Apr 4, 2007
I have a theory that the Palm brand of smartphones and PDAs is on its way out. They essentially created a whole new market by making the first Palm Pilots, enabling people to store and organize information digitally without dealing with a computer. And as they developed better technology and software, their devices became more and more useful. My Treo 650 is a great example of this. It's essentially a handheld computer combined with a phone.
The problem with all this is that Palm is losing market share, and fast. Just a few years ago, there weren't many choices of smartphones. There was a Palm model, some sort of ultra-expensive Siemens model, and a failure of a Windows model. Now, there are a plethora of good Windows models to choose from, and Palm is essentially in the same place as they were 3 years ago. I don't think it helped their case when they released a smartphone that ran Windows software. And with the abundance of Windows models comes an abundance of software and addons. Plus, Windows Mobile feels pretty much exactly like normal Windows. Palm doesn't make operating systems for computers, so they're already at a loss in that market. But choosing between a Windows feel and a Palm feel is making it harder and harder to choose Palm.
Palm used to be cool like Apple and Linux because it was a sort of underdog. It had cool applications that performed simple yet useful functions, and nothing could compete with it. Now Windows is competing with it, and I think Windows won. Unless Palm can introduce something that blows the competition away, I think they'll be stuck with being the 3rd-place handset maker that also used to design handheld operating systems.
Update (2007-05-07 9:28pm): To clarify, I think Palm as a software company is dead, but Palm as a hardware company is still alive and will continue to live. #technology
The problem with all this is that Palm is losing market share, and fast. Just a few years ago, there weren't many choices of smartphones. There was a Palm model, some sort of ultra-expensive Siemens model, and a failure of a Windows model. Now, there are a plethora of good Windows models to choose from, and Palm is essentially in the same place as they were 3 years ago. I don't think it helped their case when they released a smartphone that ran Windows software. And with the abundance of Windows models comes an abundance of software and addons. Plus, Windows Mobile feels pretty much exactly like normal Windows. Palm doesn't make operating systems for computers, so they're already at a loss in that market. But choosing between a Windows feel and a Palm feel is making it harder and harder to choose Palm.
Palm used to be cool like Apple and Linux because it was a sort of underdog. It had cool applications that performed simple yet useful functions, and nothing could compete with it. Now Windows is competing with it, and I think Windows won. Unless Palm can introduce something that blows the competition away, I think they'll be stuck with being the 3rd-place handset maker that also used to design handheld operating systems.
Update (2007-05-07 9:28pm): To clarify, I think Palm as a software company is dead, but Palm as a hardware company is still alive and will continue to live. #technology