Should Palm users organize?

[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

[Bob Russell]

PJA,
I share your frustration that we don't have more advanced hardware coming out from PalmOne. But even more frustrated that not much hardwarde is coming out from Palm at all!
I don't think they're really all that bad though. I think the Tungsten line (minus the battery problems and some quality issues that are both expected to be fixed soon) is pretty nice, as well as the Zire line which seems to have been pretty successful. Not to mention that the Treo's are very well-received, and even award winners. I think it's too early to really criticize the smartphone capabilities yet because no one has really figured that one out yet.
While the feedback to PalmOne is probably not the best, I'm sure they do some market research and get feedback from customers. If you look at some of the forums out there, I think you'll find that there's a very wide range of what people think the ideal Palm is like. Or even what the "must-have" features are. So trying to collect that kind of info into a single recommendation or set of features would be near impossible.
But it is fun to hear what individuals want to see as "must have" features and "wish list" features, especially your thoughts because it sounds like you've done a lot of thinking about this (like lots of us!)
My wishlist would include HiRes+ or VGA screen that's easy to read even in sunlight, long battery life, OS6, dual card slots, lots of memory, lots of included 3rd party software (like card backup, mount card to PC, Docs to Go, audio player, Bejeweled, etc.) and reasonably fast. Oh, and don't eliminate all those controls and buttons on the outside... they're very handy! On top of that, a clamshell option and/or WiFi would be really nice also.
But to be honest, I'd probably even be happy with a T|E2 OS6 if that was all they could produce for us. Still... wouldn't that be really disappointing!

[Brian]

I agree with you to a certain extent, but you'll have a hard time getting that much concensus. The Palm OS will have to continue to evolve and mature in order to survive, and it can't happen overnight but it should happen fast enough to prevent Palm OS from falling so far behind that it can never catch up.

First of all, there needs to be one centralized website that can be a launching place for everything Palm. I'd suggest a "Unified Network of Palm Archives" modeled after UNNA.org for the Apple Newton. It could be a repository of Palm OS free software, documentation, news and a place for a grass roots organization and coordination of Palm User's Groups (PUGs) through the creation of a PUG webring. IMO the Palm Pilot Webring doesn't really do anything to help Palm users in a significant way. A PUG Webring should be based on social networking architecture with the large, popular PUGs as the main hubs and organized geographically.

Secondly, if Palm OS devotees took a few hours a month away from their online community activities and met locally at PUGs, the community would be more unified as a result. I've been to a couple NEPUG meetings and I am planning to become active again by going to the next meeting this coming Tuesday. I suggest that others get to PUG meetings whenever possible.

IMO these two concepts would go a long way towards unifying the Palm community, exchanging thoughts and ideas and giving us a single, unified voice that could be used to lobby PalmSource and all Palm OS licensees.