What Happened To Palm? 305
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?"
Re:My story... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth are you paying $1/min for your cell phone coverage?
Update the interface already! (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm has been busy.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years. Leave palm alone. Just leave them alone. Can't you.
Way back, Palm was not the only company making PDAs. They succeed because all the applications that were developed for them. Is anyone writing apps for the palm? Palm does not even know if it's Palm OS or WindowsCE.
Rim was the next palm because they went the next step and integrated the back office into the thing with secure push e-mail and other apps.
The iphone iswhat is next. It's not the touch screens per se. It's the fast processor and great IDE that will lead to the next generation of apps. If you saw the keynote you know I'm not blowing smoke: They showed a full blown medical imaging application ported to the iphone in less than a man week.
The touchscreens main virtues are it's large area on a small device, and it's morhpability to the application. This is the next step. This is why for example Rim will be next to die after Palm. Look to Nokia and Android to actually compete against the I phone.
What (Score:5, Insightful)
Obsolete software (Score:5, Insightful)
Palm has failed to innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
Palm once led the PDA market. Their PalmOS platform was revolutionary in the 90's because it was flexible, fostered good battery life and most importantly was easy to use. When Palm moved into the smartphone market, they did very little to revamp their aging operating system. Rather, Palm tacked on advanced wireless functionality their platform couldn't really handle. They are losing to Apple and RIM because these companies designed their hardware and software from the ground up for rock-solid email and voice communication.
Re:They lost focus (Score:2, Insightful)
What happened is that they brought in the guy from Pepsi as their CEO. You know, a product that is basically a commodity, and only differentiates itself from its competitors through advertising and marketing.
He stopped R&D and tanked the product. Palm stagnated for five years, stopped innovating, and fell behind (in expectations and competition).
By the time they axed him, they lost their lead in the market, and the hearts and minds of their customers, and all of their engineering spirit and talent.
That's what happened to Palm.
He's dead Jim (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
this is how you can save yourselves, palm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Update the interface already! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously. I saw one in Staples the other week and it looked like the same stuff they were selling back in 2002-2003.
A sad but familiar story (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Quite simple (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
customer service? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened is they started with a good product and nonexistent customer support, and they just rested on their laurels instead of building their customer loyalty through good service. Now better products have come out, and products with actual customer service have entred the market. What happens after that is only natural.
If you have a problem with your palm pilot, your only hope is to find a forum where some other unfortunate soul has ran into the same thing and managed to figure out how to fix it, and was generous enough to share their experience. Either that or you'll find 35 threads of others having the same issue and nobody has figured out how to fix it.
Yes I own a palm pilot. Right now my screen refuses to re-calibrate the stylus (no it's not a "screen wedgie") so I have to press 1/8" below wherever I want to click, and there's evidently no way to fix it short of replacing it. Lucky me.
Re:My story... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, you have a _horrible_ long distance plan. Who pays $1.17/minute for long distance?
Palm - The PDA That Time Forgot (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
I don't understand either (Score:3, Insightful)
Palm's demise was common wisdom when it was still dominant in the marketplace, and I never understood why. Even today, the several-year-old OS is better than Blackberry at everything but e-mail, and better than Windows Mobile at everything (I switched from Palm to Windows for a few years and just switched back; what a relief and pleasure to not be fighting my phone all the time).
I understand the OS can't multitask, but they've had plenty of time to correct that. I suspect it's too complicated for most consumers, and does not provided features needed by corporate IT for management, support and integration. But they've had plenty of time to correct that, too.
I'm sorry to see it die off. I love my Treo 755p. It's incredibly efficient, very reliable and, for my needs, highly functional.
Re:this is how you can save yourselves, palm. (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who has been watching Sprint for years I can tell you your assertion is patently false. Sprint is not trying to kill Nextel.
Sprint continues to do everything they can to shoot themselves in the foot. They acquired Nextel in large part to protect their foot (like a shield) and keep them afloat (cell phone company floaties and a mixed metaphor!).
Sprint isn't killing Nextel, they are going down themselves and Nextel is being dragged with them.
More on-topic, Palm's problem is clear. The OS today is clearly based on the original OS from ~1996. We owned one of those (with the US Robotics name and all). It was a nice device. But while everyone else moved on (and Windows CE/Mobile/PDA/whatever it is now) pushed many new capabilities into the devices. Palm continued to ignore everything (to the point that Handspring was formed) but still things haven't changed. The company ran themselves into the ground.
How do they fix it? No idea. They need a new OS. Not the one they've been promising for 5 years, something new, and good. But at this point, you have to beat Apple (ha!), Microsoft (plenty of investment), RIM (took what could have been Palm's market), plus every other cell phone company.
Frankly, I think they're gone. It's just time. I don't know if anyone could bring it back.
Re:Palm has been busy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lots of problems (Score:3, Insightful)
1) They haven't bothered to significantly upgrade their technology in years. Their development cycles are too slow and they've been milking their platforms as cash cows for too long with too little improvement.
2) PalmOS was clearly a dead end years ago and their Windows based systems basically outsource the crown jewels (the software) to Microsoft.
3) Treos were nifty at first but they've stagnated compared to the competition. Palm missed the idea that email is a killer app and never developed the backend infrastructure RIM did.
4) They don't have the financial resources or scale to compete long term with Nokia, RIM or Apple. And they have no defensible or must-have products to compensate.
5) Their "strategy" has been insane. There is no focus to the company. No vision. They buy technology and never use it. They break the company up for no clear reason and then put it back together.
Palm made every mistake that Apple was told to (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Your mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:My story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Palm has failed to innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
They lost because the PDA market itself imploded.
Why bother with a PDA when smart phones do everything just as well.
As for their smartphone offerings, the PalmOS tried to maintain backwards with early Palm systems compatibility while the others could start from scratch.
Doom.
Re:Update the interface already! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My story... (Score:3, Insightful)
the problem with palm, is simple, they're using the same model as microsoft. microsofts business model can't possibly survive in a free market. it require vendor lock in and illegal manipulation of the market.
all they need to do is kill any suggestion the marketing department makes, give senior software and hardware engineers absolute vetoes on feature support, and make sure that management has as little control over features, and as much over marketing as possible.
If they'd do that, get a few senior engineers worth their salt, they'd have nice, solid products with solid features, instead of being completely run by marketdroids and lusers looking for cushy desk jobs telling other people how to get work dome that they themselves will never do.
pit marketing vs management, and give the engineers (only the senior ones mind you) free reign and you'l have a solid model.Re:They lost focus (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Suffering from NBTS ... Next Big Thing Syndrome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My story... (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm, what part of "toll number" did you miss?
Ever tried writing Palm applications? (Score:3, Insightful)
When Palm started they had these piddly little 68000 CPUs and less than a meg of RAM. They did the right thing - they followed the Zen of OS design and produced a minimal OS that performed amazingly on such a machine. But recent Palm machines are way more powerful than the workstations I used to have on my desktop. You can't control a beast like that with a toy OS. The MS strategy was correct after all - write a slow bloated OS because one day, in the not too distant future, it will cease to seem slow and bloated on fast new devices without anyone having to change a line of code. Maybe there's a message there: take into account what's available today, but make sure you're writing code in such a way that it'll last as long as you expect your business to last.
And after countless years, did Palm *ever* write a tool that allowed you to find out what was actually stored on your Palm? None of the Palms I ever owned had such a feature.
HERE is what happened to Palm: (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not that their OS could not keep up... it could. My Palm Tungsten (not even the newer version) runs some excellent third-party applications that can read/write documents compatible with Word and other word processors, read / write spreadsheets from Excel and other brands, display PDFs quite well, swap screen orientation, display picture files (.gif,
It was great. Bluetooth, wifi, etc. The touchscreen was great and the handwriting recognition was very good. Often better than trying to type it all it.
In short, the Palm had almost all the little pieces that go into the iPhone today, 3 or 4 years ago! So... what went wrong?
They did not take all those pieces and put them all together into a single, smooth package or set of features. The completely failed to capitalize on those strengths, and instead threw them away.
Example: the Treo phone. Now, among the STRENGTHS of the Palm were: nice high-resolution touch screen, and good writing recognition OR a pop-up on-screen keyboard. So, what did Palm do on the Treo? They made the screen SMALLER, scratched default Graffiti support, and put in a shitty little blackberry-style keyboard! I.e., they adopted a competitor's solution and at the same time gave up two of the advantages they had over that competitor (Blackerry).
They followed that pattern in a number of other ways... compromising their own strengths in order to cater to the perceived desires of their competitors' customers.
That is simply not a way to get ahead.
Palm could have BEEN the iPhone, 2 years before the iPhone. But they dropped the ball. Again and again and again, they "compromised" by giving up their better features in order to emulate others.
Re:My story... (Score:4, Insightful)
Plans like that are only cheaper if you really do make frequent long distance calls. If you call long distance for a hour a year, buying a plan with lots of long distance minutes is throwing money out the window, subsidising the big yakkers.
Back to Palm -- I used to be a strong Palm supporter, and have bought quite a few Palm devices up through the years -- for me and for others. The break came when they merged with Handera and started selling convergence devices (cell phones, Audrey, and almost Fooleo). They forgot about their core business -- PDAs with small and extremely quick applications.
The final nail in the coffin was the lawsuit with Xerox, and Palm introducing "Graffiti 2" as if it was better than the old one, when in reality it was far worse, and from what I can understand only introduced to avoid having to pay licensing fees to Xerox.
My last PalmOS device wasn't even a Palm -- it was a Sony CLIE. And though going on five years now, it still is better than anything Palm ever produced, with both WiFi and Bluetooth, 480 px wide screen, not crashing every few days like the Palm Lifedrive flop, and best of all: no bloody phone.
Re:They need to open their platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.