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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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"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
Wait... I've misunderstood what "Palm's slide" means, haven't I...
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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.
"Where Palm Went Wrong", "More of Palm's Great Mistakes", and "Who is this Palm Person ANyway?"
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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 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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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.
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.
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.