Palm CEO’s Letter to Employees
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Having said that, I've got a friend who got a pre, and he ended up giving his iPhone to his girlfriend and can't stop raving about the pre.
They aren't out of this yet, but I think there challenge will be in communicating and educating an audience about their products.
I don't know that the carriers are the best channel to rely on for marketing of the devices. The carrier will offer incentives, and push devices that are giving the carrier or reps the best business value.
I think palm needs to get customers coming into the store asking for the palm products.
This challenge is further hampered with the number of android, blackberry and soon to be winPhone7 devices.
The stores can have a wall of android, a kiosk of blackberry, and I suspect will have a section dedicated to winPhone7. With only two devices that are visually differentiated, they don't have either the recognizable presence of an iPhone, or the diversity of other platforms.
I think Palm is a good acquisition target for RIM(blackberry). They've done a great job with the OS (one area where palm has really faltered). Both companies have a history in the corporate world, and I think the palm experience could make a good dent in the consumer market, if they had the right partners, and at this point, enough runway.
To their credit, they ramped up pretty fast. Last September, they hired Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer (the Bespin guys) to run developer relations. Ben and Dion immediately restructured the developer program, and Palm had their big developer program rollout in December/January, six months after launch.
As of today, the 'App Catalog' is tiny but growing at a pretty good clip. They're at over 1500 apps right now, and are growing at around 20% a month. If they can survive another year, they should be up to Blackberry levels.
Palm's target market was 'the fat middle', which meant people who want a little calendaring, a little media, a little web browsing. The problem is that people don't want a middle-of-the-road device. People want things that are awesome.
Palm met their target. The Pre does everything, and does it pretty well. Multitasking, 3D gaming, calendaring, to-do lists, social networking, email, photos, and (as of tomorrow) video. It has more features than an iPhone, and is elegantly designed in a way that Android never will be.
However, there's nothing it does obviously better than the competition. Blackberries have better email. iPhones are better media players and game machines. Android has Google Nav, Google Voice, and phones with ginormous screens. Other than the (incredible) multitasking, there's no clear advantage to buying a Palm that'll fit in a 30-second sales pitch.
They need to pick a market segment, and go after it hard. Business people, young people, somebody. There's a saying in politics: "The only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill."
Pre were available in Europe very very late. 4th quarter 2009 I think and it still not available to some countries.
As a previous Palm user, I was really waiting to play woth the Pre, but the need of a new smartphone and the new android devices closed the deal.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=PALM
I had no idea how quickly the stock had lost that much confidence in the market, lost $1b in value in weeks.
Game over.
To survive in that position you need massive traction.
Apple pulled it off, and in my estimation they are the only ones that could manage it at the scale they're shooting for.
PALM could try licensing their OS at this point, but it's hard to argue with FREE and a product with much wider adoption, eg Android.
I would say in current form, PALM is finished after this latest failure.
What about Blackberry (outsells iPhones I believe), Nokia, etc. This is not a mature market and there is still boatloads of innovation to happen. What advantage does apple have over anybody else, with the exception that they brought out a device which set a great standard to measure competitors against.
If webOS had been a year earlier, would those positions be reversed? If so, would you be saying Apple should give it up?
What advantage does apple have over anybody else,
with the exception that they brought out a device
which set a great standard to measure competitors
against.
Their problem is that unlike other companies, they don't want to give anything back (and this annoys consumers).
This strategy works for Apple only because there are many who are heavily biased towards Apple, and Steve Job's often deceives them (like during the iPhone launch, he strongly implied he invented Multitouch, and that no other manufacturer would support multitouch because Apple patented it).
Furthermore, nobody even seems to be selling Palm phones here in Australia. Since palm are the only manufacturer which makes WebOS phones, that means nobody in Australia uses WebOS. That being said though, Palm's phones aren't that great anyway
"we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million. We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion."