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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."
I've owned PDA's since the original Newton MessagePad, including every Newton model, numerous Palm Pilots, tons of proprietary junk models, halting with the HP iPAQ h6315 PDA Phone (for now).
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.
In my experience, basic users tend toward basic devices. 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'd considered teaching users how to really achieve PDA efficiency, but the Pilots that were so plentiful were just not powerful enough and frustrated me. I can't handle spending 30 seconds finding information that took 5 seconds in a paper dayplanner.
Then I started to realize something: people were buying these in a fad fashion. Many used only the calculator or a simple name+phone contact list. Not a renewable market there.
My PDA Phone is great because it is easily customizable, has enough software to give me options, and it has the Internet. But in the hands of a basic user, I'd see them using only the phone part. These devices just don't scream "easy to use."
Apple can turn this market on its head. I don't see them doing it (again), but if there is any market that needs a unique interface, the PDA market is it.
I'm not a pro-Apple guy. My lady has an iPod, I have no Macs. Yet I loved my Newtons. I can still efficiently use them, and basic users loved mine.
The Palm's limited resolution, limited speed, amd limited memory killed it. The market wasn't ready. There were too few customers. The economy of spending millions on the ultimate interface is not there, yet.
The cell phone market will help, as the best interface models get combined with one another. SMS messaging will usher in the perfect mini keyboard someday.
It will take time.
PS The Blackberry has to be a fad fluke. It feels like a Speak 'N Spell.
Mistakes? What about what Palm did right? e.g. Realizing that everyone didn't want to play movies/music on their handheld? Or their strong focus on using the Palm as a satellite device, and not as a REALLY SLOW desktop replacement. (I don't know what Microsoft was thinking with their Word and Excel CE versions... no wait, yes I do. They weren't thinking.) Not to mention their slowness to move to color screens when high quality grayscale provided a better experience and better battery life.
If anything, I think Palm's biggest "mistake" was their push for expensive networking features when no good infrastructure existed. Their devices kept going up in cost over useless features all while they stuck with that hideous dragonball processor and low-res screens. Thank God for Sony and their Clie series, or Palm never would have gotten their heads out of their rears. Sadly, it may have been too little, too late.
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Pushing Palm? Palm fell on its rear, and got drug along. I owned a Palm, and it was the most frustrating device. Interoperability was horrible. I swore off PDA's at that point. Years later, I picked up an iPaq. Took me months to decide to bite the bullet after my prior experience. I still use the thing every day.
Bottom line: Palm would still be the leader had it supported better OS interoperability, and not been so anal about 3rd party developers back in the day.
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Although I was one of the only people who liked Graffiti. I thought it was really intuitive.
Palm helped pioneer the industry (following on previous work by Apple, etc.), then the leadership sold it and moved on. As such, it has been little more than a copyrighted name since then. It represented some visionary work and when the visionaries walked away, the copyright's value slowly disappeared. It wasn't a failure, even though the products that now are Palm are failures. Microsoft, et al, have picked up where Palm's visionaries left off, much as Palm did with its predecessors.
The Palm OS has stagnated. Windows Mobile for all its flaws is simply a better OS.
This really isn't true either. The truth is that both OSes and devices sucked, and that consumers are finally giving up on them. On one hand you had the Palm Pilot. It was a good device, sized perfectly for a satellite device, but failed to keep up with improvements in embedded technology, memory needs, and display resolutions. In the end, the device ended up being overpriced for too little power.
On the other hand you've got WinCE devices. They're far more powerful, have color screens, run Microsoft software, play multimedia, and they do it all for seemingly no reason what-so-ever. In the Real World(TM) it seems that no one really is looking to play movies on their tiny handheld screens, nor are they looking to wait five minutes for Excel CE to come up so they can do computations they could have done on the back of a napkin in less time.
So then along comes the Blackberry. The idea is seemingly stupid. It's a super-simple email reader with an analog coupler for a modem. It flops. Then they add wireless support. Suddenly, everyone loves the thing. It's the pager/personal organizer that everyone wanted. It does what they need and it does it simply. You have your email at all times, and you can even type a simple message without resorting to a stylus. So where are all the Palms and WinCE devices now? Replaced by BlackBerries. Funny how the world works, eh?
(Disclaimer: My wife uses her Palm everyday to manage our home and finances. She can't live without the thing.)
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Our network is heavily FOSS-biased and run Windows only on the desktops, jumping through hoops to avoid giving Microsoft a cent more than I am legally obligated to. That being said, I won't let my users connect their Palms to our desktops. It's way to hard to get working with non-privilaged users. If they want a PDA, they have to go PocketPC. The software does what you expect it to do. Works regardless of privilage level, syncs with Outlook without clumsy and expensive 3rd party software, and did I mention that it actually works?
Palm, who buys PDAs? Business people. What software do business people use? Windows and Outlook. In most businesses that have a lot of people with PDAs, do they all have Administrative rights? I sure hope not, but that's what you designed your software for. You deserve to loose your market share, you bastards.
When Psion stopped making consumer hardware, it was like hearing the news about Concorde stopping flying. We'd taken a great step backwards: there was nothing out there which would come close to what a Psion would do routinely, in terms of stability, application support, usability, and preceived speed. I've used Palm and Wince before and after, but both are too unstable to trust completely. Wince these days is fast enough, at the expense of battery life, but Palm hardly seems to have changed. The closest equivalents to the Psion 5 now are the Nokia 9300 and 9500, which use a later version of the OS. Nice smartphones, but they have a fraction of the battery life, perhaps 20% of the speed, and my 9300 reset itself within a week of buying it. In a sense Psion deserved to fail in the consumer space. They spent very little on advertising, and never moved to support features we would now consider essential such as USB and Bluetooth. Still, they remain the only "real" PDAs in my entirely unbiased opinion.