the email junkie market segment. Microsoft owns the "I only want to buy from one vendor" market segment. Apple will own the mobile multimedia/PDA convergence market if that ever emerges.
The only market segment they have any chance in, thanks to the Handspring acquisition, is the converged phone/PDA segment. But it's not a great segment. I carry a Treo 600, but I'd rather have a really good phone with basic PDA functions. Any device you'd call a converged PDA/phone is likely to be a mediocre phone, and for most people phones are way more important than PDAs. If you compare the Treo to, say, the original Tungsten T, it's impossibly clunky as a PDA. If you compare the Treo to any reasonable phone it's impossibly clunky as a phone. And as a camera it's complete trash. There's nothing to buy it for, other than if you are already carrying two devices. On the other hand, you buy a Blackberry for email and live with its other limitations. Most people I talk to don't care much for the Blackberry as a phone, but live with it.
Palm's developing a MS based phone seems like a really bad idea to me. How can they possibly be anything but an also ran?
What I'd really like to see a vendor stake out as a position is to be a leader in personal networking. This would involve creating a constellation of devices that are task appropriate that communicate with each other and with corporate networks. The centerpiece of this would be a phone with big battery capacity, large buttons and an easy to read two or three line display. This would work with my laptop or if I chose my PDA. If I happened to bring an MP3 player with me, I could fetch playlists through the phone, but I wouldn't have to bring the phone with me to the gym. I could maintain my contact list through my PDA or my laptop, and I wouldn't have any rituals to perform to get them synchronized, it would just happen.
In many ways, my perfect PDA would be a Tungsten T which used a bluetooth phone for comm services. The problem is finding a phone with bluetooth that doesn't also want to be a PDA. It's a catch 22. The devices don't work well enough together to build purpose specific devices. But until there are a set of purpose specific devices with personal networking capabilities built in, then you pretty much have to buy what's available and try to get it working together. If anybody could do this, it would be Apple, who seem to be the only company that understands how to assemble several bits of technology to create a favorable user experience.
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You trust Pocket Word[pad] with your documents?
BTW, Palms come with Documents To Go out of the box, and they support native files, so no conversion necessary.
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I don't know why this is marked funny. It's true.
The fall of Palm has nothing to do with the technology. The Treo 650 is wildly successful, and does what it does very well. Palm is failing because they are screwing up the business side of the company.
I've actually been trying to hold off getting a Blackberry, though everyone else on my team has one and keeps telling me to request one. It seems the Blackberry would be the final straw in converting my job into 24/7 with no overtime. With telephone, there is at least a barrier to calling at certain times of the day, some people don't like to leave messages, and you also need to prepare yourself mentally a little bit. The Blackberry (at least in my company) is not a status symbol or toy, it's a big plastic wart that shows you have sold yourself into slavery.
Many people have been making comments like that - a similar windows mobile phone device is being touted below.
The problem is that those doodads are really, really late to the party. The Blackberry had a dog's age to dominate the market of phone-PDAs, and dominate it did.
Plus, Grafitti2 was Palm's inexcusable blunder. That, and the overly high price point of the Zire 21 - no machine that does that little that late in the game should cost that much (and I know it was still PalmOne's cheapest device ever).
Palm fails for the same reason that Symbian will fail and eventually every Smartphone will be using Windows Mobile:
Windows Mobile uses the same developer tools and API that desktop Windows uses. This is huge. You don't need a huge effort to retrain developers to develop for Windows Mobile. Everything is integrated with Microsoft's desktop and server offerings and other technologies. This is the same strategy that they used makes the Xbox the #2 game system in a single generation of releases. If you had told most people five years ago that Microsoft would beat Nintendo in the console market, and beat everything in the PDA market, they would have laughed.
Everyone makes fun of Ballmer and his "Developers, developers, developers" tirade, but he is right. Thats exactly what it is about. Microsoft understands this. This is why they own the PDA market and are slowly taking over the high end mobile device market.
You obviously didn't read my entire post.
Microsoft Outlook worked just fine with the Palm -- until Microsoft upgraded it so that it wouldn't. Apple developed iSync so that their software would never suffer from the same version incompatibility as Microsoft's. Microsoft could have done the same thing, the specifications for creating a conduit for the Palm are out there in public for all to see and use.
I quoted Bill Gates' vision for what computers would do for us. I should not need to remind you that Mr. Gates works for Microsoft, not Apple or Palm. The problem I have with Microsoft's inaction with respect to publishing the standards for Outlook/Exchange is that apparently Mr. Gates' vision works only if you use Microsoft's software and operating systems. This is typical of how they use their monopoly. They do not play well with others because that is what they choose.
My fiancée (that would be the story in my earlier statement that you didn't read) uses the third party application to sync with Outlook/Exchange. And even failing that, she also has Palm's Desktop application on her computer (she is pretty minimally-functional in most applications and tends to not be able to find her files when she saves them anywhere, save her desktop.
I have been recommending to corporations for years that they do not use Internet Exploder as their web browser or Outlook Express or Outlook as their e-mail client due to how these programs connect to the Internet and are fat targets for black-hat hackers who want to exploit others' personal computers. The corporation I work for uses Outlook and Exchange for all e-mail and we regularly have problems with viruses, worms and other exploits
I will imagine that the proliferation of Windows devices on the palm of one's hand will cause that segment of the market to be more susceptible to exploits as well. I can well imagine someone radiating virus programs through a WiFi connection to steal data or destroy data on cell phones using Windows.
If I were your neighbor and drove into my driveway in a brand new Mercedes, would you pity me? Mercedes-Benz has about the same market share in autos as Apple has in personal computers. They also make similar profit margins. Just because I have a better computer than you have doesn't make my comment less worthy.
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Hawkins' longtime wish was for Palm to be run by Palm. His frustration mounted under the wing of US Robotics and later 3Com, when his requests for a spin-off fell on deaf ears.
Read Piloting Palm by Butter & Pogue for that account.
I really lost out when I bought my latest Palm a couple of years ago, an m130. It came with OS 4.1.2, whose whole claim to fame is that it "replaces Graffiti with Graffiti 2 on the same Palm OS 4.1 code base". Since the m130 is a ROM-based model, that also means I can't "backgrade" to Graffiti - I'm stuck with Jot forever. Yay.
I couldn't care less about Palm's Outlook integration or lack thereof. For me, it died whenever they destroyed the most important feature: its handwriting recognition. See ya, Palm. At least my DayRunner has a place to put a pen and pictures of the kids.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I worked at Apple in the 80's when they thought that their main competetor was IBM, it was really MS. I have done work for Palm an they thought that their competition was MS when it was Black Berry. Palm failed to come up with an solution for email for their phones (even to this day). The PDA market has come and gone and MS has never been a factor and will never be a factor in phones. The large wireless phone manufactures refuse to use CE because they do not want to be the next IBM and have to pay a MS tax. This is just an attempt to cashout and get MS to buy them.
I just bought a near-new Palm m500 on eBay for $43 (to replace my ancient m105). New, it was 10x that. I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Palm, but they somehow missed that usability was their #1 asset and their price point could only match the usable features they offered.
Palm was always a simple device that did all you needed to manage contacts, memos, calendar, and todos. But once telephone, wireless, music, media, games, etc. began to be demanded by customers, they couldn't figure out how to integrate them into their concept. The basic idea was good, but it wasn't extensible. It didn't match what was demanded by their customers. For example, I spent two days just trying to get their Palm Desktop installed on Windows XP. It works well on Windows 95, but it never became dead easy for XP, a complete failing on Palm's part to make their devices useful with the current generation of technology.
Palm failed to understand how to keep going. They tried to merely extend their current offerings instead of re-designing and growing them in scale to market demand. That included a more sophisticated operating system and better interface with desktop systems. This explains why I can be happy buying a legacy unit at 10:1 original cost and be happy while at the same time explaining why I will never buy a new Palm.
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I don't use the same tool to drill holes and dig ditches. Why would I use the same tool to develop for a low-resource handheld and a high-resource desktop?
What you call an advantage is, to me, the key failure of Windows Mobile. The apps are too big (memory footprint) and kludgy (because they really, really wish they had a 1024x768 screen available).
My daddy taught me to use the right tool for the job. He was right.
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