What Happened To Palm?

Ian Lamont writes "Palm's fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It's the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it's clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it's not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM's surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"

Comments

They need to open their platform.

[Sj0]

Palm has a massive problem, and that problem is, a Palm Pilot is really only good for one thing, and that's what it was good for in the '90s.

They've got a pretty strict monopoly on stuff for the Palm, and they'll charge you for anything. There's nothing free in the world of the Palm.

The biggest problem with that is, there's nothing particularly good in the world of the Palm either.

If the company wants to gain back the market share it's been consistently losing, they need to truly open their product up, and give open source and independant developers the tools they need to make utilities that will make people like me want to buy their product. I've got a Tungsten E, and I can't use it for anything. The hardware is fine, but there's no software to do what I want to do with it.

Until then, they're going to get raped by the PocketPC, because it has a more open platform, and the Blackberry, because it does the few things anyone cares about better.

My experience

[GWBasic]

In the fall of 2002, I decided that I needed some form of a PDA to allow me to take a few notes and manage a calendar. I obtained one of the inexpensive Palms. (Its name began with a Z, although I can't remember the exact name.)

The Palm was very basic, and it did what I needed it to do. It even charged from the USB port, so I put the power brick away and forgot about it. I was happy!

After 4-5 months, it stopped working. I was tired of carrying two devices. Ultimately, I replaced the Palm and my cell phone with a very basic cell phone that had the same features as the Palm.

Needless to say, my experience with Palm is that their devices are unreliable and easily duplicated by inexpensive phones. Today, the iPhone does everything that I wanted a basic Palm for, is more reliable, and takes up less space in my pockets!

Find niches

[Andy_R]

Palm need to stop doing whatever it is that they are regularly losing $40m doing. This may seem obvious, but their management don't seem to have realised it.

Accept that your OS (or microsoft's) will not be better than OS X on iPhone, and even if it was, you would not get 1/4m people to dl at your sdk and/or have costs below that of open source options.

Accept that you cannot make an iPhone/blackberry killer, because the goalposts move faster than you can. Accept that you are no longer a profitable player in the massmarket smartphone market, and get out of the massmarket and into niches. Now.

Palm could have easily made an N-Gage killer, let's face it, it practically killed itself, and it's basic idea is sound, just the execution sucked. What about NOT chasing after ever smaller phones, and targetting people willing to have a phone the same size as they had 5 years back but with unique features? Palm could be the only company (afaik) shipping a specialist 10-12 megapixel cameraphone today if they had spotted the niche. They could have 160Gb hard-drive MP3 player phone, they could have a phone that records decent quality video to a tiny hard drive, they could have got into bed with the open moko people, or gone to Sony and rescued the PSP with phone capabilities, or made a book-sized PDA with a big enough qwerty keyboard for older folks (or just big fingered) people to use, that last one would have cost nearly nothing to make, just house the exisiting internals in a bigger box with the same cheap screens the OLPC people use.

The other option is to stop, sack everyone, and split the remaining cash between the shareholders. If I had Palm shares, I'd be asking why they didn't do that 4 quarters ago.