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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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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.
just as CPU frequency is a useless way to compare different processors, CPU frequency is equally useless when comparing diffent kind of PDA. The palms can do *way more* per Mhz than WinCE/WinMobile. They also require far less memory for the OS.
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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Entirely aside from the question of how efficient the processors are (a 20MHz Dragonball is not ten times slower than a 200MHz ARM)...
If you can always be near a charging station, a high-MHz CPU is nice. But you can't always be near a charger, and then you have to manage your battery life. Those 20MHz Palms could run for weeks on one charge, or many hours of continuous use. How long could your ipaq hold a charge? Plus the OS could execute things directly out of flash so they needed far less RAM than any WinCE device.
Now, don't get me wrong. Palm should have updated their OS to support multitasking, and then they needed to come out with some higher-end models with some of the bells and whistles to keep the higher-end customers. But don't ignore the strengths of their approach...
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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.
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.
It's got a power switch, you know..
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