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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."
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.
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
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.
Let's see...
- I'm going to pay a hell of a lot less for the same kind of data usage/plan from Sprint than I would from an iPhone provider.
- I don't want to switch carriers anyway
- The device is cheaper
- It has a physical keyboard
- I don't want to run iTunes
- My primary need is a MID, not a media device
- I don't need storage, I need capabilities
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.