[PJA]

Successful people spend spare cycles reading the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, The Financial Times, etc. I, on the other hand, read the numerous Palm user sites, support sites and blogs (PalmAddict, CoolGadget, TreoBits, Palm InfoCenter, etc.). What else would you expect from a man who prefers Monty Python to the Bard, and thinks Karl Marx would have been a happier man if he had spent more time with Groucho, Chico and Harpo?

So, I obviously view things through a warped lens. What I see is a worldwide community of humans with a deep emotional and financial investment in tools running the Palm OS. We should be very excited right now: just a year ago, Palm, Inc. was on the ropes, and the PPC crowd was practicing a victory scream. In the interim, Palm managed to get its inventory woes straightened out, split into two organizations, and bring on Handspring, with its Treo 600 and management. So far, so good: pa1mOne recognized that the Treo represented its first true ‘flagship’ product since the Vx, and has poured development and marketing dollars into it. They promoted Handspring’s Ed Colligan to President. The stock prices and sales of all things Palm seem to support this course of action.

But, let’s be honest here: the Treo was developed as the best possible compromise product by a cash-strapped company (Handspring). pa1mOne simply bought someone else’s vision, and now shows no signs of really running with the Treo’s full potential. There are other troubling signs…

Sony has dropped out of the PDA marketplace (at least Palm OS ones, and at least for the time being), with possibly hard consequences for PalmSource. HP has dropped a quartet of hot, new PPC PDA’s into the marketplace, easily stealing the buzz from the Zire and Tungsten lines in the vital business marketplace. Palm is not acting like the company which sells most PDA’s, and with the first popular smartphone in history. Instead, they seem to be reacting, adding functionality long after it has become standard on their competitors’ products. Palm is in a position to lead in innovation, as they once did, but is not taking the baton in-hand.

So, what’s the point of this seeming rant? Simple…the Palm Community has many voices and strong opinions re: what they want in the products of the near future. They voice these opinions in many venues and with varying degrees of consensus. What they fail to do is leverage their numbers and the pure buying power those numbers represent to pa1mOne and PalmSource. I propose that there be a grass-roots effort to coordinate the various avenues of Palm owner expression, and focus them into a lobby that pa1mOne and PalmSource will have to pay heed to.
Historically, this is a sound idea: SAP AG pushed a 100% Teutonic ERP methodology on North America for years, and ignored all pleas for something more “American” (with apologies to my friends in Canada). The various US and Canadian SAP/R3 owners banded together into ASUG (Americas SAP User Group). They coordinated their ideas, demands and requirements; then they acted as a single lobby to compel SAP to adjust their product to this uniquely identified marketplace. It has worked to both sides satisfaction.

Consider this as an example of pa1mOne's just not getting it: I had been looking at the Treo 300 in early 2002, but was waiting for the Tungsten W to come out. When it did, I was shocked at its lack of functionality & power, and its exorbitant price-tag. I sent a snail-mail to Palm, Inc. informing them that they were obviously not getting any input from their target marketplace, since their ‘flagship smartphone’ was not comparable to something that had been on the market for the past year (original Treo line). Palm did have a lady call me (who identified herself as a senior Marketing manager), and spend an hour debriefing me. She wasn't looking for market data, but to try and convince me that the TW was the cutting edge smartphone out there. She became very cross when I did an apple-to-apples comparison between the Treo 300 and TW, showing how the Treo was a better tool, and less expensive. She promised that I was going to be part of a beta group to test new Palm products before they hit the market; but, of course, I never heard from Palm again. Instead of going to the marketplace and seeing that a better Treo was what the market wanted, they decided to gifob off a Palm Pilot with a few extra bells and whistles. As a result, they had to go out and buy Handspring to save Palm.

If we want to protect our significant, proprietary interest in the Palm world, then it is incumbent upon us to push pa1mOne and PalmSource. Pa1mOne’s history does not bode well for intelligent development, and the competition will be getting steeper from here on out. I suggest that you all write to the various sites/blogs you frequent, and petition them to act as a single lobbying entity, and take your requirements directly to pa1mOne & PalmSource management.

It’s an election year, after all. A little activism is good for the soul.

That's it...I'm off the bloody soapbox!

PJA