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Palm Kills Community Before It Begins
Former Fan of Palm writes to tell us that an enthusiastic, supportive developer community has fallen victim to corporate ineptitude once again. The preDevCamp started as a community-driven effort designed to mirror the iPhoneDevCamp based on the new "Pre" product announced by Palm. Unfortunately, suspicion and legal posturing seems to have gutted the founders of any and all enthusiasm they may have once had. When will corporations realize that community support is the best way to drive success? "As a corporation, I acknowledge that Palm's only responsibility is to its shareholders. There's nothing self serving or evil about that; it's how things work in big business. However there are many keen and willing developers out there, who have been waiting for the arrival of WebOS. A development platform is only a success if it is broadly adopted. Instead of embracing the grassroots upswell of interest in WebOS that preDevCamp fostered, Palm seem to be, at best, oblivious and, at worst, disdainful of the enthusiasm and good will engendered by these folk. I think they are missing a real opportunity to be involved in and to help generate the growth of a vital community."
Ok. So some guys who don't have experience with WebOS want to do a "dev camp". OK, more power to them. Palm reaches out, wanting to encourage this sort of thing.
The blogger in the linked article then gets an NDA to sign for an upcoming meeting. And then the meeting is canceled... and because they canceled one meeting, obviously palm is "killing" a development community?
I wonder if Mr. "dancrumb" (Dan Crumb?) was just harping about the HTML + javascript model not being "real" programming, and the OS guys over at Palm realized that a community that didn't want to , you know, write web-style-apps for WebOS wasn't the first developer community they wanted to help?
I might be missing something, but the fact that they were even having a meeting with Palm would have been covered by the NDA, wouldn't it?
If they started talking before even the first meeting took place it's not surprising Palm pulled the plug.
It seems like these guys got overzealous that they had signed an NDA and were to meet with Palm, so much so that they couldn't refrain from posting a tweet about it.
It's likely that one of the conditions of the NDA was that they could not discuss the NDA at all. By claiming they had signed one, in preparation for a meeting with Palm, it was probably a sign that they couldn't keep their enthusiasm contained long enough to even meet with Palm.
This is speculation on my part, but this is how it seems reading the article. When dealing with corporations and NDAs, one must be careful what one does - the old adage: "loose lips sinks ships" comes to mind.
So by way of example, whenever you earn money you keep just enough to live and give the rest to local charity?
Oh, but you clearly have access to a computer, so that's probably not true.
Get off your high horse about "right action". Hypocrisy is the essence of pure evil.
You CAN be responsible to your shareholders THROUGH supporting a developer community. In fact, causing this "bad will" by not being supportive is an act of complete irresponsibility to your shareholders, because this move will damage the bottom line.
Well, it also appears that the balance of their complaint is "we just wanna help and Palm hasn't fallen all over itself to appease us like they must".
Palm, while once a great device is just another example of a corporation who should have been unstoppable, makes a crapload of stupid mistakes, doesn't learn from them, then keeps hoping that their lack of innovation will drive them forward. iPod, iPhone, RIM, and the slew of windows devices should never have had a chance if Palm would have been at least a little adventurous.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Bond holders lend money to a company; shareholders own part of the company. Since the shareholders own the company, the board and CEO work for the shareholders. That is why they must maximize shareholder value. Then the shareholders can take the money they make and spend it how they like. Saying a corporation is evil is a silly, populist gloss over the way things work. Corporations are neither good nor evil. The people who own them are. Corporations maximize shareholder value, and then we, as shareholders, determine whether that value is used for good or for evil. Sorry- not all of that was directed at you, just the definitional part at the beginning.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Then one of the guys posted to Twtiter something about the meeting, and as a result Palm canceled the meeting.
All the guy said in Twitter that they were having a meeting with Palm and nothing content related to what they were discussing.
If that is the reason, then its piss poor community relations. If they guy gave details about what was covered then perhaps that would violate NDA.
Either way, the behavior of Palm towards its community developers isn't going to get anyone to do them any favors at this point.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I continue to be mystified as to why anyone would seriously consider the Pre over the new iPhone. The iPhone 3.0 http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/the_next_iphone will have twice or four times the capacity as the Pre for the same price (depending on how you wish to count Palm's rebate from the $299 upfront price). The iPhone has a thriving developer community that the will only expand when the iTablet finally gets released, and is unlikely to be duplicated by Palm, even if they stay ion business, which is far from a given.
And finally, the iPhone works worldwide, while the CDMA Pre is a US/Canada only device. That in and of itself decides the choice for me.
Palm lost the plot years ago, when they decided they wanted to make a laptop replacement to compete with the Pocket PC... even though they were kicking the Pocket PC 4:1 in the market even years after the iPaq allegedly "legitimized" the Windows Powered handheld.
They could have had Palm handhelds PROFITABLY for sale for $40-$50 in every grocery store in the US, if they'd followed the price-performance curve down to mass market levels. They could have sold entry level models for cost to school districts and replace the Ti-83 and equivalents in classrooms, and everyone would be using Palms and Palm Powered cellphones... but no, Compaq/HP had the ARM-based Pocket PCs and Palm wanted that last 20% of the market... and lost it all.
I'm guessing you've never read an NDA from a large corporation. Just the act of mentioning the NDA is often a violation of it - let alone that you are scheduled to meet with them!
The idiots who think they can re-interpret what an NDA means get what they deserve.
I'm not sure a canceled meeting is newsworthy, but I do feel like Palm isn't bending over backwards to help developers.
There's still no SDK (I applied to be part of the second limited release - no response), and the SDK ain't exactly complicated - it's javascript - they don't need to do much else than provide the standard packages and put in some new keyword highlights, and get an simulator out. Also there's zero published documentation - I only get PDF updates from the O'Reilly book chapter by chapter as it's written, and even the emulator to get PalmOS apps on WebOS is third party.
Palm has enough competition with App stores - everyone from Blackberry to SymbianOS is getting their hands dirty with App stores this year. Palm's strength is its developers, and it seems they're going to just let this whole advantage go as they dribble out the SDK at a snail's pace.
When will corporations realize that community support is the best way to drive success?
When it's true.
Sorry nerds, the best way to drive success is to dangle shiny bobbles in front of the plebes, and charge them out the ass for it.
Deal with it.
Well, the very existence of the meeting may have been covered by the NDA.
But the contract they signed with these guys was based on no business partnership whatsoever. Palm would have to basically just trust them to abide by the NDA.
The fact that they twittered about the meeting right after they signed the NDA probably didn't really foster trust in the relationship.
Aren't those the guys that led the development of jailbreaks? Seems like a situation Palm wouldn't want to be in.
Ever consider how many people would have not bought an iPhone if it was 100% impossible to "jailbreak"?
Corporations maximize shareholder value, and then we, as shareholders, determine whether that value is used for good or for evil. Sorry- not all of that was directed at you, just the definitional part at the beginning.
I think a lot of companies fail to realize that short term profit maximization often is contrary to long term profit maximization.
Sure, they could make a lot more money being bastards to their community and suing their customers and competitors, but over long term they will loose "good will" and suffer long term profits.
Personally, I'd rather own shares in a company that treats its employees, customers, and community with respect simply because that will mean they'll be around in 20 years with maximized gains.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Just look at what they did with the Treo. Rather than holding on to their strengths (handwriting, high-resolution screen, existing apps) and just adding a phone, they threw all those things away in order to try to compete with Blackberry and Nokia: They made the screen smaller, added that shitty little chiclet keyboard, removed the handwriting recognition, and a lot of existing apps would not work (or work well anyway) on the Treo.
What a tragedy. The iPhone is what the Palm should have been 4 or even 5 years ago.
I'll stick with RIM/Blackberry (which also has an active and seemingly open developer community) until a Android phone I like comes along.
Are you posting from the mirror universe? When I had a company-provided BlackBerry, I went looking for apps. The only "free" one I found was Opera Mini, AKA Opera Please-Trust-Us-Not-To-Steal-All-Your-Personal-Data-That-Is-Being-Proxied-And-Modified-By-Our Servers-Including-HTTPS-Traffic. I tried out a couple of shareware/paid apps and was amazingly unimpressed. One was a replacement browser which managed to be even less usable than RIM's, and the other was a server-based wrapper for MS Office/OpenOffice that would take screenshots of Office docs and make them available for the phone so they'd look correct, because RIM's viewer/editor programs were so lacking in features.
On the other hand, now that I have a G1, I've found a ton of useful, completely free applications. It doesn't have Exchange ActiveSync (yet), but since it's my personal phone I'm not in a huge hurry to get that anyway. Also, it has a browser that actually works.
If there's a whole world of BlackBerry stuff I missed, I'd definitely be interested in hearing about it, though.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Very true, and I wish more large shareholders--pension plans, for example--would do so. The problem is when a majority shareholder wants a large, short term profit and pressures the company to maximize short term value. The board can hide behind the business judgement rule, but then the shareholder will replace them with someone who will maximize profits in the short term.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Please keep in mind that contrary to popular belief, Libertarians are not in favor of completely unregulated markets. Rather, they support the least amount of regulation that works. For example, I think just about anybody today with half a brain or more recognizes that the "financial industry" was out of control and requires more regulation... Libertarian or not. Most intelligent Libertarians also recognize that a reasonable set of antitrust laws are also necessary.
No, one doesn't need to be utterly self-denying. GP's statement was phased differently by Bill and Ted: "Be excellent to each other." A Slashdotter, however, might require the double-negative form: "don't be an asshat." ;-) Neither of these forms include "to the exclusion of oneself."
Paying attention to one's own needs is basic to the ability to interact with the world in a healthy way. People (and corporations) who deny this tend to get rather screwed up and/or end up playing doormat to others' desires.
In the case of corporations, they DO have a responsibility to the societies that permit them to exist beyond just "the shareholders." This is a stupid fallacy that I'd love to see die. Occasionally, corporations forget this and get smacked down for it -- see the history of laws and legal actions relating to pollution, lemon laws, anti-trust, etc.
Hypocrisy is the essence of pure evil.
No, hyperbole is. ;-)
Ever consider how many people would have not bought an iPhone if it was 100% impossible to "jailbreak"?
Ever consider how many people have not bought an iPhone simply because for it be useful, they would have to "jailbreak" it?
My blog
Disclaimer: IAAC. I know several wealthy Christians, even one -ridiculously- wealthy one, and I'm talking real, dyed-in-the-wool, no-hypocrisy-within-sight Christians. Depending on your point of view, I might be considered wealthy. Certainly, as a computer programmer in America who's doing alright despite "this economy" (thank God), I'm more wealthy than the majority of the world's population.
If "Christianity" forbad lending, I don't know where "they" got it from. There are scriptures dealing with usury in the old testament. It was alright to lend with interest, just not to someone else of the faith. ;-)
I'm writing to note that it's "easier" for the camel, but not impossible. The trick here is that it's the LOVE of money which is the root of all evil, according to scripture, not money itself. King David was one of the richest people the world had ever seen back in his day, and he was "a man after God's own heart."
Take this for what it's worth, but since you seemed so reasonable (on Slashdot?!), I just wanted to chime in with my view.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
In enforcing their precious NDA, hasn't Palm just turned off the entire community and made their NDA moot? It seems to me that there are too many alternative phone O.S's to risk alienating their community over trivial matters. In fact, this looks to me like they have things to hide.
You have the NDA?
Palm has a huge stake in the Pre. Right now the company is ridding on it and it has not been released yet.
Again it is all just fluff and bother for now. These guys just wanted to get in first and become the place for Pre stuff and probably generate ad revenue.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
when they made it ridiculously hard to develop apps on any platform other than Windows...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
All major corps always have senior positions available, all the time.
They have open reqs, but trust me they aren't exactly filling them. A lot of companies with branch offices keep reqs open just to determine interest by area. Others have reqs open in the hopes that an applicant from a competitor will apply (i.e. pretrained for a specific job, knowledgable about tools and processes used elsewhere, and potentially a bit of a sting when you steal him).
If you send your resume around to some of these places, no matter how well qualified, you never hear back.
It feels like a scam some days.
Never ascribe to malice what can be accounted to stupidity.
Every time I hear the "Only Responsibility is Maximizing Value for the Shareholders" argument it seems to be coming from executives who are gutting a company to realize great quarterly profits. They then jump clear on golden parachutes as the husk of a company nosedives.
Wise corporations think well ahead, plowing money into research and development, retaining skilled and loyal workers, and cultivating a loyal and fanatical consumer base.
Palm (and Handspring later) used to be the former, producing truly innovative, best in the world products. Now it's the latter, clueless and circling the drain.
Entire segments of American industry have been wiped off the map this way in a manner far more pernicious than any communist could conceive.
Exactly. And that's exactly how MS got their desktop monopoly.
Piracy was rampant in the 80s and 90s. DOS and Windows disks were passed around like the town bicycle, along with CD keys. If a really big shop was caught selling pirated copies of their software, there might be a fuss, but casual copying and even smaller businesses buying one copy and pre-installing it on all of their machines was pretty much overlooked.
A lot of people have theorized that Microsoft allowed this to go on to gain marketshare. It's better to have your OS pirated and installed on a machine than for your competitors to make a sale, in the long run. There's always time to lock everything down once you've gotten the monopoly.
Not all companies are motivated purely by profit--that's just the legal default. There are entire classes of corporations dedicated to things other than making money--non-profits, for instance. Even for profit companies, such as Google.org, can have goals other than profit maximization, as long as they specify those goals in their by-laws. I am unsure that purely profit motivated companies are even the majority, as it seems every student has a non-profit registered these days. For profit are definitely the largest by market cap, though, as people generally donate money to non-profits, and invest money in for-profits.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Palm has gone the way of all cool tech companies that get taken over by suits and forget their markets. Instead of spending the time to invest in a next-generation handheld - the palm V, in ~2000, and figure this out then they did more of the same, and released bigger, power sucking devices that forgot the real utility needed.
I owned a USR Palm, a Palm Pro, a Palm III, a m500, a m505, and a Tungsten. I loved their early API. Now.. why bother?
The Pre has no chance. If they cared about their shareholders, they would sell the company and refund the money with a "Sorry for being stupid" letter.
Apple has provided a unified platform, a brilliant storefront, and hardware people are willing to pay a premium for - providing them the margin they need to stay ahead of the game.
Palm's advantage is what, exactly?
..don't panic
Not so. After a bit of practice, I could write on my Palm much faster than I could use those little keyboards. Your mileage may vary, but it certainly worked for me.
But more to the point, Palm also had a virtual, on-screen keyboard, much like the one on the iPhone. What's wrong with that? People like it just fine on the iPhone.
Regardless, my point was: the Palm was not designed to be another Blackberry. If you like the little keyboards, you could always get a Blackberry. But instead, rather than competing on their strong points (or the things that set them apart from the competition), they built a Blackberry clone. That was a stupid thing to do. They alienated the loyal Palm users, and did not draw the Blackberry users. So they got the worst of both worlds.
If we were in the same room I would challenge both you and the previous respondant to a duel to see who can enter something faster, either me typing or you writing.
I can be certain I will win. Using two thumbs I can typically be ready to press the next key right as I finish entering the current one.
I just don't see how it's physically possible to graffiti faster than typing. I will be very impressed by anyone who proves me wrong!