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.