Tuning the Palm Software Engine
Palm has gotten a bad wrap with three recent devices. Can Palm’s new PR czar Lynn Fox help turn things around?
In the late 1990s Palm was seen as an innovator in the handheld market. Their PDA handhelds were the devices everyone wanted to copy. Later on, with the success of the Treo 650, Palm began to shift from being a handheld PDA company into a smartphone company. Today, 80% of the company’s revenue stream comes from sales of their Treo and Centro smartphones with the remaining 20% of Palm’s earnings coming from traditional handheld devices. That leaves me to wonder if Palm shouldn’t be at least thinking about diversifying their product lines.
We’ll get to how product diversification ties back to public relations, marketing, and community involvement shortly.
In the last few years Palm has had three “shoulda-coulda” devices. The Palm TX, LifeDrive, and Foleo should have and could have been more popular than they were. The Palm TX should have been positioned as Palm’s answer to the iPod touch from the moment rumors of a phoneless iPhone were whispered. Think about all of the cool things you can do with an iPod touch and how many of those cool things you can also do with a TX. Think about all of the extra things you can do with the TX that you can’t do today. Lastly, think about the things that you can’t do today with a TX, but could if the software on the device were upgraded. With some additional software and shoring up of the existing software, a refreshed Palm TX could have easily been marketed as an alternative device. Strike one for Palm.
Next up is the LifeDrive. The LifeDrive was once explained to me as the device you can use to store all of your important “stuff” on. In essence, a portable drive for your life. (This was before 4GB USB flash drives had become as cheap as they are today.) Aside from not having a slide out keyboard, the LifeDrive should have been running circles around Nokia’s N800-series Internet devices. Think about it. The LifeDrive had great PIM applications, a web browser; loads of storage space (at the time), and it could play music and movies. If you timed your purchase just right, you also had the option of getting a free IR keyboard that would have doubled as a stand for the device. Again with some software tweaking, the LifeDrive could have been more that it was. Strike two for Palm.
Lastly is the Foleo. I’m still upset that this device never made it to market. It was a great little device and after having had the opportunity to play with one, I only wanted one even more. You will recall that Palm was mocked across the Internet for suggesting that people would want such a device. Now all of the sudden, about 10 months after the Foleo was announced, there is a race on to built Foleo-like clones running either some custom version of Linux or Windows. Look at the excitement around the Asus Eee PC and the recently announced HP 2133 Mini-Note sub-notebooks. Once again, by and large, the reason why the device failed was due to a lousy software stack. If the device was designed to be more than just a companion to the Treo, it could have been so much more for Palm. Unit price doesn’t seem to be the largest contributing factor in the decision to purchase an Asus device. Amazon has the list price of the 7-inch; 4GB black Eee PC as $596, which is almost the exact same price as the Foleo was going to launch with. Strike three for Palm.
It would seem that Palm has been a head of the curve in anticipating the next idea in mobile computing, and yet some how fails to achieve a successful product launch. If that is the case, what are the contributing factors? I believe that one such factor is the software.
With only a few exceptions, such as the LifeDrive’s microdrive and the shared hardware platform for the Treo 700 series, the three devices I mentioned earlier are examples of good hardware solutions from Palm. The problem with most of these devices is the software. For as much as I would like to have a Foleo, I’m glad that Palm decided to not release it if the software used on that device was going to be problematic. Similarly, the reason why I changed to a new phone was because of the constant resets on my Treo 700p. And the Wi-Fi stack on the LifeDrive was almost unusable.
If the key to delivering great products is a combination of great hardware and software, what can Palm do to achieve that goal? For starters, the development of a new, modern, feature rich operation system is a good start. Palm’s decision years ago to sell their software division hurt the company badly and they are still trying to recover from that mistake. The development of their new Linux-based operating system often referred to as Palm OS II or Palm OS Nova is the place to start. Expect new devices from Palm running the new operating system to appear in early 2009.
The development of a new OS isn’t the only thing that Palm can and should be doing. Palm needs to engage the third-party software developer community. The developer community was critical in the past for the success of Palm’s PDA products and developers will need to be there to support Palm’s new platform when it begins shipping on new devices.
This brings us to Lynn Fox, Palm’s new VP of Public Relations. While Palm yet to list Fox on their website as being an executive of the company, PalmInfoCenter recently ran a story stating differently. I believe that it would be beneficial for Palm to quietly begin talking with their top-level developers to gain support for their new operating system. I would also expect that those developers would also be given access to the latest software development kits (SDKs) and hardware as it becomes available. As Palm gets closer to publicly unveiling Palm OS II, the development tools should quickly become available to a much larger developer base. I also feel that Palm should also begin end user testing as soon as possible. It became clear that power users in the Palm user community were able to ferret out issues with the Foleo’s software that Palm’s own engineers could. The problem with talking to outsiders is that if too much information is released to soon, or if a tester breaks their non-disclosure agreement, Palm could lose their competitive edge. It is a difficult decision to make. Is it worth the risk to Palm to bring in outside resources to help test their new platform?
In conclusion, I believe that Palm has developed some innovating solutions however; their software implementation has hurt them. The company has also been badly hurt by the sale of their software division and has suffered some major set backs in previous attempts to overhaul the Palm OS 5 code base. In the year ahead, Palm needs to ensure it is doing everything it can to deliver Palm OS II/Nova according to their internal roadmap. Even more important than that is getting new products running the new platform into customer’s hands absolutely no later than March 2009.
While Palm is putting its software house in order, it is also critical that Palm begin an open, honest dialog with their partners and customers. Palm should be talking with their top-level development partners to ensure they have a strong springboard of applications when that first device with Palm OS II launches. DataViz Documents To Go and NormSoft’s Pocket Tunes are foremost in my mind. Palm should also make development tools available to the members of the Palm Developer Network as soon as possible. And Palm should also be talking to the developers and leading members of the Palm user community to ensure that they are building support for the new OS. In short, Palm needs to rebuild their ties with developers and community leaders to help champion their new products. The future of the company depends on it.
What are you thoughts on Palm’s software development efforts? Should Palm be talking directly with their developer and user communities? What support, if any should Palm be lending to those two groups of people? Let us know by clicking the Discuss this article link below.
