Trading Community for Corporate

On November 27, Motoricity launched the “new” PocketGear.com online software store, and in the process, eliminated virtually all of the shareware and freeware titles from the new site.  Where has all the software gone?

We all knew this move was coming because it was advertised on the PalmGear site.  PalmGear.com would be rolled up in to PocketGear.com.  When I first read the news, I figured that PalmGear had become just another victim of the decelerating Palm OS PDA marketplace.   As I mentioned in a recent blog post over on Foleo Fanatics, I was surprised to discover that I could no longer download Alex Pruss’ NVBackup, and that as part of the site migration, Motricity, the company that owns the PalmGear and PocketGear properties, decided to “eliminated much of the outdated and freeware listings” according to a statement on the PocketGear website.

The move by Motricity to drop freeware applications caught me off guard, as did a few other people I talked to recently about the migration.  So I started to think about what might be the driving factor behind the seemingly heavy-handed house cleaning.

The first possible driver that came to mind was a pure business decision to eliminate the software.  Motricity keeps a percentage of the purchase price from each sale a developer makes as a fee for providing the retail web portal, credit card transactions, and all the rest.  If the software is free, Motricity still has to pay to keep the lights on, the servers running, and the network connection to their data centers operating, and yet they make no money on freeware downloads.  Is this a good business decision to lower the cost of operations or corporate geed; that is a question I will leave you to make up your mind about.  Yes, disk space is cheap, but there are still real costs associated with keeping a server farm up and running.

The second possible driver has to do specifically with the name PalmGear (my emphasis).   Many regular 1SRC.com readers will recall that Palm and ACCESS reached an accord that grants Palm the exclusive rights to the name “Palm” and that ACCESS can no longer use “Palm.”  This agreement has far reaching implications for ACCESS.  For example, PalmSource can no longer be a separate entity in the ACCESS business.  As such, ACCESS has ceased to use PalmSource and now refers to that entity as ACCESS Systems Americas.  ACCESS also had to change the name of their mobile operating system from “Palm OS Garnet” to “Garnet OS.”  Could Motricity have licensed the name “PalmGear” from the former PalmSource and is now being forced to give up the name now that Palm has exclusive use of the name?  The Motricity hosted ACCESS Garnet OS software store was forced to close down the same day that PalmGear was integrated with PocketGear.  The Palm Software Connection online software store, also powered by Motricty, interestingly enough, is still up, operational, and open for business.  (NVBackup isn’t available from the Palm software portal either.) 

While the name swapping idea does seem plausible, I’m not so sure this is what happened.  It all sounds too complicated.  There is likely a simplistic reason behind the move.  I still like my first idea better.

In conclusion, I believe that with the possible exception of Motricty, there are no real winners here.  With the closing down of PalmGear, and it’s large catalog of inexpensive shareware and freeware applications being taken offline, the Palm user community has lost a valuable resource.  PalmGear was the first site, after Palm’s, that I visited to learn more about my very first Palm handheld.  PalmGear was the first site I turned to when I needed to purchase a new application or utility for my Palm devices, and it was the place I turned to for great freeware software like Alex Pruss’ NVBackup.  That little taste of free software is what ultimately drew me in to purchase more software from Mr. Pruss, including FontSmoother and mySkin (formerly known as SkinDIA).

I feel that small developers have been done a disservice by losing the ability to post free or low-cost software along side their more expensive commercial software titles in a single online repository.  I hope that these smaller developers are able to put together a workable solution to bring their software back to the community so that we can all benefit from the time and effort they put into writing software we can all enjoy on our Palm OS handhelds and smartphones.

What do you think about Morticity expunging the freeware from PalmGear?  Let us know in the 1SRC forums.