Ars on failure of Palm Pre | Hacker News Reader

Ars on failure of Palm Pre

arstechnica.com

42 pointssuraj39 comments

Business is a lot like politics. Things are never as bad as they seem, and they're never as good as they seem either.

Palm's down a lot from $17 because they should have never been at $17. (I bought in around $6 so am a little underwater, but hanging in).

I really think it's their marketing. Palm's never been very good at this, and now they're competing with Apple, a company whose ads have been case studies in college programs for over a quarter century. And the Motorolas and Nokias, who have much more clout with carriers, which still counts for a lot because most people still get a phone (even a smart one) by deciding what carrier they like then going to the store and seeing what looks good.

They seem to have had a fire lit under their ass. I don't know if they'll make something work, but I do know they've got hands-down the best OS on the phone market. Unfortunately as a shareholder I'm a lot more confident in their ability to produce great phones than their ability to sell them lately. Their turbulent period before WebOS pretty much ceded what little control they had of the

"One thousand apps is peanuts compared to the iPhone, which has well over 100,000 apps on offer, or Android's 10,000+ apps."

How many fart apps do you really need? 100x the apps is not 100x as good. In fact, it's probably not even 2x as good. The main thing I do on my Pre is listen to a podcast app that will not be allowed to exist on an iPhone. I'd rather have that one app than 100,000 others. I'm a special case, certainly, but the point is that it's not just a numbers game, and even if it were it would not scale linearly.

The article makes the "long tail" case that the number of fart apps within a phone's application catalog signals to potential buyers of the phone that they will likely find the fart app that is just right for them.

I don't know many people who takes that into consideration when buying a phone.

It's certainly better from a marketing perspective to say "We have 100,000 apps" than 1,000. I'd be curious to know what a prospective first-time smartphone buyer thinks, perhaps their conception might be that it's 100x better.

They won't think that when buying their second smartphone though.

There are nearly 1,800 apps available for download on my Pre. It is not 100,000 but it is not small either. From what I have seen the vast majority of the 100,000 iPhone apps are spam apps (useless or glorified rss readers), but even if only 5% of the apps not spam, 5,000 quality apps is a good thing to have. Palm's 1,800 is more than Windows Mobile Marketplace.

Well to be fair a lot of Pre apps are spam too. I see 5 a day that are just some public domain book.

For sure a lot are spam apps. If people just submitted 5,000 public domain books and 20,000 feed readers it wouldn't make their app store any better. Throwing around large app numbers is meaningless, people should be talking about the apps that they think are quality and aren't available elsewhere.

It's really weird.

They made a bet-the-company phone for "busy people" that mostly works only in the US and that is locked to a single carrier.

This is incredibly stupid.

Had they decided to sell unlocked GSM phones since day one, I bet they would have a a lot more of them in the hands of their users.

Even Google + Nexus One hasn't sold more than about 100K phones with the "unlocked, GSM" strategy. So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like this was one of them.

> So, whatever Palm's mistakes, it doesn't look like this was one of them.

Having a GSM phone would, if not help selling them abroad, at least not prevent them from doing so.

As for the Nexus One, why would Google want to pose a threat to its licensees? The Nexus One is not meant to compete with Motorola's or HTC's offerings: it's there to show what a pure Android phone is. It's a showcase.

Palm sells GSM phones outside of the US, and just announced that they'll be coming to AT&T later this year.

They do now. The save-the-company Pre was CDMA-only until about last week.

I couldn't disagree more.

You really think more people would buy a phone unlocked at $650 versus with a two year contract for $150? Keep in mind that you need a plan regardless and that (excepting some new T-Mobile plans) you pay the same monthly cost whether you got a subsidized phone and a plan or not.

(Sure, they could have marketed it better overseas, but I don't think that would have made the difference either.)

Palm did very well with the OS, but they screwed up everything else. The hardware is crappy, the performance is sluggish and unresponsive, too many bugs, their marketing sucked, etc.

I think the only solution for Palm is for Google to buy them. Then Google can incorporate some WebOS stuff into Android.

You can't just bolt code from one platform onto another. Google shouldn't buy them; they offer nothing that Google needs. However, if there are any struggling phone manufacturers, buying Palm for WebOS to distinguish themselves from the competition might be a good idea.

Any idea why Palm doesn't take its (arguably) strongest asset, the webOS, and license it out to other phone makers? Apple wouldn't mess with Palm/the phone makers because Palm still holds a considerable chunk of patents, and that'd get some cash flowing into Palm again.

What's the upside of paying money to a shaky company to license a struggling webOS, as compared to paying nothing to a huge stable company for healthy Android or paying money to a huge stable company for interesting-if-unproven Phone7?

As the article states: the market has largely spoken on webOS. Customers aren't choosing it based on its strengths. And when they choose its competitors, they do so for reasons that correlate strongly with webOS's weaknesses.

I'd say WebOS's weaknesses are 100% hardware. App store, sure, but that's because no one has a Pre or Pixi because they are cheap pieces of plastic crap. Put WebOS on the HTC Supersonic and just try to keep that thing in stock.

You don't think the media experience pales in comparison to the iPhone?

Or the customisability/flexibility pales in comparison to Android?

The default music playing app is much better on the iPhone. Other than that you can get videos from Youtube and break.com. You can play music in the background with Pandora, Grooveshark, Slacker Radio, or Radio Time. You can upload photos and video to Youtube, Facebook, Flickr.

As for a flexibility, look at the WebOS hacking community. WebOS is running on a Linux that isn't very far away from stock (closer than Android for sure). Just last week they got the QT framework running on it.

That's just a silly argument. There are thousands of factors going into which phone you buy, just one of which (and not the biggest) is the OS. I don't think the poor sales are at all indicative of the quality of the OS, and even if they're indicative of the perceived quality (which I'd argue is still not true) that's more of a marketing problem.

I was super impressed when I saw their demonstration video of WebOS from an event, but as of present I've never sought out or even seen a Pre in real life. iPhone is evidently 'good enough' for me.

I've got a buddy with one, and I've seen at least two out in the wild around Milwaukee, not including my own Pre, and my wife's Pixi (both of us love our phones and for different reasons).

I find this whole "Palm doing poorly" thing to be rather odd. I really hoped Palm would return to it's rightful place, and I'm disappointed to see Palm on the way out again.

I sincerely hope WebOS survives. I think it's a great OS.

I definitely prefer WebOS over Android.

Why? I have to get a new phone soon and really don't know which one to get.

Don't get a WebOS phone because the hardware blows. Plastic screens and tiny hardware keyboards are no fun at all. However, I agree that WebOS is hands down the best mobile OS out there. In terms of ease of use, multitasking interface, notifications system, and even development, it's not even close.

I wouldn't say the hardware blows. It's not perfect by any means, but I think it's comparable to the competition. The screen is nice, but I apply a Skinomi plastic skin to any phone so it's all the same to me. The keyboard's not bad, better by far than a virtual one, but it's not really good like a Treo or Blackberry either. The battery/usb compartment door is hilariously shoddy. No idea how that one got in the finished product.

There are some great things about it too though, like the slider up top to mute the phone (standard Palm feature). And whatever flaws it may have with hardware are made up for tenfold by the Touchstone. As far as user experience goes, that simple item makes phone ownership so much better than you'd intuitively think. Before I got it I thought "do I really need to spend money on something that makes me not have to plug my phone in once a day? How hard is that really?" Now I think I'd gag if I ever had to plug a phone in again.

But really, the joy of using that OS is worth almost anything. I can't really explain it other than to compare it to owning a Lexus. It's a total experience that's greater than the sum of its parts.

I didn't say get Palm Pre or Pixi (the hardware). I meant the OS. The Palm hardware is nothing to write home about.

Since phone companies all have 30 day return policies, get WebOS first. If the hardware isn't an issue for you, keep it. You can get another phone if it is.

That's a really good idea actually. I didn't realize they had return policies.

For what it's worth, my wife really liked those Pre ads.

Anyway, I used to work in the cell phone industry and the suits at Palm have been disconnected with reality for years. Their VP of Marketing was once bragging to me of their growing dominance in the PDA market, long after it was clear that smartphones were about to destroy the unconnected PDA market. What's that joke about buggy whips?

> For what it's worth, my wife really liked those Pre ads.

And FWIW, my wife thought they were creepy and condescending.

The suits at Palm have changed in the past 2 years.

Fair point.

Asus should buy Palm. There is room for a non-iPad tablet and webOS has the capability to corner that market over Android. Asus is an aggressive and smart company. They could do very low-priced tablets and have another big win, as they have with netbooks. I also wonder how blazing fast webOS would be on a Tegra2 CPU.

I was an unhappy owner of a Pre for a few months. The software they shipped on the Pre could generously be called beta quality. After 6 months of slow speeds, lack of features, and almost no third party apps I gave up and got something else. I think Palm in retrospect should have tried to hold off releasing WebOS until it was ready. I realize there may have been some business realities that made that impossible but it looks like they're going to suffer either the consequences either way. Early Pre hardware and software destroyed Palm's reputation among a lot of loyalists.

seems like only yesterday that the tech world was giddy with excitement over the possibility that palm could come back from the dead, apple-style. now i've read a couple of articles that say they are as good as gone.

i personally wouldn't have ever used a pre, but increased competition is always good, so i'm sorry to see them go.

Sad.

The lack of apps is what really killed the Pre. I think that everything else listed here except maybe the faulty (as in defective) hardware is a relatively minor point. If the Pre had cool, unique applications, or even just a reasonably-sized selection of average applications, the awkwardness of the clamshell, the mirror on the back, the cramped keyboard, etc., all could have been fixed in a new hardware revision.

A more aggressive, general-purpose ad campaign could have helped too. Targeting women is fine, but kind of silly since in my experience women already have a high attraction to Apple's designs, and should not have been the only focus of their marketing.

If they'd taken more of a Google approach and licensed webOS to other hardware makers, that would have helped a lot too, but in the end the Pre was killed by its lack of developer support and that's the long and short of it.

There's a much larger selection of competent HTML/JavaScript/CSS developers than there are Objective C developers, and the fact that one didn't need a Mac to develop applications would have drawn a lot more devs in that way, I think. It was a good idea.

Word is that the process for Pre development was contrived and horrible. jwz wrote about it a bit. This is mysterious because Palm really made overtures like they "got it", but the actual implementation of the app submittal and review process was basically unusable even for the contingent that wanted to provide apps.

The Ides of March were brutal - I saw elsewhere echoes of one analyst setting Palm's stock price target at zero ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com