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Originally Posted by BobR
But isn't there plenty of money to be made by lots of analog watch manufacturers? I wear one myself. And one of these days I'll replace it. Those markets may not expand exponentially, but there's enough there to be successful, and keep putting out good products.
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Analog watch manufacturers have millions upon millions of people who wear watches, so there is always some constant turnover with people replacing new watches. Also, there are enough watch brands and styles and types to fulfill everyone's deepest desires. And watches aren't the niche commodity that PDA's are. Yes, there are millions of PDA users and they will at some point need to replace their PDA's, but the howling you hear from the Palm OS camp is that they're (we're) unhappy with what they're (we're) being offered as replacements. That's why people who dig Palm OS deep down have migrated to PPC. And I'm not certain that there's enough of us to keep these companies afloat and solvent while they spend their time fiddling and twiddling around looking for the "next big thing."
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Originally Posted by BobR
A lot of the doom and gloom is just reaction to all the Clies not being sold. And without many new products that are delivering value and capability, I think a lot of people are just waiting....The sales may be falling for PalmOS, but most of that is due to Clie gone and no sign of the basic products people can rely on.
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Originally Posted by BobR
I'm not a Microsoft hater, despite having my complaints. I actually appreciate a lot of what they've done for personal computing and PDAs. I want them to succeed.
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I wasn't a big Sony CLIE fan when they were around (I feel hampered by their proprietary feng shui), but I always appreciated how they pushed Palm into keeping up with color screens and expansion cards and hi-res and cameras and Bluetooth and so on. People are upset with Sony exiting the market because they miss the CLIE line themselves, or like me, they miss the innovation that pushed Palm into competition.
You mention Microsoft and what they've done for the PC industry, it's analogous to how Sony and Palm and the other various licensees have helped shape the PDA industry. For instance, for all the ubiquity of Microsoft and it's bundled products, it took Firefox's explosion onto the market for Microsoft to get down to making a new IE independent of Longhorn. It wasn't Safari and Mozilla and Opera and Camino that did it, but an actual threat to IE's dominance. Without a threat to PalmOne's "dominance" it's easy to see how they are resting on yesterday's laurels. In a market where you're only as good as your last hit, Palm(One) hasn't had one in a while. They appear to be banking everything on a "home run" (Treo 650) where before they were willing to hit for the cycle and offer some different things for everyone instead of trying to get everyone to like their particular some one thing.
It'd be great to see Palm come back, but I think that the split into 2 separate companies has hurt the platform. The rumors that PalmOne might entertain another operating system for their product(s), the inability to get out of the smartphone rut, the rudderless "leadership" that appears to be fleeing like rats off of a burning ship, and the inability of PalmSource to find viable licensees for their product (as well as the inability to either get Cobalt straightened out, or hurry up and get this Linux experiment put together) is costing this platform dearly.
It's not just about us end-users and no matter how much we want what we love. "Consumer Confidence" is also about how the retailers feel about continually ordering a product that doesn't move off of the shelves as quickly as they'd like it to, the supply chain issues that inhibit smart inventory management, the profit margin that these retailers make, the customer services issues (and tales of woe) as well as the quality control and technical issues that have people returning units or repairing them or waiting for a driver release or whatever (the NAND ROM thing, the digitizer issues with the "slider" Tungstens, the lack of features that various segments of the market ask for because of the perceived need, the lack of cellular carriers willing to carry the Treo 650 or the time delay of getting the units to the carrier to get branded and out to market,...) In this "instant pudding" age where we as a money-carrying public want what we want and now, the availability of the various options will cause the most impatient of us to look elsewhere and to go spend elsewhere.
It's like how these television studios cancel our favorite shows. It's not personal because they don't care a whit about us as people and what we like. It's always about money, and how to make it. Our favorite shows are nothing to them but vehicles to bring in advertising revenue, and when that dries up they'll replace our show with something they'll tell us is better and hope we fall for it. No matter how much we whine and moan and protest, if we aren't seen as a big enough segment, our voices will go unheard, because money rules everything in the corporate world. And not just being in the Black, but being as deep as possible into the Black.
Or like how our city's football team leaves for another market. It's always because that other market is offering a new stadium deal (paid for by that market's tax-base), or they can guarantee that the market is starved for the product enough to guarantee continuous sellouts, or something money related. It's never about the 7,000 diehard fans who attended every game in the old city since the team's inception, it's always about the 55,000 other fans who decided that the product being delivered wasn't worth driving to the stadium to pay for.
Nothing corporate is about either intentionally hurting our feelings or making us feel good. Everything these mega-conglomerates do is about making as much money as possible. The decisions they make take years to come to fruition, and if they judge wrong it takes years to address and correct them. I'd love to stay a Palm guy, but to be honest, I'd have jumped to PPC a while ago if I wasn't a Mac guy. And if TapWave wasn't around. And even then it was a tough decision as I'd have had to buy Missing Sync either way to get my device to work. I went to Costco strictly to buy this certain iPaq (I forget which one) and if they weren't sold out, I'd have gotten it, Mac guy and all. Luckily for me, the Zodiac2 is such a great PDA that I'm glad Costco was sold out.
POL9A