Perhaps the Palm CEO has also been wondering who would buy a Foleo (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=93969).


Thanks to MobileReader, Laurens (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/member.php?u=957) for pointing this out to us (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=93969#post93969).




From today's entry (http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html) in The Official Palm Blog:

In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all of our energies on delivering out next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to develop products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.

Because we were nearly at the point for shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.

Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.


There's some discussion about how they believe that this is the best decision in the long run, and remarks on the $10 million dollar hit they'll take for doing it, for more details, follow the link (http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html).

So, what do y'all think? Is this a bad move or a good one?

Wow! As a Palm fan (pun intended) I thought it was a late April Fool's joke. So I can't sort it out right now.

Good decision, no point throwing good money after bad.

So you don't think anyone would have bought it, then, LG?

I'm a huge palm pilot fan, but have left the company behind for more reliable, and greener pastures. Their decision to even market the folio in the first place left me baffled. Who needs a smart-phone-aide that costs nearly the same amount as a laptop that would do the same thing.

They need to go back to the drawing board and develop some stand-alone handhelds, or I'll never look their way again. Until that time, I'll migrate my smart phone to blackberry, and my reading to sony reader.

I think this is very smart in the long run, and am impressed that Palm actually listened to the simple but logical arguments from the critics and decided they had merit.

Mixed decision: Given that they already sunk $10 million into it, I wonder how much more they would've had to go to give it a limited production run.

That said, their hype on smartphone integration was a definite limiter IMHO, and I'll bet they saw stiff competition coming from Asus as well.

While it's nice to cite that they want to get back to core Palm OS issues, I can't help but feel that actually doing that would be a step backwards for Palm.

So you don't think anyone would have bought it, then, LG?

Now that it no longer available, I want one. I wonder if they have any to sell for clearance?

Now that it no longer available, I want one. I wonder if they have any to sell for clearance?Hmmm. A clever reverse-psychology marketing ploy, perhaps? :grin:

They have lost face big time. It took courage to kill this product after all the hype. But it is a good move for Palm. I, personally, would like to see them make a reader-sized device that runs all the Palm apps. Take that with a shaker of salt. I know zero about marketing.

They were about to turn the corner. With a surge of activity they could have turned the tide and achieved success. They should not have withdrawn the device without first achieving success. By cutting and running and withdrawing the device, they only encourage the competition.
The CEO shouldn't have listened to the shareholders or the public. He should have only listened to officers with a vested interested in success who he had personally appointed to their position.
Any suggestion to withdraw the product should have exposed as a lack of loyalty for the company.
Its a sad day for America.

I never could understand the "smartphone companion" angle - I just wanted one for writing. Since I switched from a Treo to an iPhone, I didn't need all the stuff they were touting, but I so wanted that instant-on, no hard drive, wifi-for-backup writing machine that it looked like it could be.

:(

They were about to turn the corner. With a surge of activity they could have turned the tide and achieved success. They should not have withdrawn the device without first achieving success. By cutting and running and withdrawing the device, they only encourage the competition.
The CEO shouldn't have listened to the shareholders or the public. He should have only listened to officers with a vested interested in success who he had personally appointed to their position.
Any suggestion to withdraw the product should have exposed as a lack of loyalty for the company.
Its a sad day for America.
Wow! I think it was wise of them to heed the rumblings of their public. Who buys the stuff?
I never could understand the "smartphone companion" angle - I just wanted one for writing. Since I switched from a Treo to an iPhone, I didn't need all the stuff they were touting, but I so wanted that instant-on, no hard drive, wifi-for-backup writing machine that it looked like it could be.

:(
Now you can buy the Asus EEE 701. It is nearly the same thing at half the price. And you don't have to fool with a mail-in rebate!

I seriously hope Palm succeeds. I have owned their devices for years, and will continue as long as they keep making them. Competing in the inexpensive laptop market is tough for a small company. Here in China you can buy a laptop for under US$400 and US$500 is common. We have to pay a lot of Value Added Tax which keeps our prices higher than in the west for technology products. So you can see that low-priced laptops are the wave of the future. Palm's offering didn't hit the sweet spot, and they realized it. Watch what happens in the next year or so. Asus is the first, but won't be the last.

...

Now you can buy the Asus EEE 701. It is nearly the same thing at half the price. And you don't have to fool with a mail-in rebate!
...



I will, of course, be looking at it, though judging by the constant price hikes, by the time it actually hits the market the price will probably be right where the Foleo was. :p

Like so many others here, I've had Palm devices for years and trusted their quality over an unknown (to me, at least).

I do have a Neo from Alphasmart and it is great for just plain writing, but I was hoping the Foleo would fill the gap between the Neo and the big laptop. Again, the Asus will get a close look.

I sure wish Palm would have at least given the Foleo a shot, though. I still think the market for it was much wider than the "smartphone companion" they were aiming for.

Yep, I think they realized they couldn't sell it as-is. They also were probably in trouble with the new platform development. Put those things together, and they were willing to admit failure now rather than face failure and financial loss over time and delay the new platform. Trouble is that people already have lost faith in Palm's ability to produce products. Now that reputation is solidified, and not for the good.

Ironically, I do believe in the Foleo concept, as long as it includes an easy terminal mode for it to be used with the smart phone. Maybe that's part of why they delayed... Foleo might only really make sense once they can provide the value-added pieces together with their new OS smartphone platform and the integration features. Especially in the face of cheap UMPC competition.

Palm still, even after all this, is still in a position to succeed wildly. But the window of opportunity is closing, and they have to actually be able to produce the goods. We're all starting to doubt that they can.

Palm, I'm still hoping you pull all this off and succeed. But I'm not holding my breath.

:stunned: So close to release, all the money spent... and they just abandon it? I can't believe it. Send it back to the showers... decide it's not ready for prime time... rework the dumb thing! How can they not try to salvage something out of that time and effort?

I realize Palm wants to appear smart enough to quit when they're ahead... but after all the effort and money spent on production, right up to imminent release, the move doesn't seem particularly smart to me. Maybe if it'd been done months ago, but not at this point.

I think they did the right thing. I never "got" the Foleo and I usually like to buy new gadgets. Even on this web site, there are a lot of early adopters, but many of them indicated they did not see the need for the product. If the early adopters won't buy it, who will?

Betty

Send it back to the showers... decide it's not ready for prime time... rework the dumb thing! How can they not try to salvage something out of that time and effort?I think that's exactly what they're doing, Steve. Take another look at the third paragraph in the passage I quoted:
Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.

Make you feel any better? :nice:

Mixed reaction here as well. On the one hand there is this German saying, better an ending with a shock than a shock without an ending. I bet all my Star Wars figures that the Foleo would have been a commercial failure. So from that point it's good that Colligan decided to pull its plug. On the other hand, it makes me wonder about the future prospects of this company. Wasn't the Foleo their baby? The "secret product" they kept talking about to make shareholders and fans happy? How could it have happened that they were wrong in misjudging the market all these months and years of development? Personally I am very disappointed with the company, and I am glad that others (Apple, Google) are jumping in to get innovation train moving.

Foleo, we hardly knew ye. But we knew enough to know that almost no one was going to buy ye. :unafraid:

There is also some shuffling in Palm's board of directory today, it appears (http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7b21C139F1-8ACF-4E96-B801-5677C4526E08%7d&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo):

Palm said in a regulatory filing Tuesday afternoon that Bruce Dunlevie is resigning from the company's board of directors. The company said Dunlevie, a venture capitalist with Benchmark Capital, informed the company of his move in an Aug. 28 letter. The company also said that Scott Mercer has decided to remain on the board. Mercer and director Eric Benhamou had planned to resign from the board to make room for Fred Anderson and Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners, an investment firm that took a stake in Palm earlier this year. The company said the departures of Dunlevie and Benhamou will enable the addition of the Elevation members when the deal closes.

So you think Elevation aka Bono (http://www.elevation.com/EP_IT.asp?id=112) will do their job better?

I think that's exactly what they're doing, Steve. Take another look at the third paragraph in the passage I quoted:


Make you feel any better? :nice:

Considering how late in the game it was that they apparently came to that decision... I'm not sure. Besides, "We're not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first." means he didn't commit to really even doing the Foleo II.

This is like buying a new star player, playing him up in the news for months, and the day of his first game, sending him to the minors one minute before he's supposed to walk onto the field. Then you tell the public "We don't know when he's going to play." Talk about mixed messages.

So you don't think anyone would have bought it, then, LG?

Solution looking for a problem. A pretty expensive solution at that. I think it would have died a fast quiet death. Most people looked at it and said "ok, why bother?".

Wow! I think it was wise of them to heed the rumblings of their public. Who buys the stuff?

I assume he was being sarcastic mogui, otherwise :blink:

I think the problem was either the new software or the manufacturing.

In reverse order. We can easily grant that Palm can design great hardware. What happens is that not all great designs work when converted to mass production. Perhaps there was a problem in the early samples that they could not overcome or the manufactuing process was going to cost more than the market could afford.

The new software platform is a more likely reason for the product killing. Perhaps it was too slow (and a faster CPU would make the unit too hot.) Most likely it was a dead end system that could not integrate to their main line platform. Palm is too small of a company to support two core systems that divergent.

I think that they will take the lessons learned and fold these back into their main line products.

At least the killer product didn't kill Palm. (Yet.)

Neither fish nor fowl.

Must admit, I thought it was a bizarre thing to produce in this century; it reminded me of an uneasy combination of an old Psion MC (for 'Mobile Computer' - had one in the 80s) and Apple's Newton-derived eMate of a similar era. The MC made a bit of sense back then, because it was a cheaper alternative to the not-very-good laptops available at the time, but I never figured out the eMate's appeal and nor did anyone else if the sales were anything to go by; ditto the Foleo - though I guess now we'll never know for sure...

Makes you wonder how a company can get a product so close to production before pulling it?

Pete

palm is dead. bury the corpse.

palm is dead. bury the corpse.Funny, I keep hearing that, ever since the iPaq came out. :shrug:

At the very least, they needed to make the thing powerful enough to run the basic web apps, especially YouTube.

I suspect they'll wait and see how Asus does with their ultra-cheap laptop. If there is a market there, they can come in later with an upgraded Foleo and try and beat them on features. If Asus flops, the Foleo II will probably never see the light of day.

I think that Foleo or something like Foleo is destined to appear and become popular. The question is how to do it and how soon it can be done.

If it's not very soon, then I'm pretty sure that MS will create a platform that runs on Vista (or successor) and becomes an instant-on terminal for Win Mobile smartphones.

But I think Palm will get the Foleo II working.. at least if we assume first that they can create some really popular smart phones on the new Linux platform. That's the biggest question in my mind. Hope they do.