PalmSource Exclusive [Part 2]: Michael Mace (CCO) and John Cook (Dir Prd Mktg)

[Bob Russell]

MobileRead.com is very pleased to continue presentation of this exclusive interview with two of the key leaders at PalmSource… the Chief Competitive Officer, Michael Mace, and the Director of Product Marketing, John Cook, who were kind enough to sit down with me at the recent PalmSource Mobile Summit and DevCon 2005 in San Jose, CA to share their views on the direction and future of PalmOS.

The interview is being presented on MobileRead this week as a five-part series, and it continues today with the second installment, covering PalmOS for Linux and Cobalt.

MobileRead: With the implementation of PalmOS for Linux, PalmSource is going to be competing world-wide in the cell phone market, not just as a platform for the top-line communicator smart phones, but now also for a larger range of phones. So PalmSource is in the middle of a very big transition. What do you see as the keys to success?

Michael Mace: I'm the competitor guy, so I worry about the competitors a lot. But frankly, the issue for us is not that somebody is kicking us in terms of market share (Gartner and the other guys aside). I track really closely, for instance handheld sales in the US, and our market share is the same as it was in 1999. It is not an issue of share, it's an issue of the handheld market not growing. So we need to support our licensees in exploring new categories of handhelds like PalmOne is doing with the LifeDrive, and we need to make sure we really help them with that. And we need to get after this phone stuff. There are lots of open doors for us in the phone space, especially because of Linux. There are a lot of companies that want to work with Linux and are now willing to have conversations with us that wouldn't talk to us before. But we've got to deliver the goods. It's good in the sense that our fate is in our own hands, but it is about execution.

MR: What would you consider some of the major obstacles to overcome in terms of that transition?

MM: One of the trickiest ones is that there are so many directions you can go, and it would be very easy for us to overload ourselves. So we're working really carefully to understand really carefully who are the best partners to work with, what are the best targets to go after first. You know if you do something first it doesn't mean you ignore the others, you're just prioritizing. Exactly how can we make sure we don't get ahead of ourselves, how can we make sure we don't over promise?

You know, one of the things you'll notice is that we're not hyping the PalmOS for Linux stuff the way we did PalmOS Cobalt. That was a very deliberate decision. At the time that we started talking about PalmOS Cobalt, a number of our licensees said, "We're going to ship really soon" and we kind of took them at their word and then they changed their plans. And so, okay, we learned, and in the future we're not going to hype stuff heavily until the actual physical shipment of the hardware.

John Cook: One thing I heard Michael mention the other day which I forget, too, being down in the guts inside of it, is that we have to do our technical due diligence. Our engineering work, our testing and integration. And then we deliver it to a hardware vendor who then in turn has to build it into their project, get qualified by a carrier and then eventually ship a product out here some time after we're done. That could be 18 months or two years later.

It's a much different paradigm than working at a typical consumer electronics company where you say "Stay tuned" and six months from now you'll see a product come out the door. So part of the keys to success hit down to the internal focus and Michael's point about not getting ahead of ourselves. One of the other things we are doing, which is very significant, is as we've moved from our traditional technologies we knew and said we want to build this thing on Linux (effectively what we've done is taken out the old engine we had and put Linux underneath), it's given us the opportunity to review all the various technical standards that we've chosen to support in the OS. You don't often get that chance. Most of the time you build it, and ship it and you keep on building on top of that. So through that introspection, if you will, I think what we've managed to do is evaluate -- Did we make the best decision or is there a better opportunity?

And now we're also at a point where we can leverage more of the open source community. So going through the Linux world, going through the open source community, I think they'll help keep us on the path. But they're also gatekeepers to see how successful we are. So there's an internal challenge, if you will, to do the right things, and we're certainly up to that. And then the external success you'll see when you see devices running on this stuff.

MR: You mentioned the Linux community. How do you expect to win the hearts and the time of the Linux community?

JC: We want to be very good Linux community citizens, and there are some well established rules for being able to do that. One thing is to make sure that if you take, you also share and give back. We've made some small contributions already. I don't want to over hype those because they're small things, but for example in the Linux world people often think all Linux is created equal, and it's not really. Particularly for the type of devices that we've been going after. They're based on the ARM processor family. And that's where some of the work in ARM support for Linux has actually been one of the laggard areas because most of the effort has been on desktops and servers. They haven't been thinking about mobile devices. And even in going through the process of doing the [PalmOS for Linux] demonstration that we did yesterday, we found some pretty interesting things for the ARM kernel which we in turn uploaded and gave back to the community. So you want to participate in the right forums, you want to join the right discussion groups. We want to have a good understanding about how the licensing aspect works for our licensees as well as for our developer community. I think we kind of understand how to do the right things. But as much as anything it's being a good citizen. It's not saying "Okay, we're here now, and we'll take care of it." Instead, it's really saying, we have respect for the fact that there's 200 people out there working on the Linux kernel, which is really a big advantage to us.

MR: I think a lot of people are looking forward to that kind of participation in the Linux community...

JC: Yes, we've seen a lot of interest. A fair number of people I've run into in the course of this conference have come out of the Linux community and are kind of here because this is an interesting opportunity for that. I'm hoping that one of the benefits of doing this is that we'll get some more interest out of Linux developers looking more closely at PalmSource and platforms we can offer for them to work on.

MR: I have to ask the question -- When are we going to see a Cobalt device and what's holding it up?

MM: I am out of the business of predicting hardware. It's driven by too many things that are outside our control. The devices will ship when they ship. A number of licensees have said that they're working on Cobalt stuff, and I know that they are, and it will be out there when it's out there.

You know the other thing I should add is (and I'm not saying this to be disingenuous, this is the truth), most users don't give a flip about the version of the operating system. There are people who care, but for instance, Symbian is on Symbian OS9. Symbian OS8 shipped in a total of one Symbian phone. Most Symbian licensees are still on Symbian 7. A number of them are still using Symbian 6. There a couple of new products that were just built with Symbian 5, I believe.

It is normal in the mobile marketplace, especially in phones, to have enormous lag times in the adoption of different versions of operating systems. That is routine. It happens because there is an enormously long development and carrier approval chain that has to happen. In that development and carrier approval process, often products get killed that you never even hear about. And so it's not like PCs, where a new version of the operating system comes out, and everybody upgrades, and all of a sudden the hardware flips over. The licensees use whichever version of the operating system they happen to want to use. And people have to get used to that.

So, you know, I'm not meaning to denigrate the customers who do care about this stuff and who track this stuff. I can completely understand that. It's a very, very legitimate perspective. But folks have to understand that for the vast majority of customers, they don't get versions of the OS. They don't understand it and they don't particularly care. They care about what the device does. That's clearly true, otherwise nobody would be buying a Symbian 7 device when Symbian 9 was just shipped.

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This interview will continue with the remaining installments…

..Part One
<Part Two>
..Part Three
..Part Four
..Part Five

Special Note: Please note that while we encourage a lively discussion of these topics, we require that the discussion remain polite and on-topic so the discussion can remain profitable for all. We will moderate heavily if necessary. Thank you!

[lindseydyson]

As always a very interesting read Bob, well done.

Lindsey Dyson
Deputy Editor PalmAddict
Personal Assistant to Sammual McLoughlin
Welcoming over 40,000 visitors a day to Palm Addict

[Alexander Turcic]

I like their response regarding "giving back" to the Linux community. They definitely understood what it's about the Linux spirit.

My only worry is that if they give back too much, other competitors can take that knowledge and easily compete with PalmSource without requiring the same startup costs.

[Antoine of MMM]

INteresting read indeed. Nothing revealing, but definitley open. Nice. I look forward to what's next.