Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I bought my Palm T|X, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.
I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, used almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.
Considering that I was so happy with the T|X, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.
Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This T|X was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.
So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem on receipt of the unit) then Palm will refund to my card.
I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced -- this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working T|X... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.
So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely -- I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.
So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...
So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted T|X, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.
On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Palm OS was brilliant at running PDA-style apps. However, that's not the direction portable computing was going, and Palm never did much to address the future. When every other platform was moving into media, Palm was proud of its third-party support calendars with more buttons.
And don't get me started about the Graffiti 2 debacle ("Easy to learn, even if you'll never get faster!"). Instead of working out a deal to keep using Jot and its trickier-but-faster strokes, they switched to that two-stroke abomination that instantly cut power users' data entry speed in half. Way to save a penny, Palm!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Their hardware is solid. They just need to release an OS that is more capable than Windows 3.1.
RIM happened, then Apple happened.
Shipping an obsolete OS is what killed Palm. I stopped caring about them in 2005 when I realized that they were never going to ship any hardware with Palm OS 6. I don't know whether Palm OS 6 would have generated more success than Palm OS 5, but lo and behold, it's 2008, and they're still shipping an OS that lacks multitasking support and dates back to 2002. It's no surprise, then, that they are failing in an industry that is rife with competition from more modern software.
What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Not a thing. Stick a fork in them, they're done.
That is all.
Make a phone that is aimed at business users.
remember blackberry? the old one? the one that ONLY did email?
That little device with its tiny niche' market rocketed RIM to the company that they currently are. Unfortunately RIM has completely lost sight of what used to make them so incredible. The market needs a new paradigm for business phones. there used to be nextel, and the blackberry 7520 (which i said they could have when they pried it from my cold, dead fingers) but sprint is basically flusing nextel down the toilets. they're hoping to phase out the network and poach the users onto sprint.
This is all another story...
The point is that there is definetely a group of consumers out there who don't WANT a phone with an MP3 player, a camera, lots and lots of bright, shiny surfaces, tiny buttons, etc. etc. we don't want phones that we designed for the 15-20 female market. We don't.
Lets look at something like the blackberry 7520 (the phone that i had up until yesterday) to the blackberry curve (which i have now had for about 24 hours).
The 7520 (which was an astounding success, btw) was big. really big. But we LIKED that about it. It was rugged, I would routinely chuck it across the office to demonstrate to the non-believers why it was so amazing. Its size also allowed it to have BIG keys...ones that you could type on. The screen was recessed, it NEVER got scratched, ever.
This is the type of thing that business users want....functionality.
Now lets look at the curve:
the buttons are f*cking tiny. You can't type with your thumbs, you have to use your fingernails. I can only assume that this is because the phone was designed for 8 year old girls. The dropped the scroll wheel on the side that made the old blackberries have such a (in my mind) LEGENDARY interface. Honestly that was one of the best interfaces i have EVER used. They dropped it for a stupid trackball that, while pretty, is all but useless unless you use two hands to operate the phone.
Okay...rant rant rant rant...i hate the new blackberry, but this is my point:
A market (that used to be dominated by RIM) has been abandoned. there is a sizable gap that needs to be filled, and this is Palm's opportunity to start turning a profit again.
If you dont' belive me about the 7520, ask anybody that owned one. Most of the people that did still keep it (with the service turned off if they have to) as an organizer. It was just THAT good, and there currently is nothing on the market that offers the same level of functionality.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Palm suffers from the same fatal illness that has killed so many once-promising companies - totally inept management.
From their board minutes: "Let's make a Linux OS! No, wait, let's buy BeOS and use that! Great, it works, now let's not ship any products that run it! Now let's announce another Linux OS! Now let's announce an UMPC with a different, incompatible Linux OS than the first one - I mean, second one. Now on shipping day, let's cancel the UMPC and "commit" to the first Linux OS! Let's write an emulator that runs on another company's tablet, and give it away for free - but not ship a product of our own that runs it! And in the meantime, to keep our customers entertained, let's keep selling the Palm name to ourselves over and over again!"
Didn't these guys used to run Atari?
Want to make a chat application? Have an ssh session running in the background? Have the wifi card work as a wireless router with an internet connection through the cellphone service? Nope, sorry. The hardware can do it, but it's not part of Steve Job's vision.
You clearly did not watch the Keynote. They ridiculed this idea for mobile computing. Backround apps are the death of your battery. Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources? And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.
In the future your persistent connection (e.g the ssh connection) will be running on a server not on the iphone. The display might be on the iphone but the ssh session you are monitoring won't be on the iphone. You can stop and start this display app, just like it were a VNC connection or a unix "Screen" connection without affecting the ssh operation.
Yes they have chat too. Yes Jobs said they will allow wifi phone service.
You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Palm is the new Amiga. They both had great devices that were ahead or the best of their era, but then decided to sit on their butts and stop innovating.
That's what happened.
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years.
Don't forget selling their OS, writing a new one from scratch, shelving it, buying back the old one, then rewriting it again, all the while promising "It's gonna be Linux!" Color me unimpressed.
Breakfast served all day!
This thread is peculiar timing for me, as i just spent the last few days resurrecting my Visor Prism for a Head-to-Head with my Dell Axim x51v and my AT&T Tilt...
The long and short of the comparsion? Palm never confronted Wince and its Descendants...
My early Palm's, the III's and the V's, were SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE EARLY WINCE PDA'S...
Good screens, GREAT battery life, and once you got the hang of Graffiti...you could fly on
entry. The Wince recognizer STILL isn't quite as good as the early Palm.
The Palms were soooo much better that Palm had the market essentially all to itself. For the FIRST FEW YEARS.
But then, Palm failed to grow, Palm failed to innovate (How old is Garnet?)... ....and each generation of Windows PDA got slowly and slightly better.
So, i remember attending the MS PDC in Denver ('97) and spending over 8 (F******) hours, working on my Compaq Companion (rebranded Casio Cassiopeia), getting the modem and Pocket Outlook and Pocket Explorer working over a 9600 baud connection. If the "windows" in my 16th story hotel room had opened, the Companion would have taken a Unscheduled Flight.
OTOH, my x51v (with a Stowaway BT Folding KB) has around 90% the ESSENTIAL functionality of my current laptops, and the x51v is a 3-year old PDA.
YES, the battery life on the Axim sucks, Yes, the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket apps are still a little underpowered and slightly flaky.
However, in raw functionality, my TX has less power than my x51v, Garnet is flakier than WM5, and i have to go to a bunch of 3rd party apps to get equivalent functionality with the Axim.
The TX's battery life is not all that much better, and the display screen isn't half as good.
ON THE BLACKBERRY SIDE; email on the Treo 700, though way better then my Treo 180, is still a relative PIA, compared to the Idiot Simple usage of a Blackberry.
And though i vastly prefer my Curve2 to my old Pearl, both of them had equivalent basic functionality to the Treo 700 in line-of-business apps, such as contacts and appointments.
Internet access on the BB is just a little behind the best of the 3G/4G phones. Display is also slightly-to-moderately behind, but has been catching up.
So, Palm got beat by cellphones on voice and Internet connectivity. Palm got beat by Wince on applications deployment and display. Palm got slaughtered by RIM on email functionality. Palm (along with everyone else) GOT MASS MURDERED BY Apple on multimedia delivery, which will only get worse with the 3G iPhone.
And both LG and Samsung, gigantic industrial conglomerates with HUGE MONEY, are lining up to play whack-a-mole with the iPhone. They may not succeed, but they WILL deliver many more powerful cellular devices to further eclipse the Palm line.
I STILL LOVE MY PRISM, but it's SOOO Olde Skul...
Palm SHOULD HAVE become the "iPhone", but they got fat and lazy with a dedicated user base.
Then once they fell behing they didn't have the: talent, vision or resources to catch up.
Palm -- "The PDA That Time Forgot"
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources?
Yes, god damn it! Give me the choice, at least! If you want simple computing, fine, but why should the device be forcibly limited using code signing? Have a little switch somewhere that lets me load any software I want onto the thing, then I can hack around the limits I don't want. But instead I'm only allowed to load Apple-approved code onto the device, crippling it far beyond what the hardware would otherwise allow.
And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.
Yeah, those are great for the two or three classes of applications that can actually use that technique. They're total crap for background music playing or maintaining an ssh connection or any of a dozen other tasks that maintaining a real persistent connection would be useful for.
You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.
I can't speak for the other guy, but I watched it live. The iPhone is great hardware and a great OS but it's completely crippled by artificial restrictions.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Every mistake that the pundits wanted Apple to make, Palm tried.
They licensed out their OS. Then, because the licensees were complaining about Palm's unfair advantage, they split into separate hardware and software companies. They even bought Be, which everyone said Apple should have done instead of buying NeXT.
So what happened?
Well, the software side (PalmSource) came out with a fancy new OS based on the BeOS stuff they bought. And...the licensees all said "We'll get to it."
So PalmSource said, "Oh, and the 6.1 version will be even better!" So the licensees (including PalmOne, the hardware side) said, "Great! Tell us when it's ready."
So PalmSource panicked and said, "...um, great! Um...hey...we'll make our next OS based on Linux!" And the licensees said, "Oh, okay, we'll wait for that one then."
And so, without planning to, they committed the one fatal error when you're up against Microsoft - they stood still. Microsoft can't catch a moving target, but stand still and they'll run you over. The PDA market dried up and all the licensees bailed. PalmSource got sold off to a Linux company. PalmOne decided to make a Linux OS of their own, and it'll be ready Real Soon Now.
was in assuming that ordering direct from Palm was better from their point of view. It isn't. Manufacturers don't specialize in logistics, distribution or warehousing, all of which are complex problem spaces that require significant skill to execute correctly. In fact, many manufacturers are so inefficient in these areas that it actually costs them more to sell you a unit than for you to buy it through distribution, margins and all. It also costs them far more to attempt to diagnose and support a problem than to accept a large batch of returns from a major distributor.
Just buy the thing locally from a retailer with a no-questions-asked return policy, and if there's anything wrong with it that you think might be a hardware defect, return it and try another one. This would have saved you $100 in phone calls (though why the hell are you paying over a dollar a minute for long distance?) and would have saved Palm several hundred dollars in support costs.
-Graham
This was a letter from Engadget to Palm back in 2007, it left an impression on me after I read it. I think most of it still applies today.
Dear Palm,
Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven't really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven't given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great -- you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks.
The problem is that lately we haven't seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you've let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we've thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we're not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.
So yeah, it was probably a smart move to recognize that you needed to offer a Windows Mobile version of the Treo to appeal to enterprise users, but there are literally millions and millions of consumers who want a high-end, powerful mobile computer that isn't built around Exchange server support. What they're looking for is a great user experience. Apple has done a good job tapping into that market, but there's still a huge opportunity out there for Palm to offer a smartphone that's just as engaging as the iPhone, but that's also open, rather than closed, and more geared towards productivity.
Frankly, you've taken a turn from being the respected underdog and innovator to repeat offender in stale gear. Every press release you issue or "leaked" photo we see these days is another dent in your already banged up armor, and really, we're not sure how much more we can take -- our loyalty has practically become an embarrassment among peers. The New York Times totally nailed it when they said "Palm is about to release a new model in its Treo line and photos leak out to silence." That said, we humbly submit a few (mainly practical) suggestions for how you can turn things around, organized by hardware, software, and other.
Hardware
Get thin - Three words: FIGURE IT OUT. If HTC, Apple, and Motorola can offer thin (and we mean friggin' thin) smartphones, you can too. We know you think the Treo is perfectly proportioned, but it's not. It's chubby. No excuses any more, ok? It doesn't have to be as thin as the iPhone, but you've gotta trim some of the fat.
Bigger, higher resolution displays - Make the screen bigger and up the resolution and you'll go a long way towards winning us back. There's no reason the 750 shouldn't have 320 x 320 (or higher) -- Windows Mobile 6 supports that, or didn't you hear? But for new devices you might want to have the keyboard slide out, like with the HTC Hermes or the Samsung i730. It's a really smart move. The long and short of it is this: if you can find some way to marry the expanse of something like the iPhone's or G900's massive, high res screens and still retain the spirit of the Palm keyboard, people will be very interested.
Speaking of the keyboard, don't mess too much with it - Apple may or not add a physical keyboard to the iPhone (our money says it won't happen), but the one the Treo has now is pretty good and it's pretty much the one thing that's keeping a lot of Treo owners from jumping ship. And from what we hear, the Centro is going to have a keyboard that's "impossible to type on" -- not
Palm management has not been innovative since Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky left to form Handspring. The bean counters they left behind just milked the cash cow until they figured out that Handspring was about to eclipse them. So they bought Handspring from the obliging Jeff and Donna and brought them back on board (hundreds of millions of dollars richer).
Jeff, apparently having exhausted his innovative ideas after perfecting the Treo, went and wasted millions of dollars developing a questionable gadget that no one asked for--the Foleo, a laptop-like appendage that helps augment the abilities of a smartphone.
That brings us up to the present. We have a company with one product. It's pretty much milked that product dry. They have failed to update the operating system in any significant way, and the battery life of their handhelds has shrunk from the legendary Palm III era when disposables kept it running for 6-8 weeks. Now you're lucky to get through an 8 hour day without needing to recharge.
I still use my Tungsten T3. I have many useful apps on it--Oxford English dictionary, medical dictionaries, medical atlas, guitar tuner, image display, voice memo recorder, large LCD. Nothing else on the market provides the same functionality except maybe an iPaq or its ilk, which involves repurchasing all the apps and losing some apps forever. Why bother? The thing works.
When this one dies, I'll buy another T3 or perhaps a Tx on ebay. It would be nice if Palm continued to be innovative, but that's too much to ask. Jeff had a great idea 15 years ago, and it's helped change the world. But innovation marches on. I suppose eventually I'll get a nice new 80 gig iPhone or an 80 gig gPhone running linux. But for now, my trusty Palm just keeps on running, and will probably continue long after the company is gone.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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.
What are you, paid by Motorola?
I went five years never buying software for my palm -- because I could get all I needed for free. And now that I do buy some software, I almost always have at least two strong competitors for what I want to pick up. As often as not, I can get free-as-in-beer or OSS software for it.
On my TX right now, beyond the basic:
AudiblePlayer (for audiobooks)
PocketTunes
Documents To Go (reads Office 2007 files better than OOo, and works better than PocketWord!)
TCPMP 0.66 -- GPL'd and plays TiVo's videos. CorePlayer is a non-GPL'd release of the same thing, with built-in AAC support.
Filez -- an OLD OOS file manager.
Google Maps, and a LiveJournal client.
"Eat Watch", the hacker's diet custom weight log.
HandDBase 3 -- a simple database program
HandyShopper -- a free as in beer shopping list program
And a whole bunch of games from PDAmill, a company that went out of business because it's games were too "non-palm" to sell well enough.
And beyond the list above, there's software to use the Palm as a remote control, emulate video game consoles, and connect to a windows desktop via desktop-sharing.
What the hell do you want to do with your PDA that Palm doesn't have software for? (And, for that matter, have you ever wondered why the biggest release for any new PDA platform, from PocketPC to Nokia's Linux things, is a Palm OS emulator?)
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.
The Palm Hardware is NOT fine. Why did the LifeDrive have only 32 MB of ram? Why doesn't the TX have a microphone OR a vibrating alarm? Why do my TX, my Treo 600, my friend's Centro, and my old zire 71 all use ENTIRELY different power and accessory connectors?
If PocketPC is ahead in the market, it's simply because they've gotten better hardware and newer releases. Palm hasn't released a new PDA in three years. THREE YEARS! And the darn things still make up 10% of their sales volume.
On a completely unrelated note, Palm is opening their platform in the only way they can, thanks to the most bone-headed management call a company can make. ("Palm OS" is no longer owned by Palm, y'know) They're going to have a Linux-based PDA OS out next year, code-named "Nova", and they'll either return to glory to sink to obscurity based on that.